 My name is Elena Silva. I'm a senior director in the education program here at New America. My pronouns are she, her. I am not going to use the term middle age because I feel as though it's been overused. But I'm a 51 year old Latino woman and I'm joined here by my four exceptional guests who again are going to introduce themselves and share as we go through the panel about their experiences in the classroom teaching and learning. So to introduce yourselves, if I could start with you, Emmy. Hi, I'm Emmy. I'm an eighth grader at Rocky Run Middle School at Fairfax County. Hi, my name is Alice Wright. I am an assistive technology specialist at Montgomery County Public School. My pronouns are she, her and I'm an African-American female, but I'm not going to refer to age. Hello, I'm Raja Kushnagar. I don't know how to pronounce my name, and I don't think the interpreter does either. So we have there's apparently lots of different ways to pronounce it. However, what I care about is actually the actual spelling because my first language is a written English and so I say this because there are many different ways of communicating and learning and it's not only through audio or speaking and signing. You know, the writing and captioning and you know, they all have their benefits or plus and minuses. So I toggle back and forth and it depends on the context. So I have well, I'm both a student and a teacher here. I'm a professor at Gallaudet University. We're right around the corner from here. The only university in the world that's a bilingual written English and American Sign Language. I also have gone to many different schools as well while growing up and teaching as well in various different environments. And I am an Indian male and middle-aged. And I'm wearing a black jacket. Good morning, everyone. My name is Dion Young. I'm a learning disabilities teacher in Fairfax County Public Schools at John R. Lewis High School, which was formerly known as Robert E. Lee. My pronouns are she, her, hers, and I am in my mid-20s and I'm an African-American woman. Thank you all and welcome again. We heard from the last panel a lot of conversation about the definition of accessible ed tech, what it is and what it isn't. There's some official terms and some official definitions. There's even the definition in the folders that you all have. But I want to know from you, from your experiences, what it means to you. So what does the term accessible ed tech mean to you? And again, I'll start with you, Emily. So what accessible ed tech means to me is leveling the playing fields for me and other students in my class, because I've been taking a lot of advanced classes this year that I didn't take last year. So now the workload is getting harder and the curriculum is getting more advanced. It's nice to have all of these tools to help me get through the classes. It means the definition of an inclusive education. So if we have ed tech that's accessible, it means all our students are going to be able to access and learn at the same time and not have to wait to be able to get their own education that they need. For me in my role, it's hard in a district our size to get that equality across the board. But advocating and making sure that everybody is aware and making it part of a universal design in terms of how we learn, how we educate, and how we design materials. Thank you, Alice. Raja. My ex, it's a part of a big picture for access technology. Everything in the classroom in terms of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. The process. So I'm old enough and I grew up prior to the assistive technology, you know, when it became prevalent in the field and it was prior to ADA, it was before IDAA, and all that. And so my parents put me into a small private school with the same teacher and I had the same group of friends and there was a one one kind of access process and it was making it easier to understand and understand people and so I started to pick up writing and using interpreting and that was later on and and I had more technology access down the line including so it's a huge process and it's part of the part of the whole classroom environment. This is Dionne speaking again. I think this is kind of tough to answer as we've heard quite a few individuals share what accessible ed tech means to them. For me as a special education teacher, it truly means creating an inclusive environment and if you've worked in the education space, you've been a special education teacher, you hear the word inclusion a lot, right? We're trying to create a free and appropriate education for individuals who have disabilities. But I think beyond that someone who has served as a special education teacher and has even taken on the role as a mentor and taught general education curriculum as well is really differentiating and scaffolding instruction the same way I do with my learners who have disabilities in the same concept with my individuals who do not have disabilities, whether they're identified or not, or have IEPs or in my mentorship groups, but really making sure that when students come to school, when they come to my classroom, they understand that they have a place where they're learning needs or their areas of areas of need or growth as we call them in IEPs, that they will be met and that they have access to the tools that they need to excel in the classroom environment. So Dionne, thank you. This is Alana speaking. Could you let me follow up with that if I could and could you tell us a little bit about the experiences that you've had in your classrooms with accessible ed tech, your students and what tools you're using and how it might be helping their experience? And this is Dionne speaking again. I think it's varied. I started teaching during the pandemic. So what a way to start my career in education, but it's been a blessing and each year has been significantly different. So I've taught sixth grade learning students with learning disabilities. I've taught general education, sixth grade math. I've taught kindergarten and first grade enhanced autism and this year I'm teaching 10th through 12th grade economics and personal finance government in English 12 learning disabilities. So over the past few years I've had quite a bit of experience with working with different age groups as well as working with individuals with different disabilities. And I think one of the things that I use most or the most experience I've had with assistive technology was last year with my kindergarten and first grade enhanced autism class. So quite a few of my students were not able to speak. So they had speech devices and I know Dr. Silva and I have had this conversation that was challenging that although I had probably out of my eight students, five students who did not have language and needed a speech device, only one of them received one. So when you're thinking about having to communicate with a student who does not have speech, what does that look like? And then it gets into a space where I as an educator had to be creative and not having access to someone teaching me, hey, here's the tools that you can use, but really having to dig into my own knowledge base and research on my own. So using speech devices, one resource that we use, I don't know if anyone's familiar is called Natural Reader. And it's programmed in a lot of computers on Fairfax County public school system. So a lot of my students who have learning disabilities use that you can highlight your text and it'll read the text aloud for you. One of the problems my students have with that is they didn't like the voice. It's very like, hello, this is Marcia. Marcia is going to the store. So it's really hard when you're looking at students who have issues with the coding and fluency. And you're hearing this robotic voice talk to you about a story that very much might be interesting. It's hard to keep them engaged. So they preferred my voice instead. I have a student this year who has, who's hearing impaired. So she has a device and this is new to me this year actually where I have to wear like a microphone around my neck. And I just click the microphone button and it turns green. And as I'm talking, I know that she hears me. And she has an implant in her ear. And that's how she receives our lectures for the day. So Alice, I'm going to have you jump in here because you oversee assistive technology for schools across Montgomery County, which I also know it's a large county. It's the largest one in Maryland. Can you just riffing off of what Dionne's saying? Can you jump in and share your experiences in Montgomery County? So Montgomery County has over 200 schools. And it's a very big county. And our assistive technology team in terms of size in comparison is very small. We do have two that works on different levels of assistance. And I have a colleague here who's with the other team, Shawnee, that works with our low incidence students. And then I work with students who are high incidence, which means I work with the students that have disabilities that are more prevalent. So like dyslexia, you know, learning disabilities of different kinds and figuring out our assistive technology that's going to work with those students. A lot of times it comes back to having accessible materials. Does the district really try in the procurement process to have materials that are accessible? Yes, that's true. But like I said, it's our large district. And teachers do have the wherewithal and schools do have the wherewithal of purchasing in the building of something that they feel is going to work and accessibility when they make those purchases are not always top and center. So us as a assistive technology team, we're out there doing professional development, working with individual students to try to figure out what those needs are, figuring out what's the best match using the set process. I was happy that Cynthia talked about that earlier in trying to make that match and remembering that in every IEP meeting, if we have any parents in here, assistive technology needs to be discussed. And part of that discussion should be how it's going to be implemented in the classroom and in the environment in which we're talking about. And so that's also part of the coaching that we do as our team is trying to make sure everybody understands how we can make that better match and then figure out how that match can work in each individual environment regardless of level. So whether we're talking elementary or we're talking high school or if we're talking about the level of device, like the speech devices that my colleague here was talking about or thinking about the actual materials and whether we have access to Bookshare and publishers making sure that they do send the information. So it's a very, very big issue that could happen and there's a lot to coordinate and advocate for. Thank you, Alice. I'm going to turn to you in just a moment, Amy, but I want to use moderator's privilege to say that in a district as big as Montgomery County or Fairfax as well, which is also a large county, when you have these big standardized systems and you have IEP meetings, many, many IEP meetings that are happening all the time, we could use some accessible ed tech within our IEP meetings as well. Just the process alone of the IEP could be more accessible. Turning to you, Amy, tell us about your experience in your classroom, how it's evolved, what is your story? So I was diagnosed with this lexio when I was in third grade and, you know, I didn't really know what that meant. I thought I was just weird. So my first tool that I got was natural reader and, you know, I wasn't really the biggest fan of it because the robot voice wasn't my favorite, but it did work for me then, but it doesn't work for me now. And the next tool I got, I figured out what immersive reader was by me and my mom watching made by dyslexia videos. So then I got learning ally, which is just a platform with like a bunch of books that you can listen to. And then I got inspiration. I didn't really use that one that much because it's just an essay builder and elementary schoolers didn't really use essays that much. So then I got orbit note, which is like a PDF reader. No, wait, PDF, yeah. A PDF reader and screenshot reader, which is a screen reader, and then read and write, which is a screenshot reader. But wait, screenshot reader, you can snag any text on the page and it will read it aloud to you. And so it sounds like you're an expert on all the readers. So one thing is that one potential outcome of this, if we could have someone make a list of all the readers and eventually the world needs to somehow have a way of rating quality because there are so many, I think this was referenced on the first panel, there is plethora of new innovations happening and new software and hardware that students and educators are experiencing every single year. I'm married to a high school teacher every year. There's a whole new suite of things that you have to learn to use, some of which are fantastic, I'm sure. Others are not and by the time of year, you're halfway through the year before you realize that whether it is or isn't useful. So we could use your expertise and yours as well. Gabby, thank you for your question on all the readers and which ones work and which ones don't. Raj, I want to give you a chance to jump in. You had mentioned that in the middle-aged world that we live in, that you were in school and had experiences before ADA and of course now, many years later, you're experiencing as a teacher of older students but nonetheless a teacher using all sorts of technology that didn't exist before. So could you tell us a little bit about that evolution and how things have changed? I would say that there's much more access today than there was back in the day and it doesn't show an increase. There's an increase in students with disability in the K through 12 environment and higher ed. Back in the 60s, there were only seven universities that accepted deaf students, for example. So now all of them have to accept them because of the law. But there's still a huge gap between what the law says versus what the institutions can support in the higher ed environment. In the higher ed environment, there's no requirement to make sure the student has services for the students and the student has to self-advocate for a lot of that. And sometimes it's beneficial, sometimes it's not. One surprising thing that happened recently, there's an access technology researcher as was one experiment with captioning that was projected above the teacher as the teacher moved in the classroom and it would follow the teacher around the classroom and it made it much easier for the person to see the teacher in the captioning at the same time. And there was a deaf student in that class, one versus 30 hearing students and the deaf student decided to withdraw from the class. All the hearing students in the class wanted to keep the captioning. They did not want to stop those services and they really appreciated having that captioning to double check and verify those things. So it was the access technology can benefit everyone. So another thing I'd like to add, one of the things that I'm seeing today is services on the individual level and institutional level, I'm finding that and I'm sending students that are deaf that they could pick an institute that has good access services and not compared to those that might not. And they would have to struggle with constantly have to fighting with the university for access. The law says one thing, again, but it's also important for the institute themselves to be committed to providing access, so between what the institutional level and whatever technology is available out there. And thank you. This is Alen again. Raja, to continue, what barriers are you seeing in teaching and providing accessible ed tech in your classrooms? About working with technology services, making sure things are available for use. Some of them goes against security policies, the auto captioning, or image descriptions and stuff. It's the little things like that. Also, yeah, they have offices of student support services or disability support. And working with us, there's a lot of moving parts from a teaching perspective. And sometimes that creates a conflict with my passion or my wishes to kind of adapt material. And one of the last things is the range of information from to communication in the classroom. So everything needs to be accessible, including books, slides. And then there's communication in the classroom, classroom discussions, those little things that you have to prepare ahead of time for. If you have the right support, it becomes much easier to have the accessibility and inclusion and the equity and allowing everyone to work together. And sometimes technology doesn't necessarily cooperate, but if the process itself is embedded, it protects against that non-cooperation. It makes life a little harder as a teacher, and also to flip it on here as a student as well. Thank you. This is Elena again. There's a big difference between something being required and then something being available all the time. So I've spent a lot of time in schools, and there's a lot of requirements, particularly in big districts, but really in any district. And there's a requirement to mean something. You can, as a parent, as a parent myself of a child with disability, you can go into the IP and you can request. You can say, I have to have this. And the schools say, oh, we need to have this. But I think this was mentioned earlier. It could be days, weeks, months. It might be next year by the time you get the thing that you are guaranteed. So I point that out as a barrier that I've experienced personally, but also to pivot back to you again, Dionne, if you could say a little bit about the barriers that you might be seeing in not just what accessible ed tech is out there in the world, but is it getting to your classrooms and is it getting to your students? So one thing, the special education teacher me has to say in case in someone in the room does not know what an IEP is. It stands for individualized education plan. So if a student is found eligible for an individualized education plan, IEP, there's 13 areas of eligibility. So it can range from intellectual disability, learning disability, OHI, ADHD, anxiety, so on and so forth. Put that out there. But aside from that, I think one of the biggest barriers that I've seen when looking at assistive technology within the classroom is looking at this area. So if you are from or live in the DMB areas, we coin it. This is a very diverse area. And it's actually something that I admire about this area is the diversity. But one thing that I've seen as a special education teacher, when you're looking at diversity, I've seen in most instances that assistive technology does not meet the diversity of our students. For example, I had a student last year who was, I think the term was COTA. So both of their parents, it was two sons, both of their parents were deaf. So mom and dad were both deaf. And that was new for me to have parents and sit in IEP meetings where I had to have an interpreter and being able to communicate with mom. So when she came to pick son up from kiss and ride, it's like I'm typing on my phone like, hey, he had a great day or he needs these things. And she's typing back and not having that ability to communicate. I also brought up how last year, same situation, students who were unable to speak only had one student who had a speech device. So for my students who didn't have a speech device, but didn't have language, having to find ways that I could communicate with them or realizing, okay, they have receptive language, but they don't have expressive language. So although they hear and understand what I'm saying, they cannot express their needs. So how can we build their language? Some of them didn't even receive speech and language services, which is another flaw that we might see within our education system. And on top of that, I think one of the most difficult things was seeing that as educators, I felt that, and I don't know if I want to say, you know, put blame on the county, but teachers were not getting the professional development and the resources that they need to be better equipped to assist their students who had needs, who needed assistive technology. I was blessed and fortunate enough, receiving a master's in special education, where I had to take an assistive technology class. My professor actually used assistive technology herself, so I learned a lot from that course. When my student was giving her, given her speech device, I had to go and spend a day at Gates House, which is our central office, and do professional development on how to use the device and how can I customize it and tailor it better suited for her needs. And I kind of made a complaint and they're like, hey, I have three other students in my class who can't speak. How come they don't have? They don't have expressive language. How come they don't have a speech device? And the answer wasn't very fulfilling to me. It didn't give me an answer on why my students' needs were the same, but they weren't accessing the same resources. And then looking at parents, I had a very diverse classroom last year. I had students whose parents were from the Middle East. I had students whose parents were from Africa, Asia. So we're talking about these different continents and countries, and English was not their first language. So again, you're talking about giving a student a device, giving them assistive technology. Teachers are not trained on how to use them, and then we're sending them home to parents. There is no, here's a guide, here's, here's how to put it together, and here's how to use it on a day-to-day. The parents don't have these resources. So oftentimes what we find is we'll send these speech devices home. On the weekend, their charge, they come back, they're dead. They weren't used. Parents don't know how to use them, so it's not that they don't want to give access and help their students or their children, rather, with, you know, their speech or the different areas of need that they have, but they don't have the knowledge, right? They don't have the tool, the tool belts and the tools that they need to be able to use them. So I see that in the classroom as an educator, but I also see the strain that it puts on parents. This year, I work in a school that's 52% Latina. A lot of my students, parents, are undocumented citizens here, so they don't have the knowledge base. They come into meetings, we have to use interpreters to have IEP meetings. So the struggle with them, English isn't their first language, so if we're giving a student who doesn't have speech a device that's in English, and we're sending it home to parents who do not speak, understand, or write in English, how are they able to access these tools and really benefit from them holistically? Thank you, Jian. This is Elena again. I turn to you, Alice, because you work with educators across the county. If you want to jump in on both the question about how that folks are getting access to the accessible ed tech, but also the educator point, how much the educators know about how to use these tools? So part of, there were two things in there that I kind of want to talk about. One about the IEP process, and the assistive technology section of the IEP process, where we have AT service. And having detailed discussion about how that service is going to take place, and educating the parent, and we're inviting training to the parent on how to use the device, or what we need to do to make it, is part of that process that I think sometimes gets glossed over. So I just kind of wanted to bring that up. And then when we think about providing training for our educators, there are so many, you just heard our young lady to my right, saying all these different reading tools. There are so many different tools out there and matches that from an educator perspective, because I was in the classroom for a long period of time, trying to learn all those things, it's almost an impossible task to kind of think about. And then also thinking about the fact that while we're doing all these matches for tools and they're all out there available, training all the people involved is also a massive task, and trying to find the time to make that happen, because our educators are really busy. We have, I couldn't even tell you how many different tools are available, depending on the need for students, and trying to go out and work with our districts, leaders, principals, resource teachers, which would be the managers of content area, and trying to figure out, okay, what's going to be the best match for the student, and how are we going to get the training to all the relevant parties involved, and understanding what that process is. In my role, or in our district's role in terms of our AT teams, that's part of what we do. We try to be a resource for each of our schools. They know that they can reach out, we have a process about reaching out that we could provide training, or we try to reach out to different school buildings to figure out if there is a need there. I was listening to all the different things, and a lot of times our biggest need is that sometimes the materials that our students are using aren't accessible. So then we have to find things like using the C-Pen, which is great, but mainly because we couldn't get the materials digitally, and so we have to find an access point for a student to be able to read that has that need, and having the C-Pen is an acceptable alternative, but ultimately if our publishers are all putting out our materials, and having it so that we can have it digitally to be able to use with students, that would be the best thing because then we have tools that could work digitally. Talking about access to different curriculum, so we have immersion programs, right? We have Spanish immersion, we have French immersion, we have Chinese immersion, I don't know which specific part of Chinese Mandarin, I can't remember now, but when we have students with disabilities trying to access those programs then it becomes a problem because if you have a dyslexia and we have to figure out how to get reading to you in those, sometimes those materials aren't accessible, so we may have the English materials accessible, but not our foreign language materials accessible. So we're trying to figure out how to manage that whole process, and it's really a big task. This is helpful on so many levels, thank you Alice, and this is Elena again. We have in our education policy program a sub team of folks who focus specifically on English learners, and we've been trying to talk about the connection between this, but it's coming up again and again, the former panel and this panel about language, so I just want to highlight that. So back to the educators and what they are, all of the tools that they're trying to use, all the accessible ed tech that they're trying to adopt, the ways in which they're trying to improve their instruction, their pedagogy. Emi, you've actually, I believe, had to work with teachers, or you've worked with teachers before, which is an interesting flip. It's always good when the students are teaching the teachers, but that's not usually the way we think about things. Could you tell us a little bit about your experience, like why did, what were you showing the teachers and why did you have to show them? Yeah, so when I was in fourth grade, I, like I said before, I learned what immersive reader was, and that very same year, my elementary school, the two amazing tech ladies who worked there, they started a student run, like, tech team to help teachers and students with their laptops, because my school had a one-to-one ratio, like one kid had every one laptop, and so they had this opportunity for kids to start teaching the teachers about a software they've learned about, so I decided to teach my teachers about immersive reader, because a few of them knew what it was, but didn't know it well enough, and most of them didn't even know what it was, and plus everyone had access to it, not anymore, but we did have access to it, so it was good for the teachers to know how to use the software. And what, thank you for sharing that, I mean, what an innovation to have the people that are using it all the time and are having to figure out how to use it and have the students teaching the teachers, so I think it's wonderful that you were able to do that, I don't know how common that is across the counties and across our districts, but it does seem like the folks who are having to, you know, navigate the system should be the ones that are advising us, which is part of the reason we're all here today. I want to turn to what a question that was asked on the first panel, which was, well we need to know what you need, like what would you need, what would you want, so when you think about accessible ed tech and in your classrooms from from higher ed teaching experience to K-12 and then of course as a student yourself, Emi, what would be helpful to you, what do you, you started in on this Alice, what would be the most helpful accessible ed tech innovations that you wish you had, and I'll start with you, Alice. When I was in the classroom, my content area was mathematics and so it's something that is very near and dear to my heart and I would love to have consistency with math being read out loud. For students who need the mathematics read out loud, there is such variability. I would love for our developers to think about, I know we have different languages, MathML, but somehow or the other how, I don't know where the breakdown because I'm not a programmer, but I can definitely tell you that there's great inconsistencies when it comes to doing things with mathematics, so that would be something that I really would like and then when I think I work with students who sometimes have physical, profound physical disabilities and science is another area, they always aren't able to have equal opportunity at access to the labs and it's always in a work around mode as opposed to having the materials available at the labs in whichever way we're able to do it, even if it is a video just readily available and consistently available without teachers having to think about it after, oh we're about to do the dissection, oh I have a student who's not going to be able to do that and now in that moment we can't make it happen, but so thinking about that, so some kind of innovation when it comes to our math and sciences are STEM subjects for that to be more accessible and for it to be a forethought, not an afterthought, so not retrofitting fitting it to make it happen. That would be on my biggest wish list, there are a lot of them, but that will be on my biggest wish list. We'll get to the list, the long wish list soon. Dionne, how about you? Dionne speaking again, this is it's challenging, I think my lens has really expanded again working with such a diverse population, but I really think seeing assistive technology that's more individualized, I think Paul kind of mentioned in the last panel that we need to stop looking at a broader lens, like we really do need to be specific and intentional with the assistive technology that we're creating and that we're giving to schools and to users that benefit from it. Again when even Emmy said, now to readers, it was boring and the robot boy so it's funny to hear her follow-ups, I'm like at least I know that she's validating the thoughts of my students, but really seeing that we've shift to a place where assistive technology does become more individualized for every individual because it does look different for everyone. I've seen natural reader work really well for some students and not work well for others, I see most students they benefit from hearing an actual voice, right, not hearing an automated voice, but hearing the voice of a teacher or a parent or when looking at speech devices, speech devices are pretty similar, most of them, and Alice and I spoke about this before, they're typically iPad based, they're on an iPad and they have these like little cubes and each cube has a picture and if the picture's of an apple you click the apple, but there's been in some instances where I've had speech devices where the picture will be of a rainbow and if you click it it's going to say happy, so it's kind of confusing having to teach a student, okay, you click the rainbow for happy, but what does happy really look like? Happy can look different for every individual, it looks different based on the students, so really making sure that we could see a day where assistive technology starts to become more individualized based on every student's needs instead of something that's one-size-fits-all because it doesn't work that way and if you work in the field of special education or just work with individuals who have disabilities, you understand that. Raja, how about you, what would you hope for or what would you need the most that's not out there right now? The assistive, the listening devices, you know, the robot voice sometimes, yeah I know that's a, you know, it's like needs some captioning, like to make it, it's harder to read, like for instance it's not as exciting or intriguing for, there's no emotion, there's, you know, with the information that's being brought forth and also like captioning, you know, needs to become better, like, you know, with the right punctuation and and, you know, easier to read and understandable, but we still need improvement with also the AI out there, the technology out there for instance, you know, in the past we would have, you know, a captioner sitting there with a device and on my screen I could read it, you know, and I could see the emotion, the tone, but also like you can have glasses that do the similar thing where you can, you know, read at the same time, read the text at the same time as it's coming up. So nowadays students actually are using more of the chat GPT and so they'll type emails or homework and things like that because oftentimes their English is not as fluent or is not up to par and they'll use the chat GPT to clean it up a little bit and, you know, and they facilitate them and they use that amongst each other and that supports them using it and we support them using it and also communication and they communicate with us more clearly doing that. So that's just an example of AI allowing them to be more individualistic and being more empowered actually to communicate. So the process for technology definitely helps, yes, and I feel and to make those individuals feel more connected with learning and communicating in the classroom. Thank you. So, yeah, the risks and the threats of AI or potential AI are potential risks are a lot of what we're hearing about so it is helpful to hear about how AI could be used to help have more adaptations and have tech be not just the tools but it would be baked in and you'd have so much more accessibility because it could in real time change. I mean that's the power that I see in AI not knowing much more about it. Emmy, I want you to, if you could, tell us what you would want because I'm sitting next to you here reflecting on the age comment again and thinking that you do not not just yourself but you represent youth here and folks that are growing up with these tools but are going to be able to live in a world hopefully where they're not just tools they're not just added tools that we're finding a c-pen for you for example or we're finding some sort of reader. If you think about that like the future you can think about right now too but right now and the future what do you hope for like what do you think would would make a big difference what would you like to see? What I would like to see in the future is kids having access to all of these softwares from a young age because when I was younger I would have benefited a lot more but I know these softwares are more advanced for younger kids so that might not work for them but if they could have the access to have these softwares would be more beneficial for them. And how about I'm going to push on the teacher piece one more time how about teachers what would you hope that how would you hope that they would approach a student that has a difference or a disability and a learning need like you experienced in fourth grade I think you said how would you hope that educators might be more prepared? Just understand that it's gonna give them it's they're gonna need more time to understand the concept because I know for me it takes me more time to understand math and English so just to have patience with this student and understand that they're trying their best. Which is thank you which is interesting because technology is like speeds everything up so much and yet you would hope it would have the power to slow things down for all of us since I think we are living in a pretty high-paced fast-paced world that is sometimes good but sometimes it can be too much. I want to get we're going to open up for questions in just one moment. I just want to see if there's anything that that you all since there's developers learners leaders a lot of people in this audience that might want to know if you have some sort of last bit of advice or lessons learned from the classroom that you might want to share. Call this a lightning round before we open up for questions. Alice please. This is Alice just two things one is providing more options for especially for our readers of voices and high quality voices it's not that they won't sound completely human but we have better voices out there that can sound but those are not usually the voices that are sold with our products. Obviously finance comes into it and then the other part is making sure you have accessible training for our teachers as well you know provided with your product that's readily available hopefully not for an additional cost but just part of what you do is provided because if we had more on-demand training for our teachers that could be in an accessible format and I do mean with it being captioned a lot of times when we look at products they have captioned videos for students but not for the the teachers and we do have teachers who have a variety of needs and sometimes they're not considered as part of the professional development so being more conscious of the fact that our students do grow up to be part of the profession and the same needs that they had when they were in students they have and making sure that your professional development trainings that you're providing can be more readily available and on-demand so that when you do get a student in the middle of the year with a specific need it'll be a little bit easier for this teacher to be able to rev up really quickly about how to use whatever tool I'm just gonna pig I know it said lightning round but I'm gonna piggyback on that to say that that's also for all educators that professional development needs to be for all educators since every educator is teaching students with disabilities we're all teaching really diverse classrooms of students there's no reason why it would be for some teachers and not all of the teachers that are teaching in our classrooms on the lightning round Dionne or Raja or Emi do you want to jump in I'll just I'll quickly say one thing that and I think from the previous panel it does seem like you all are still well versed but I think my my hope or ask would be that you continue to make sure that you're involved in academic spaces so being involved in an event like this is purposeful but actually taking time to connect with individuals who have needs or use assistive technology I think sometimes there's this large gap between those who make policy and those who need the policy right who benefits from the policy so I know as an educator I get really flustered sometimes because I'm sitting there like who made this policy like did they ever set foot in the classroom oftentimes not being a special education teacher we have people who make our laws and policies and legislation and regulations around individuals who have IEPs and they've never taught or they don't have a family member they have no connection with individuals who have disabilities yet they make these policies so I think making sure that you still stay and remain well versed in these spaces and really take time to do groundwork and work with those who benefit from assistive technology I think that's what truly makes the world a difference Emi do you want to jump in with any final this is Raj I'll just make a quick statement I think overall like teaming between the teachers and the students instructors and all those who work together and listening to what they actually need actually listening and learning about the new tools and sharing that information within each other and getting and receiving those tools and you know that the excitement with the new AI and the apps that we have coming out and internet services or online virtual services there's so many possibilities that students can take advantage of these you know new possibilities and thanks Emi so something I would like to see is having compatible on all devices like an ipad a phone a computer because what I've had to do is like switch between softwares on my laptop and my ipad because it's not all compatible so and if there is like a read aloud that doesn't only read aloud but help you comprehend what the passage is doing and since English classes only get harder from here having like note system so it can help you make notes on whatever your teacher assigned you thank you this this is Elena again that so this is this interoperability question is or point is so important the term that they all should fit together they should all work together and they don't all work together and I know this perhaps means the companies would have to work together but we see this we see this everywhere my my daughter went recently into I'm gonna take a question in just a moment went in to take a standardized test because this is part of schools and she goes in and she's in a room with other folks who need accommodations and one of the you know the person sitting next to her needs speech to text but the computer doesn't provide speech to text but this is the computer that this child has to use for the standardized test so problem I mean it was solved in some way that took extra time but it was very difficult for the student to have to deal with the student should not have had to deal with that and so on and so forth but the the pieces don't fit together and that seems like a prevailing theme here so thank you for raising that I mean we're gonna go to the questions it looks like we have a question from the online audience so we'll go there first this is a this is a question from Dina Phillips with Google Classroom thank you all for coming and sharing your experiences would you mind sharing which tools or technologies you've worked with that have made accessible teaching and learning easier and what about those tools has been particularly helpful conversely what aspects make a tool or technology inaccessible I guess as a teacher as someone who currently this is Dionne speaking currently teaches and I guess I'll actually use Google as an example one thing that was really helpful during the pandemic for my students who are learning disabilities was on Google Slides the speech to text a lot of my students really struggled with writing both handwritten as well as typing and what I noticed was when they when we would ask them a sixth graders hey we need you to write three paragraphs look oh my goodness three paragraphs how can I write three paragraphs like I don't know how to put my thoughts on paper and I would tell them well how about you I'm talk to me talk to me about what you think about this topic and as I would talk they would have these eloquent and beautiful thoughts and the only issue was they didn't know how to synthesize them to actually write them so I would tell them have talk it out so you know fortunately I think you just have to I can't remember off the top of my head where to go to actually get to the speech to text on Google Slides but that's something that I use a lot with my sixth graders and it was very much so helpful again looking at natural reader not my most favorite but it does work giving students the opportunity to be able to hear the text that they're reading I think Emmy made a great point by saying having a tool that also helps with comprehension you know the fluency and the voice isn't something that's appealing to you it's really hard to really understand the text it's one thing to hear it to be able to understand it is something completely different this is Alice one of the things that probably was really useful especially when we moved as a district to Chromebooks was actually the text help so google read and write and it having a variety of tools one tool that could meet a variety of needs instead of having to have seven different products you could have the one product and it had speech to text that you could use you have text to speech that you could use you have highlighting tools you could use you have a screen masking tool that you can use an all-in-one toolbar and and so that was a particular helpful tool it worked pretty seamlessly for the most part across the board and the ability to also to make individual adjustments for students so if we needed the text read a little bit slower the student was able to change the rate of speech if the needed to change the voice they had a couple of different voices that were built in with the product so that that was also a very helpful tool to have as well during the pandemic that we had that rolled out for our students with disabilities across the board so any student who had an IEP or had a 504 plan had it readily available for them so that that was pretty helpful are there other questions good afternoon my name is Shelly Gray I am a principal here in DC public schools and I represent a community of children families and leaders that is also the most marginalized here in our country where I represent children with students with disabilities immigrant undocumented more than 40 percent of our populations are English language learners and then I also consider in our community accessibility for all children so we have our silent learners that are not identified that still have specific needs and then our students that are identified or duly identified I am wondering because of the our students we have an educator we also have a central office oftentimes we are as a school leader we are looking at a variety of platforms for resources that meet the needs of such a diverse community and yet one district may have a platform of resources that are helpful another district may have a platform and there is no systematic approach for us to be able to also access what is good for all children and families at this time is there any conversation in some of our partnering universities as well as counties to start norming and creating a platform where school leaders and educators can access these resources for for our schools that's an excellent question thank you for asking it and especially because this is a DMV mostly a DMV audience here and we have folks represented here why couldn't we do that DC, Maryland, Virginia, you've got higher ed, NK12, sharing all the resources in one clearinghouse or one place that's accessible and that we would easily be able to both add things and and pull them down do other folks have thoughts or do you know if this is happening who's sharing what and how do you all how how might we figure that out I know from an AT perspective we have our assistive tech this is Alice speaking sorry we have our assistive technology work group for the state of Maryland so I know there's a lot of sharing of information and support for all our school districts in Maryland and I know that if I have a question and I know someone who's in Fairfax for example I have no qualms about reaching out but I don't know that we personally I don't know if we have something that goes across in the DMV area I just know that we have that within the state of Maryland do you know Raja if there's um any coordination between Gayeudette or the higher education world and the K-12 schools in DC around this point of sharing resources yes I mean there are actually um many groups that try to establish you know resource center Gayeudette actually has a resource center regional center there's four of them in the U.S. to help actually provide that knowledge sharing practices policies in the in regarding deaf education and also along with that is the national deaf deaf center that has resource that has a resource center there and they have a lot of discussion amongst that about what the specific situations that might help and they'll actually post those online and so and then people can give their comments and feedback so that's really helpful and also access to teaching the different teaching groups that try to provide that kind of sharing those resources all throughout and you know it'd be nice to have a one-stop shop store but yeah I haven't seen that yet so I know that there are we're going to close out now but I'll just note that there's a number of other questions both here and online and we'll try to make sure that there's time in networking online and in person for you all to talk to one another um I do want to note that there are some national resources and national organizations that do have resources cast was up here earlier and there have been other examples that have been mentioned but there's something about this regional community that matters so I feel you on that and and New America we are a national organization but we do try to do that as well connect people it's part of what we do so we bring people together we also try to connect them in other ways that are on an ongoing basis so maybe we could play a role in that that's that's just an idea not a promise but we'll try we're gonna we're gonna stop now because we're gonna take a break we're hoping thank you for your patience and thank you very much to the panelists here for all of their wisdom and wit we're gonna there's food lunch that's out in the atrium we hope that you all will take the time to talk with one another and to exchange more ideas we're gonna come back into this room at 12 50 so we can begin promptly at one o'clock please enjoy your time together thank you again to my panelists here and the panel panel one round of applause thank you