Conversations about CVI: John Ravenscroft with Dr. Roman

Turn in to this webinar organized by Dr. John Ravenscroft as he interviews Dr. Christine Roman-Lantzy. This is a fantastic conversation about Dr. Roman’s journey learning about CVI since the 1970s. She shares her passion that led to the development of the CVI Range. If you know her, your know her work begins and continues with parent information.

Enjoy!

Scoring the CVI Range Reliability Workshop

This face to face workshop with Dr. Sandra Newcomb is a wonderful and rare opportunity for parents and professionals to practice assessment using the CVI Range (Christine Roman-Lantzy)

The bedrock of service to students with CVI is the accurate assessment of their functional vision using the CVI Range.

This workshop will be held at Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts on November 3rd and 4th, 2017.

I know when I was learning about CVI, the hands-on practice with other professionals increased my assessment skills and therefore improved the reliability of the results of that assessment of my student’s functional vision. I could be confident that I was scoring it correctly, identifying the correct needs and then providing the correct interventions.

The What’s the Complexity Framework: Designing a Visually Accessible School Day for the Child with CVI

This is an online CVI related class through Perkins elearning conducted by Matt Tietjen.

October 23^rd to December 10^th, 2017

It provides educators with 35 ACVREPs, 35 PDPs, 35 CEs, or 3 Graduate Credits

Matt is a passionate and gifted practitioner serving students with CVI in all Phases (Roman-Lantzy). He recently developed this framework to help teachers, TVIs, therapists and parents assess the complexity of visual presentations, learning activities and learning environments for students with CVI. I signed up to learn more about this important new tool for my work with students.

Here it the description:

“We will study the characteristic “Difficulty with Visual Complexity” in-depth, explore its central relationship to the other characteristics, and examine the ways in which it can impact behavior and access to education for a child with CVI. Our study of visual complexity will integrate the literature on cortical and cerebral visual impairment.

Participants will learn how to use The What’s the Complexity Framework in order to evaluate the complexity of school environments, tasks and materials and to guide educational teams in creating more visually accessible, appropriate learning activities for children with CVI.

In addition to learning how to rate the complexity level of a particular environment or education task, we will also emphasize the importance of balancing the complexity of the environment and task in each activity, managing cumulative complexity and visual fatigue throughout the school day, assessing interpretation of two-dimensional images, and providing direct instruction in salient features.”

http://www.perkinselearning.org/earn-credits/online-class/cvi-complexity

What’s the Complexity? Workshop

This month I attended a full day workshop titled: “What’s the Complexity?” with creator, Matt Tietjen, M.Ed. CTVI. This assessment tool was developed to look at the visual behavior of complexity as it is intertwined with other visual behaviors of CVI.

The “What’s the Complexity?” framework takes a close look at the visual behavior of Complexity,  that is most difficult to control and the visual behavior that seems to effect children’s visual functioning to the greatest degree. It provides a way for parents and educational teams to assess complexity in all forms. It helps parents and teams choose appropriate materials, design appropriate environments matched to appropriate tasks and then to plan across the complete learning day for the student with CVI.

The “What’s the Complexity?” framework also provides us with a well thought out system to assess the student’s interpretation of images. We evaluate the child’s understanding of photographs of their real items (my spoon), colored photographs of other classes of items (the class of spoons), understanding of realistic or abstract cartoon icons of items (spoons in cartoon form), colored icons (Mayer Johnson spoon) and black and white line drawings (black and white drawing of a spoon).

This is an important new tool for us as we serve our children with CVI. It will help support our recommendations for children’s accessible media. Fantastic!

I understand that a graduate class will be offered regularly at Perkins elearning to deepen the understanding for using the “What’s the Complexity?” framework. I will certainly be signing up for this!

 

Free Active Learning Series

I can’t recommend this series strongly enough! I believe Active Learning is a core philosophy for providing our students and children ACCESS to materials and concepts for learning. Especially for children with CVI or children with multiple disabilities. The world must be brought to them to explore, wonder and experiment!

This is a free series, all online through Perkins eLearning. I’m signed up! It starts September 22 so don’t delay.

http://www.perkinselearning.org/videos/webinar/active-learning-5-part-webinar-series

From the site:

“In this series of Active Learning webinars we will share ideas for moving from assessment to IEP development to delivering instruction. Attention will be given to organizing the student’s day and delivering both general curriculum and expanded core curriculum content using an Active Learning approach.”

 

 

Examining Some Perspectives on CVI: Conversations with Experts

This is an upcoming CVI event at Perkins School for the Blind on March 7th, 2016.  It will be recorded and available on their website at some later date.  It is so important to come together to discuss this important topic! http://www.perkins.org/get-involved/events/examining-some-perspectives-on-cvi