Great Video: Perkins School for the Blind Teachable Moments

 

Marguerite Bilm created a CVI friendly literacy material around the Itsy Bitsy Spider song.

http://www.perkinselearning.org/videos/teachable-moment/itsy-bitsy-spider

To create a book such as this for a child with CVI, Marguerite or the TVI working in the classroom would need to assess the student for their unique visual behaviors and skills.  The book would need to match those assessed visual skills.

To use a material such as this, the child would need to

• Have some visual location abilities
• Have some sustained gaze
• Tolerate two items in an array of complexity
• Be able to visually locate red and white items
• Have the material presented visually prior to the auditory presentation
• Have the material presented visually before the tactile page was touched
• Have the book presented propped up in the best visual field. This propping up would also reduce glare from overhead that reflects off the page. (I have good luck rubbing laminated pages with a fine sandpaper. It takes the glare completely away!)
• Have the book presented for as long as the child needs to look and to understand what they are looking at.
• Have the book to be presented at the optimal distance
• Have the book to be used routinely to build familiarity
• Have the book be presented against this nice black background

Marguerite used light to draw visual attention. This tells me light is still important for her child, She also moved the light which tells me movement can still help draw this child’s visual attention.

There are some great characteristic considerations for this student!

Classroom Adaptation

Here is a source for portable and adaptable room dividers and partitions to reduce the complexity of the environment quickly and easily.  It is so important to be able to quickly adapt the environment if needed to optimize a child’s visual abilities.

Portable Block Aids

http://www.versare.com

 

From Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience

My head is once again spinning after the March 7th Perkins School for the Blind CVI conference.  Fantastic new research about CVI is being conducted by Dr. Roman-Lantzy and Dr. Lofti Merabet.  How does it related to my work with children? I need to understand as much as I can about the “why” children present with certain behaviors.

“New publication from the lab showing mapping of brain anatomy and visual activity in response to visual field deficits in CVI”.

http://journal.frontiersin.org/…/10.3…/fnsys.2016.00013/full

JOURNAL.FRONTIERSIN.ORG

 

 

 

Ted Talks: Invaluable Resource

I mentioned Ted Talks in my last post. Many people were unaware of this fabulous resource. Ted Talks stand for Technology, Entertainment and Design.

This explanation is from their website:
“TED is a platform for ideas worth spreading. Started in 1984 as a conference where technology, entertainment and design converged, TED today shares ideas from a broad spectrum — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages. Meanwhile, independent TEDx events help share ideas in communities around the world.”

TED hires specialists in a variety of fields to give 10-20 minute lectures. I watch at least one per day. For my work, I search “vision”, “brain”, “visual processing”, “smell”, “touch”, “developmental learning” and any other topic related to my work with children. I have listened to fascinating lectures with cutting edge information about each of these topics. The search bar is in the upper right of the website home screen. Here is the link:
https://www.ted.com

TEDx is another resource. https://www.ted.com/about/programs-initiatives/tedx-program

A few weeks ago, I shared a TEDx Talk by Lofti Merabet who is studying visual processing in people with blindness. Here is that link: http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Blindness-is-Just-Another-Way-o

Amazing New Tool

I am a bit of a Ted Talk junkie.  I found this lecture about a tool called 3D shape shifting.  Imagine the possibilities for use with children with CVI and other visual impairments to help students build fuller spatial concepts in math, science, nature and life! What an exciting tool this would be for a classroom to provide access in real time!