Friday, May 17, 2019

WATI: AT Teams check it out!

Hey Tek-ninjas! Back in 2012 I shared a post about WATI (Wisconsin Assistive Technology Initiative. If you don’t recall, or know what WATI is, their mission was/is to assist early intervention agencies, school districts, and their partners to provide assistive technology by making training and technical assistance available through the development of materials related to the provision of assistive technology tools, and services.You can read that post here.

WATI has had a number of changes since I wrote my original post. In 2009 they lost funding, and were shut down. Since then, they rebooted and are now run by a volunteer group of former WATI Consultants.

The new WATI site imo is better than before, and any school district in the process of developing or improving their Assistive Technology team would do well to spend some time exploring the offerings.

Again, all hail WATI!

Thursday, May 16, 2019

30 years as the industry standard!



Hey Tek-ninjas! Do you work in Special Education? How long have you been around? (You don’t have to answer that)

Are you "I remember when we made Xerox copies from our Boardmaker Book and cut & paste (literally) to make picture schedules" old?



If you are, you are as old (or maybe older) then me!

Well, 2019 marks the 30th Anniversary of Boardmaker! That's 30 years of being the "industry standard" in education. There a several different ways a subscriber can access Boardmaker tools to increase your efficacy as an educator/therapist. Including robust free tools that I blogged about last December.

It has been a long time since Boardmaker was "just" a picture symbol generator. Boardmaker Online provides a multi-level approach to creating engaging print and interactive materials for your special education needs. Start with convenient, ready-made print activities or just imagine, make, print and use. Extend learning by adapting curriculum to the unique needs of your learner with easy-to-use enhanced features. Then, increase student engagement by making your favorite print activities interactive on smart boards, computers, tablets and communication devices.

Take a look at all the different offerings and price structures here.

Happy therapy!

Wednesday, May 8, 2019

Users, Pagesets, Pages, and Tigers, oh my!

Hey Tek-ninjas! I’ve blogged a lot about Tobii-Dynavox’s Snap + Core First, and today I want to dig a little further into the many save/export/backup options. The many options can be a little confusing, so hopefully this will shed some light on the various processes.

Snap + Core First offers several convenient ways to share and save your clients Communication tool. I like to think of it as *nesting-levels of content .

  • Pages; an individual Page can be saved, or shared with anyone else with a mytobiidynavox
    account. For example, if I’ve made a terrific page of Occupational Therapy activities, I can share that with another therapist for the child they are working with. All of the graphic/text content will remain the same.
  • Page Sets consist of all the pages, and they also can be saved, shared, etc.. For example a colleague shared with me a Core 7x7 Rett syndrome Pageset that a lot of folks have appreciated. It can be easily shared to a User profile, and caregivers can “toggle” back and forth between different Pagesets to determine “best fit”.
  • Users: this is the most all-encompassing view of your client’s tool, User backup files contain the Page Sets and settings associated with that user. User backup files do not contain voice files, however, voice settings are preserved and the selected voice will download automatically if it is not available on the device (internet connection required).

That covers the “levels” of content. Now let’s consider variations of saving/moving data.

  • Export/Import Locally (User, Page Set, Page Bundle) — Use when storing the file on your
    local machine, sharing on a USB drive, or with people who do not have a myTobiiDynavox account.
  • Export/Import through myTobiiDynavox* (Page Set, Page Bundle) — Share Page Sets and Page Bundles with oth- er myTobiiDynavox users. Store and access files privately on your own myTobiiDynavox account.
  • Sync** (Page Set) — Share ongoing changes to a Page Set across your devices and with specified myTobiiDynavox users. A Page Set shared through sync keeps an up-to-date version of the Page Set in the cloud, so that changes made to the Page Set on any approved device/account are shared across all synced devices/accounts for that Page Set.

* Conceptual name credit to M. Sardo - ‘Master Tek-ninja”
**These sharing methods require an active internet connection.

Happy therapy!