Podcast Transcription
Hello and welcome to this podcast. I’m Mike Marotta from the Assistive Technology Center at Advancing Opportunities.
This interview was recorded during the 2011 Texas Assistive Technology Network Statewide Conference in Houston.
The title of this session is: The Next Generation: E-Materials, E-Instruction, and Students with Visual Impairments. The presenter is Patrick Van Geem from the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. The session description reads: Participants will learn how e-materials, applications, and devices are seeping into the primary and secondary school instructional environment and what impact they may have on students with visual impairments.
Patrick Van Geem (PVG): My topic is on e-materials and instruction – delivery of instruction and the impact it has on students, mainly students with visual impairments. The next generation means how that’s really going to look in the future in the classrooms for students in general but especially for the students I am going to talk about.
It’s divided into three parts. First, what are the students like now in the schools – in a digital age. They are very versed with a lot of digital media and devices.
Mike Marotta (MM): Sure. They are not scared of the technology.
PVG: Not at all. You never hear them say “I don’t know the technology. Or I don’t care about it.” They love the stuff. But it also means they are very good at it and a lot of times they may be bored in school. I am going to talk about the way instruction looks today – we are still in a traditional mode – in a transition. We are seeing more on-line lesson activities but we are not seeing on-line courses yet in the K-12 area.
MM: Are you seeing that part of the reason for that is that teachers are not as comfortable with that technology as their students might be?
PVG: It could be that, absolutely. But there is more third party software that is making that kind of authoring pretty easy to do. They will have their own specific layout and all a teacher needs to do is add the content. But that is part of the issue. The issue is that it is not always accessible for blind and visually impaired students. That is part of my talk – to talk about there are certain layout problems for the student with a visual impairment having to use assistive technology like a screen reading software program or screen magnification software and be able to navigate through these courses.
MM: What are some of the experiences you have had with students trying to navigate these and the accessibility issues that have popped up.
PVG: Well there is a couple things. There is the cognitive load issue. First of all, they have to know technology. That’s what we do – we train students on how to use certain assistive technologies. So they have to know that stuff. Then they have to know the way the course is laid out which is the design of it with the third party authoring software.
MM: Right, some people don’t think that right away – for the students that are using assistive technology – they have almost a double learning curve. They have to learn their tools but then they have to use that tool to access the curriculum to learn whatever the curriculum is.
PVG: Right.
MM: And that becomes the trick.
PVG: Yes and then of course there is the other thing. They have to have a previous knowledge base of the content. So there are three things that works against anybody but it really escalates with people that need extra technology to just access the information.
MM: Right, what are you seeing coming in the future. What do you see technology instruction moving towards?
PVG: Well, it’s going to get to where – well, I don’t really know where it is going towards. What really needs to happen is there needs to be a dialog with the authoring software and making their designs accessible somehow. By using i-frames on websites, by using more headings, by chunking information, using certain typeface – like sans serif or serif depending on the issues. Making sure there is enough blank space for kids that are learning disabled – they need to have information chunked so there needs to be some white space between chunks so they can have a rest period.
MM: And visually distinguish what is on the screen at any given time.
PVG: Yes. And for the blind and visually impaired students, they need key commands that will go through headings – a kind of skim reading. They need to be able to have that process. That’s what I think needs to happen – I don’t know if it really is but …
MM: But that’s a goal, right?
PVG: Right
MM: In your experience, what are some of the electronic authoring third party tools that you have seen that have worked very well – that you have seen success?
PVG: One that I have used and practiced with, and it works pretty good – there are still some HTML issues, you have to be a little bit savvy with it but not very much – is Soft Chalk. That’s one I am going to talk about. Also, I have made a lesson and it is pretty easy to do and it works with the screen reading software and it also depends on how you lay it out still but you have more license on how to lay things out. The things that also work well – but they are hard to use – is something like Moodle, which is a learning management system. That’s a pretty large collection of features such as chats, blogs and whatever. Those can be accessible if the person, because it is open source, it could have the layout format. You have to form the layout so if you can collaborate with people and lay that out a certain way then you can give that to the teacher. Then all they have to do is add the content.
MM: OK. So then they will have success right. So using that, a lot of teachers would be familiar with Moodle. That’s a familiar tool to a lot of teachers that do instruction on-line and to know how to use it and make it accessible would be great.
PVG: This is what I think needs to happen. There needs to be, in school districts, an accessibility center for developing braille productions and large print and also this kind of on-line accessibility. Then they can make the Moodle template and then send that to the teachers. The teacher can just put the Texas history content in there and that’s it.
MM: Then it is done.
PVG: Hopefully.
MM: In theory.
PVG: Right.
MM: That’s great. If people have any questions about the things you are going to be talking about, is there a way to get in touch with you?
PVG: Absolutely. I am at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Outreach Assistive Technology department. Go to the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired website and go to Technical Assistance Outreach and my name is there.
MM: Very good. Thank you for sitting down with me today.
PVG: Absolutely. Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this podcast. For more information about the Texas Assistive Technology Network, visit the website at www.texasat.net
For more information about the Assistive Technology Center at Advancing Opportunities, visit the website at www.assistivetechnologycenter.org
The music used in this podcast is by Kevin MacLeod and is used with permission under the Creative Commons License 3.0
