The AT team serves over 70 schools from preschool through high school and covers a large geographic region in northern Virginia. In addition to providing direct services to students who use assistive technology, the AT team provide professional development and technical support to teachers, families and other educational professionals who are working with the students using AT. The team originally began as a group of volunteers who were interested in AT but eventually evolved into a formal team consisting of 10 different individuals with varied training and experiences with AT.

With regard to professional development related to AT, Chris relays that the team has experienced a number of issues:

When our team first started, one of our goals was to do professional development. This was seven years ago. Many people would describe professional development in the same way. Teachers go to a location and they sit in that location and they listen to someone speak. Maybe they may do some kind of activity and that is how they get their professional development. We did that and we still do that. We call it ‘butt in chair professional development’. What kept frustrating us is that we would get a lot of teachers that would say that they were interested but they would sign up for the workshops and then not show up. We had no repercussion or consequence for that. It was on a volunteer basis. Maybe they would need re-licensure points and that would be a motivator or the topic would be relevant to a population they were working with. Still, there would be conflicts like ‘my daughter has swimming and I have to get to swim practice,’ or ‘I have to do soccer practice,’ or ‘its a nice day out and I signed out a month ago and now it’s spring and I rather go work in my garden.’ Recognizing that, we said we have to come up with an alternative professional development model. The first obvious answer was turning to the web. Well, when we started to explore that, a lot of our teachers are not technology – at least not high tech – savvy. There might be a small population that is tech savvy and maybe that has grown in the last seven years but still I think we are talking about 25 percent that really know how to get onto an online discussion area. Now with facebook and twitter and services like that, I think that might be growing but we still have that issue. Plus the other issue we ran into when we started to think about putting things online was bandwidth issues. Where do we house our videos? We just kept seeing barriers. Teachers don’t have time to watch it at home and some teachers don’t necessarily have the high speed internet. We had to come up with something besides just online.

While the AT team continued with some degree of traditional professional development, over time, they developed two solutions that provided options to the teachers with whom they were working.

AT DVDs – The ‘Netflix Model’

The first idea was to take the videos that we made – keep them small and short and burn them to DVDs. Every teacher knows how to watch DVDs and has access to a DVD player at home. If we burn the movies to DVD, they can take those DVDs and watch them at their own leisure. Kind of like ‘Netflix’ is what we equated it to. We have gotten a huge response from those DVDs. They are set up so that each video is about 5 minutes long. There are 5 videos per DVD. When a teacher signs up, we send them the DVD and a set of questions that come along with each video. That kind of proves that they watched the DVD. They answer the questions and then send the DVD and questionnaire back to us. The response has been fantastic. Part of the questionnaire is a feedback form. They all seem to like that they can do it at their own pace and in their own time. There are no real technology barriers because everyone knows how to use the DVD. By far, it has been our most popular professional development workshop meaning that it has had the most people sign up for it. We never had anyone ‘not show up’. The trade off there – because I don’t want to make it sound like it is all roses – is that we do have a management issue. Where you take your video and put it online, then it is just available online. In this model, there has to be people checking out and collecting DVDs. That component takes some time. However, it takes about the same time overall. You could spend two or three hours coming up with a professional development workshop and only have 2 or 3 people actually attend. That’s a lot of wasted time. We see that the models are balanced that way.

AT Tip of the Day Calendar

We do a strategy a day calendar. It is just one technology integration strategy a day. That runs the gamut from high tech Web 2.0 tools – look at this website and use it with your kids- to a low tech – here is what you can do with popsicle sticks. We threw a coupe other slides in there like, “This May is Better Speech and Hearing Month. Go give you SLP a pat on the back.” Most, thought, are just technology integration professional development slides. It runs the duration of the school year. Every special education teacher, technology resource teacher, and each individual school gets a physical copy. The physical calendar – the way that it is made – we make it in PowerPoint. We print it at our administration building and then it goes to our vocational center where the students do the actual cutting and gluing of the calendar. That way it makes it a nice in-house project that the students are working on.
The very first year we did the calendar, we split up the topics across different domains. So, one person developed 40 slides on communication strategies. Another person developed 20 slides on Microsoft Word strategies. Another person developed 20 slides on software that we already have in our school that people don’t know about – like Audacity or ReadPlease – these things exist on our school network and people don’t know about them. And, so forth. We had, over the years, been building a library of strategies and resources and recommendations that we had been using over and over again. I think that is an imported thing to point out about the calendar – it is all resources that are available in our schools. It includes nothing that a teacher would have to go out and buy on his or her own. It is all stuff that is for Special Education but it is for any student. It’s how we differentiate instruction for any student. I failed to mention this earlier, for some of the technology resource teachers, we give them a digital version of the calendar and they put it up as their computer desktop. When they login, they see the strategy of the day.

Future Trends and Other Resources

Chris goes on to comment that he sees the use of technology changing within the schools. He relays that, with the advent of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), there is “lots of blending between technology used be special education students and technology that is use – or could be used – by every student”. Furthermore, he observes that teachers are becoming increasingly more accepting and willing to use technology and more teachers are becoming more tech savvy.

In addition to working on the AT Team, Chris is the producer of A.T.TIPS CAST ( http://attipscast.wordpress.com/), which is a podcast full of short tips on how to use technology to meet the needs of students with disabilities and other diverse learners. Chris is also the co-author of a book entitled, The Practical (and fun) Guide to Assistive Technology in Public Schools (http://www.iste.org/source/Orders/isteProductDetail.cfm?product_code=chewat).

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