Teachers Trained in Adaptive Technology
By Pam Chickering Wilson
Union Staff Writer

Milton – Milton serves as the regional training center this past weekend for a new type of assistive technology designed to make learning easier for students with disabilities.

Through overlay keyboards and other adaptive technology, these innovations help students who have learning or visual impairments, or who lack the fine-motor skills to use a regular keyboard.

The newly available technology helps students with these or other challenges to follow along and participate in a computer-based lesson with the other students in the class.

Cooperative Educational Service Agency 2, which serves Jefferson County and other surrounding counties, hosted the training in its newly built computer lab in the old arts building of Milton College.

Jill Gierach, of Jefferson, a CESA 2 representative and a coordinating member of the Wisconsin Assistive Learning Technology Initiative Academy, served as a local coordinator.

The training brought in teachers from across the Midwest, but it also included several area participants, including two teachers from the School District of Jefferson, a speech and language pathologist and a teacher of multi-categorical classes, for special education students with more than one disability.

One teacher from Watertown was also registered, along with a few CESA 2 reps who serve the whole area.

Additionally, representatives from the United Cerebral Palsy Center in Illinois, a representative from the Birth to Three program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Waisman Center, and a variety of state reading specialists and speech and language pathologists also attended.

IntelliTools, the California based company whose hardware and software the training showcases, formerly did one training a year, Gierach said, hosting no more than 100 people a year at its California site.

Recently, however, the company has expanded to create several regional training centers in response to nationwide budget constraints which made it increasingly difficult for school districts to send their teachers out of state to learn how to use this technology.

“For what it costs to send one teacher to California, you could send many more to Milton,” Gierach said.

The local CESA, based in Milton, got involved in hosting the area training program though its involvement with the Wisconsin Assistive Technology Initiative, one of the most successful projects of the Department of Public Instruction, Gierach said.

The director of WATI, Gierach said, is Penny Reed, who formerly directed a similar project in the state of Oregon before coming to Wisconsin with her husband, who took over as superintendent of schools in Amhurst’s Tomorrow River School District.

Now, both the state and national governments use materials developed by WATIE to assist in teaching students with disabilities.

Through Reed, the IntelliTools company became aware of CESA 2 and the community of Milton, and the president of IntelliTools contacted Reed to ask if Milton would host its new regional training.

“IntelliTools has only 10 to 12 of these sites across the country right now, so this is a great honor,” Gierach said.

The workshop, which ran last Friday and Saturday, trained teachers and other education professionals with the IntelliTools’ state-of-the-art software and its adaptive overlay keyboard, named IntelliKeys.

Although IntelliTools is a commercial company, this was not a sales program, but rather a training for districts which already had and used this technology, in order that they could put it to the best possible use, Gierach said.

Participants also got free CDs from the company, which provided links for those teachers whose schools prevent Internet surfing, so that they could connect with other educators across the country who use this technology.

Through these links, teachers can even share “talking books” or other lessons they have created with others across the county, who might be teaching the same subjects, similar units or students with some of the same learning challenges.

At the workshop, educators learned more about how to integrate this technology into their classrooms to benefit both regular special-education students, how to incorporate the new Wisconsin educational standards into their lessons by using this technology, and how these tools could help reach students with specific learning difficulties.

These assistive technologies, although they can work for an entire classroom, are deigned specially for students who have individualized educational plans (called IEPs), which accommodate special areas of need.

The workshop focused on a few different technologies – the adaptive keyboard; a math program called “IntelliMath,” which creates visual ways for students to conceptualize math; “IntelliTalk,” which creates “talking books; and “IntelliPics Studio,” through which teachers can create multimedia educational programs to reach students who learn in many different ways. Speech and language pathologist Rhonda Reis, who works at East Elementary School in Jefferson, was one of the participants in the weekend training.

Reis said the keyboard overlays – a touch-board that interacts with the computer like a regular letter-and-number keyboard, expect with pictures instead – are great tools to help those who do not have the literacy skills to use a regular keyboard.

“We have an early childhood classroom where these are used,” Reis said. “The kids who don’t have the fine-motor skills to type can use these overlays. Instead of typing, they touch pictures on the overlay board that go along with the computer program you make up.”

This way, she said, students who do not have basic literacy skills because of a learning disability or some other reason, such as beginning English as a Second Language students, can communicate that they are learning the lessons being taught.

“They can now demonstrate what they’ve learned without having to fumble through good spelling or other traditional literacy skills,” Gierach said.

The program allows the teacher to se up a program whereby a student can press a single button to convey the knowledge they have been absorbing.

In some cases, a single button can represent a sentence, through which the students can demonstrate they understand the concepts being taught.

Their work on the computer can then be printed out and turned in, just like a regular paper written on the computer.

The IntelliMath program works much the same way. For example, a student who does not have the fine motor skills to operate a traditional keyboard can still demonstrate knowledge of basic math concepts by moving quarters on a screen to make change for an imaginary $1.25 purchase.

The IntelliTalk and IntelliPics Studio programs are very flexible.

IntelliTalk allows teachers to create “talking books” so students don’t have to be able to read to follow along with the rest of the class.

IntelliPics Studio also allows teachers to design educational games, quizzes, animation and stories for use on the computer.

Gierach said that one of the participants in this weekend’s workshop designed an interactive, multimedia program on bugs, including pictures of bugs, a bug game, a section that uses bugs in counting and creates a grid with the number of bugs seen, and a bug story, among other elements.

Through these programs, Gierach said, this teacher created animated pictures an highlighted each word of a story as it was read, to help young students make connections between the spoken words and the letters they saw on the screen.

“They worked from 8 to 4:30 on Friday, and some were still there at 5 on Saturday,” Gierach said of the training. “That’s how exciting it was.”

The training allowed teachers to hear an explanation of the software, work in groups and then work on their own, tailoring their work to the needs of their classroom, she said. Then, anything they created in the workshop they got to take back to their classrooms to use with their classes, she noted.

The teachers also went home with binders full of tutorials and ideas to use with the various hardware and software.

“There are so many different things you can use it for, and it’s something that both classroom teachers and special ed teachers can use,” Reis said.

In comparison to traditional “lecture-style” teaching, these new technologies provide students with stimuli that are not only auditory, but also visual and tactile, as only some students are primarily auditory learners.

Others, tactile learners, learn better by “doing” or by manipulating items, while others learn best by visualizing new concepts, creating mental pictures that store their new knowledge.

All classrooms, both special education and regular, contain learners of all these types, but students with disabilities are in particular need of these accommodations, educational experts agree.

Furthermore, these adaptive technologies allow students with different learning styles and abilities to all follow and participate in a group lesson in ways they could not before, Reis said.

“These new technologies have allowed us to help kids be much more independent,” the Jefferson teacher said.

IntelliTools will host a second training in Milton in November, specifically oriented toward teachers of early childhood students.