Paul Menton Centre's Virtual Make the Cut 2020:
Video #4 - AT Presentation - Transcript

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SOMEI TAM:
The second presenter is Jordyn Tremblay. Her official title is Learning Strategies and Assistive Technology Officer, but we call her our "Tech Guru". She will be giving a live demonstration of different assistive technology that students with disabilities are currently using in university to assist them with their reading, writing, and note-taking.

JORDYN:
Hi everyone. As previously mentioned, my name is Jordyn. I am an assistive technologist and learning strategist at Carleton University. During my presentation, I am going to be providing you guys with some demonstrations about different technologies you can potentially use when you move on to post-secondary. But in addition to that, I also wanted to talk about some different tips that I wanted to share just as someone who has personally used assistive technologies for the past 17 years of her life. I also want to give a quick shout out to Lynette and Hunter who are going to be at backend and will be posting the links to webpages with more information about all the technologies I will be providing information on.

Okay, so let's move on to our first "Tip of the Day" which is "Know Thyself." So, when it comes to picking out your assistive technology, it's really important to kind of know how you think and how you like to work with technology. This information will help someone like myself, your assistive technologies, find the best technology to pair and work with you. A really good category of technology where this really shines through is notetaking because they are a lot of different devices, software, and applications that you can use to assist you to take notes and they all have a variety of different features. For example, some technologies are going to be more tailored to typing while others are going to be more tailored to handwriting. Others will give you features that allow you  to record the audio, while others might convert digitally handwritten text into typed text. Also, it's important to consider whether in your program you're going to need to draw the equations or add pictures in your notes. And these are all really important features to consider when picking out a notetaking technology. So, I am going to pull up our first technology of the day. This is Glean, right here on my screen. This particular technology, it will allow you to upload your professors PowerPoint slides which are in PDF format and then what you're able to do is you're going to be able to record the audio of your courses, either live or if you're in an online environment, you're going to be able to record your computer system audio. So, you still won't miss out if you're taking online courses. 
Then when you're taking your notes, you have option to type and then post it in the feed over here. But if you prefer to just sit back and listen and to really absorb the information, you can add these tags that will synch up to the audio recording and you could go back to listen to that particular point in the audio later. 
Now, Glean is an excellent note taking technology, but for some cases, it may not be the best tool to use, especially if you're taking math and science courses because it's really hard to type out equations with this particular software.

OK, so onto tip number two, which is "Know Your Devices." 
For assistive technologies, occasionally you come across something that's a full-on device.  For example, reading pens or smart pens are their own separate technology. However, a lot of software applications and extensions, they're all run off of laptops, smartphones, or in some cases, even tablets. Just so you guys know, the operating system in which your device uses, so whether it's mac or windows or android or ios, it kind of will pick and choose what technologies you're going to be able to use, but it's usually not a big idea. There's a lot of assistive technologies nowadays that are available on multiple operating systems and, in addition to that, if it's not the case, there's usually functionally equivalent programs across the different operating systems. 
Now I know when coming to post secondary, one of the biggest purchases that you might be making is a new laptop. And when I meet with new students in the summer, usually they're asking me, "Okay what sort of specs do I need to look for when I get this new laptop so I can use my assistive technology?" So, my answer to that is as long as you have a computer that's either windows or mac, that has been made ideally in the last three years, and has an i5 processor, you're going to be good to go. So typically you ... you won't need the most expensive laptop, but you definitely, like, you don't want the cheapest laptop. Anything kind of in the middle price range, that's going to be perfectly fine.
Just keep in mind that it's really important to check with the program you're deciding to go into to see if they have any requirements for what sort of computer you use. Usually if this is the case, your program is going to have that information posted on their program website and if they don't, definitely feel free to reach out to your program's department and you can easily just do this by email and they'll let you know if you need to use say a windows computer over a mac. 
Okay, for this particular technology that I wanted to pair with this tip, I went with OneNote. So I chose OneNote because this tool works off of basically all the major operating systems, and all the features that it has are pretty much unified whether you're using a mac or windows computer, the application on your android phone or an application on your iPad. What's also great about this tool is, even though it's traditionally viewed as a note-taking technology, it has a lot of interesting additional features to it. And this kind of brings in, comes into knowing your device because I highly recommend when you have your different devices you're using your assistive technologies on explore them a little bit. A lot of times things will have embedded accessibility features that you can definitely benefit from. 
So, for OneNote in particular, I really like how it can handle math. So, I'm just going to draw this equation right here and then what I can do is I can click the math feature and this is exactly what I wrote, but if I needed to, I'd be able to let the software know that ... oh, actually I wanted a Z instead of a 2, but I'm going to leave it as is. Okay, I can convert it to type text, which is very cool. I can also use OneNote as a calculator to show me how I would solve this equation and I can see the steps that it would follow. What's also really great and really helpful for studying is you can use OneNote to generate a practice quiz. So, I'm going to create a quiz with, let's say, five questions. Okay ... oh ... well, apparently that's glitching out, but that's okay because I have extra practice quizzes already pre-made. So, I'm just going to go into forms and ... there we go. So, I'm going to insert this practice quiz that I already made up before this, and so I would be able to go through this and if I wanted to practice solving this particular equation, I would just have these multiple choice questions to practice off of. 
Okay, now that we're all done with OneNote, let's move on to tip number three, which is "Be Flexible." So, as an assistive technologist, unfortunately, I can't always promise that I'm going to be able to provide you with the exact technology you want. There are a couple different reasons for this. One of the big ones is the technology you want may not exist yet. For example, I have a lot of students that would love software that will automatically caption their lectures and write all their notes for them. That technology is developing and it's getting better day by day, but it's definitely not perfect. But also, certain things like how much a technology costs could also impact whether or not you might be able to use a particular technology. But if there comes a scenario where I can't give you your dream technology, as an assistive technologist I always try my best to find workarounds, whether it be finding an alternative technology or finding a technology that does one feature you want and then a second or third technology that will do the other features you're looking for. So, when meeting with your assistive technologist, be open-minded, be creative, but still, like, stay informed. The more information you know about the technologies you're using and the limitations that using one technology or another cause you is going to be really important information if you ever have to let people know that, "okay, I might not be able to do something quite as efficiently because of this." 
So, the technology I decide to pair with this is Google Voice Typing. So, the reason for this is my first assistive technology that I ever used is a dictation software known as Dragon Naturally Speaking and it's a great technology. It's really powerful. I can dictate what I want to write into a Word document or my emails. I can also use the software to open and close documents on my computer or to browse the internet, if I even wanted to. However, for myself, I just really need to be able to dictate text to help me with my writing. That's the most important thing for me. I don't always need a hands-free experience with my computer. So, if I ever need to, I can always use Google Voice Typing and that'll allow me to dictate directly into a Google document. Just by clicking this microphone here, I can talk away and it will transcribe what I say. It's fairly accurate and relatively powerful period ... bold powerful. As you can see, it didn't quite take that voice command. That would be something I'd be able to do with Dragon Naturally Speaking, but that's okay for me ... I can always just highlight the text here and bold it manually. Google Voice Typing is great if you really prefer to write in a Google doc. But in addition to that, if you need to dictate in a variety of different languages because maybe you're taking a language course or you have a pen pal who reads a different language, you can definitely consider all the different languages available to you on Google Voice Typing. What's also great is Google Voice Typing has a variety of different accents available. So, in some cases, it's even better than other dictation software because it has that pre-set up template, so it's more likely to request recognize accents versus dragon naturally speaking which I love to use just because the templates on that aren't necessarily set up for an english south african voice. Okay. So, all done with that tip. 
On to our next tip which is "when stuff is not working, get help." So, technology will glitch. It's going to crash. It's going to freeze. It's not going to be fun. And I fully support taking the time to see if you can fix technical difficulties on your own. It's really important to know your technology and try to figure out what's going on and see if you can fix it. With that said, if you restart your computer at least once and you can't fix the technological glitch in about 30 minutes, contact your assistive technologist right away to let them know what's going on and then if you have the contact information of the tech support for that technology, reach out to them as well. It's important to do this because I've seen numerous cases where my students have just been so frustrated with the technology not working that they give up on it. Please don't give up on your technology. Try it out. Usually when those students reach out to me, I can solve the problem in five minutes. If not, usually within 48 hours in conversation with tech support, things can be resolved. So, definitely get help when you need it. So, for this technology, I decided to pair it with Microsoft Editor because who doesn't need a little help when editing nowadays, right? So, this is a new feature on the Microsoft Word, on the 365 platform. So, I can click on this and it will flag various grammatical errors. So, right here, it wants me to switch note-taking to not have the hyphen. But I can also have it flag how concise my sentences are. So, you know what, for this I'm going to go with several. So, it's really helpful for editing. What I also love about Editor is you can go in and you can flag exactly what you want it to check for. It will flag different biases. So, I really like this because it'll let me know if I need to be using a more gender-neutral term, or it can help me flag whether or not I'm using an oxford comma. So, you can go in and you can check off exactly what you want it to check for you. It's completely customizable. 
Okay, on to our next tip which is "Ask questions and then practice." So, when I meet with students, all questions about the technology are completely fair game. I don't expect anyone to have all the answers about the technology when I'm showing them what they could consider using. So, even if you feel like it's the most ridiculous question, ask it anyways. I always like being presented with the challenge and I've definitely heard some very interesting questions that even I have had to take a moment to ponder and be like "okay, how would I potentially do this?" or "Why is this like that?" Now, keep in mind that after you have your first session and you ask all your questions, definitely take some time and practice using the tool on your own. As with anything, especially with the more complicated technologies, practice makes perfect. This is definitely, like, not something that you can look at once and then maybe, say, right before your test, you will be able to use it flawlessly throughout your entire test-taking experience. So, I wanted to introduce Read & Write to pair with this technology. And this is a text-to-speech reading software that we like to use at Carleton. This particular software as you can see has a lot of features and it's great. It's wonderful, but it literally has three features that will allow the software to read which is a lot. So, I'll typically have a student reaching out to me and asking, like, "Hey Jordyn, how do I get it to read a pdf document again" and I'll go through that procedure. No problem! It happens. It's definitely a complicated tool. Also, keep in mind when you're meeting with your assistive technologists, when you ask your questions, or after you practice using the technology and follow up with them, let them know if you have questions about other features the technologist didn't cover. When I have my sessions with students, I really try to tailor them to what the student is looking for, but sometimes, if I don't know that maybe you might benefit from something that changes the color of your screen, I'm not going to know that I should maybe introduce you to the screen mask, which apparently ... well, it's kind of ... no ... okay, it's slightly tinting my screen purple. It's okay. But you can completely customize what color you want to tint the screen with this feature. You can also use it to create a reading ruler for yourself as you go over text. 
So, on to our second to last tip of the day which is "To use tech or not to use tech, that is the question." So, there is a lot of assistive technology out there and it can do a lot. Like, it's pretty much "There's an app for that" is a very common saying in this field. But sometimes you might not need a tool to do something. Tech solutions are great. For example, I have been using Microsoft To Do to check off for myself all my different tips for this presentation and the technologies that I need to cover. But I'm a list person and I do love my digital list making applications and tools, but I also like using sticky notes. So, I literally have a pile of sticky notes here just to kind of remind me of all the features I need to make sure I cover with my different technologies. Microsoft To Do is great. It's a list-taking tool that's directly on your computer. You add any tasks you want. In addition, you can add subtasks to all of your tasks. You can add reminders. You can flag something as important. You can attach files to the different tasks. If, for example, you want to add your syllabus for a particular assignment so you have the instructions to review them when you're working on the paper. 
Okay, so ... and here comes our final tip of the day. So, with assistive technology, sometimes you might be buying particular technology, or consider purchasing a tool, and if that is the case, definitely make sure you do your research before actually purchasing a technology. A lot of technology will have some sort of trial period, usually ranging from three days to 30 days which is great, but some don't. So, whether it be looking up information online, talking with your assistive technologist, seeing if you can potentially borrow the technology for an hour to try it out - all great options. Now, I didn't pair this particular tip with a particular technology and the reason for this is I wanted to make sure that I let you all know that most post-secondary institutions will have technology that they have a site license for. And so, because of that, there might be technologies that you can get for free. For example, at Carleton, we have a site license for Read & Write. But not every institution has the same technologies on their site licenses. So, definitely check in with your assistive technologist because if you're, say, looking for a reading software or software to help you with writing or something to help you with studying, they might know of free technologies that are already readily available to you as a student that you can use before you buy something that's maybe 50 or a hundred dollars for either a one-time licensing purchase or a yearly payment. Okay, so that is the assistive technology presentation, guys. I hope you enjoyed.
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