Assistive Technology Update - A fast-paced weekly update for AT professionals and enthusiasts
ATU694 - Objective Ed with Marty Schultz
Your weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs. Special Guest: Marty Schultz - President and Co-Founder - Objective Ed Website: www.objectiveed.com Email: info@objectiveed.com Learn more about Bridging Apps: bridgingapps.org Sign up for our Full Day Training: https://www.eastersealstech.com/our-services/fulldaytraining/ —————————— If you have an AT question, leave us a voice mail at: 317-721-7124 or email tech@eastersealscrossroads.org Check out our web site: http://www.eastersealstech.com Follow us on Twitter: @INDATAproject Like us on Facebook: www.Facebook.com/INDATA
Hi, this is Marty Schultz, President and Co-Founder of Objective-A, and this is your Assistant Technology Update. Hello, and welcome to your Assistant Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of technology and to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I'm your host, Josh Anderson, with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to Episode 694 of Assistant Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on September 13, 2024. On this Friday the 13th, we are super excited to welcome Marty Schultz to the show. He is the President and Co-Founder of Objective-Ed. We're also excited to be joined by Amy Berry from Bridging Apps with an app worth mentioning. As always, listeners, we thank you for listening. Now, let's go ahead and get on with the show. Listeners, we are super excited to partner with our Employment Program here at Easterseals Crossroads to offer Assistant Technology and Employment Full-Day Training, coming up on Thursday, October 3, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern Time. This marks our final full-day training of the year for us here at INDATA, and as I said, we're very excited to partner with our Employment Program here at Easterseals Crossroads in honor of National Disability Employment Awareness Month. During this training, we are super excited to welcome folks from Jan to present on inclusive strategies for welcoming applicants and including employees with disabilities. I'll also present on Assistant Technology, Job Placement, Job Accommodation and all that fun stuff, and then we will welcome the folks from our Employment Program here at Easterseals Crossroads for a whole seminar on the Job Search as well as an employer panel, featuring representatives and some employers here in Indiana and how they work to employ individuals with disabilities. So, we're very, very excited for this training, and as I said, it will happen on October 3 to kick off National Disability Employment Awareness Month if you are interested in attending any of our trainings, but especially this one coming up on October 3, you can go over to Eastersealstech.com Check out our full day trainings and sign up right there. It is free to attend, but you do have to register, especially if you need any of those continuing education units or CEUs. This training is available both online and in person, so if you're not able to make it here to Indianapolis, you can always join us online, or if you happen to be in the neighborhood, please do stop by. We always love having folks in person now that that is, again, a possibility. So, if you're interested in learning more about assistive technology and employment, please do join us for our full day training on Thursday, October 3 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. eastern here at Easterseals Crossroads and online. You can check that out at Eastersealstech.com. I will also put a link down in the show notes where you can go and secure your tickets. Don't forget it is free to attend, but you do have to register in order to be able to attend that day both in person and online. We look forward to seeing you there. Listers up next, we are very excited to welcome back Amy Berry from Bridging Apps to the show with an app worth mentioning. Take it away, Amy. This is Amy Berry with Bridging Apps, and this is an app worth mentioning. This week's featured app is called Right Here Blind Assist. Right Here is a free navigation tool for users with visual impairments. It helps users easily orient themselves in all environments by providing information about their environment when indoors and outdoors, where Bluetooth beacons are installed. Right Here has a very simple interface. After downloading the app, users just have to open it to hear their current location. If they are not in a Right Here enabled location, then the app will start naming what is near them. If users are within range of a Right Here enabled location, they will hear their current location and what is around them indoors when they turn their phone in different directions. If available, users can also call a local representative for the location that they are in through the app. Open the Businesses webpage, use the lens feature to access third party object recognition apps, such as Be My Eyes, Seeing AI, Cache Reader, and also Envision AI, as well as know the direction that they are walking towards. Right Here was trialed by a Bridging Apps staff member and her blind client in the Easter Seals building. The client liked that the app was easy to use and did not require much instruction. She liked that she did not need to use her camera to navigate indoors, and that all she had to do was point her phone in different directions to receive information about her environment. As of fall 2024, the Right Here website states that there are 2381 Right Here enabled locations worldwide. The app is currently available for both Android and iOS devices, and it's free to download. For more information on this app and others like it, visit bridgingapps.org. Listeners today, we are super excited to welcome Marty Schultz from Objective-Ed to Assistive Technology update to tell us all about the tools that they have available to assist individuals with disabilities to maximize their education. Marty, welcome to the show. Thanks for inviting us. Yeah, I am super excited to learn about Objective-Ed, all the great things that you all are doing. But before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself? Sure, so I'm, as I mentioned, I'm co-founder of Objective-Ed and president. We started this company about six years ago, used education technology to help teams with disabilities improve both their employment and education outcomes. My background is as a serial software entrepreneur. This is about the fifth or sixth company that I've kicked off and this is kind of our give that company and really make a difference for children. Awesome, awesome. Well, we're very glad that you're given back and that they've got someone with kind of the experience of starting a company on board as well. So I guess just start with kind of the big picture. What is Objective-Ed? So we provide education technology tools using really cutting edge technologies to make a difference. We started off originally doing orientation and mobility skill building games, assistive technology skill building games and braille literacy skill building games for our kids. And adults with vision impairments. We did that for the first couple of years and then kind of COVID kicked in. And then a lot of schools took advantage of the fact that they could get access to all these skill building games at no cost during the beginning of COVID. And a lot of them came back and decided this was an important curriculum and dealt with a lot of the issues of the expanded core curriculum. Along the way, one of the ideas we had was to help improve braille literacy using speech recognition that kind of comes on AI natural language processing. And the way that system worked, it was called Braille AI Tutor. And the way the system worked is we, a teacher would write a short, do a three paragraph story, and then Braille AI Tutor would send down to an iPad and a Braille display, one sentence at a time. And then the student would read that sentence on their braille display, reading out loud orally. And if they got it right, they would move ahead and treasure hunting game. And that project was actually funded through a grant that we want from Microsoft AI for accessibility group. We then took that technology and applied to the National Science Foundation to say, "Hey, I wonder if there's a way we can use the same type of speech recognition to help kids with dyslexia." And the idea that we had would be the kid and the computer would alternate reading one sentence at a time from the screen using any book that's out there. And then the computer would analyze how well the kid has read that sentence and help the kid where they struggled and show the teacher in a dashboard where they need additional assistance. Well, as I mentioned, we want a grant from the National Science Foundation, both a phase one and phase two grant to build out this product called Buddy Books. And to get content for Buddy Books, we did a partnership with Benetech Bookshare, who provides over a million books for anybody with a reading or print disability. So Buddy Books comes with access to all the books in the Bookshare Library. And we've been providing this to both school districts and a lot of parents who have kids with dyslexia through different voucher programs in states like Texas, Arizona, and South Carolina, and others. And we've been doing that for about the past two years or so. More recently, we've been looking at to see whether or not Buddy Books could be very accepted in the after school market, kind of both in some school and after school, because in addition to kids moving ahead in their literacy and regular school. And after a lot of kids in underserved areas, other kids who have a struggle readers because of dyslexia or autism or ADHD, or speech and language impairments, need some extra time. So we, we worked with Benetech Bookshare to run a pilot program in the Detroit area and underserved community, working closely with the Black United Fund School there. And then down in West Palm Beach area, we worked with two or three different schools, one of which was the Edna runner, Eduardo Educate Tutorial Center. And in the, in that latter one, the Edna runner school, we worked with kids that were anywhere from say about second or third grade, up through about sixth or sixth grade, and most of these kids were at least one to two years behind when they're reading as compared to their peers. And they use Buddy Books for about five weeks, they were using it about three to four times a week, about about 30 minutes each day. And the cool thing about Buddy Books is, as I mentioned, the kid and the computer will alternate reading one sentence at a time out of any book. Now, since it's every other sentence, it's a low of cognitive load, which means kids can be enjoying books at their interest level as opposed to their reading skill level, which they might think the most Katie books. So the kids were really engaged in using Buddy Books, and we found out that just after five weeks of using it, the, the worth performing readers, these are kids who were at least two years behind their peers in their reading. They improved their accuracy by about 10% and went up from about 70% accuracy to 80% accuracy in these books, but their reading fluency measured and correct words for a minute, went up from about 70 words, a minute to 80 words a minute, and that was just five weeks of using Buddy Books. We've seen in general with Buddy Books, close to two grade levels of improvement every year, what a student uses it. So, given the, the crisis of reading and that's happening in the United States and really well in the world, to help kids really improve their reading, it's simply a struggling reader, whether it's something related to COVID pandemic learning loss, whether they have ADHD or autism, whether dyslexia, dyslexia, in all those categories and low vision. Buddy Book seems to be a very effective intervention to help kids really improve their any skills. So that's one half of what we do, the wind and low vision and the, the buddy book so I'll be quite now and let you ask some questions. Wow, that is so much to unpack but I have to start with just a question about, you know, I've worked with so many folks I've never done, but I've worked with a lot of folks that do or went through it. So I have to ask how O&M training can be done electronically, kind of with an app. Can you tell me kind of about either the games the process or kind of how that all works. But the very simplest level for O&M, we have one game where the child is learning either clock directions or compass directions. So let's say there's a cow in the, in the middle of this field and it can work for a low vision student or blind student, and they move their thing around on the screen until they get to how and then they told to drag the cow to save the north fence. And then they drag the cow they are one if they get them if they pick the right fence meaning dragging up, then they get points and then it says okay now drag the duck to the west fence, or as it moves more and more drag, drag the dog to six o'clock or something like that. And then the game has multiple levels so it gets harder and harder and even set the timing and, and do a lot of other customization with, with this game called barnyard to really help them improve their skills. For students who have really met with those type of directions, then we move into something called template explorer, where you're kind of going through an old ancient temple, and you have to discover different rooms. And then you have an instructions like walk ahead three rooms to the north or to three o'clock, open the door and then make a left turn, and then walk to the end of the room, and there you'll get something that will help you pursue your, your treasure hunting in this temple. So you make it fun and interesting anytime I feel like you can trick kids into think they're having fun and not realize they're learning and always seems to get a little, a little bit more out of them and also just to kind of stick with the blind and low vision part. And you might have mentioned this you mentioned so much my my head spin in a little bit but there's also some games to kind of help folks learn how to use some assistive technology is that correct kind of like voice over and things like that can you tell us about those. Sure so that actually is a two-faith project, but one thing we did, we have several games that work to teach from one thing, iOS gestures for the iPhone and the iPad. And we have one game where the game is a new gesture each time you do another round against a little faster so first of my sake swipe up with one finger. And they do it correctly and I'll say swipe left with two fingers they do it correctly they'll say, you know, pack with three fingers and they do that. And then they move on to the next level, and they repeat the first things and they add another one to it and then each time they go and they move up a level and the game. There's another gesture that they have to do and it gets faster and faster and faster and they score points and we're heading again. That's kind of a cool way to do it. And so that's kind of the injector thing. Using that concept. We did a project with CNIB which used to be the Canadian National Institute of the Blind, I'll just know the CNIB called voice over playground. What they want to do is help kids that are between, say, three years old and six or seven years old kind of just before they're starting three technical gardens, and they want to make sure that they had all the assistive technology skills that they needed. And just go so they'd be on far with their peers. So we did it took us about 18 months project we came out with six or seven different apps and training guys with teachers and parents that they could sit down with their low visual blind child and go through all the concepts of assistive technology on the iPad. Things like split tap and doing all the gestures and getting into some early use of a braille displayed all these different features are in there to really help the child understand how to use an iPad and and be ready for kindergarten when they start. And that was again called voice over playground. It's awesome kind of going on to to buddy books and you did a great job kind of describing it but I know there's there's sort of a version for educators and one for parents. Can you kind of tell us the difference between those those versions. Only based on the number of students that working with so so parents can get it directly off our website or through some voucher programs and we also work the school districts where instead of one or two children using it they'll bring in multiple classrooms or using it either out of the might be added special ed department because the kids have an IP or they have five or fours or now we're seeing a lot of demand out of general ed as well where they want to help their struggling readers significantly improve their, their fluency and accuracy and comprehension. Oh excellent but the user experiences the is kind of the same on both sides perfect perfect. It's the same spot on both sides because we know what what is working and we make sure the product has all those features. Excellent and I think there's even some some kind of tools for for teachers and parents we talked a little bit about kind of how it helps the students but kind of can you tell us about the dashboard and how it can give really good information to the parents the teachers and others. Sure, so when the child does a reading we're actually recording everything and analyzing it all the way down to the word and phone level. And then we show in the dashboard different charts like what their fluency is what their accuracy are they dropping certain words, are they skipping endings are they skipping over certain sentences. They're really mispronouncing, and all that shown the dashboard and then at the parent or the teacher wants to dive down more to understand what's going on. We even let them listen to the child's recording so not only do we rate it numerically, you know the accuracy with the state 93% but the parent or the teacher can listen to exactly how the child read each sentence. And then from that we let the parent or the teacher decide what they want to focus on so if the child's having area you know they dropping the engine ending or they're having trouble with certain phonemes. The parent kind of what the teacher kind of focus on one or two of those at first, make sure the child is met before they move on to other things. And then the question we have Friday each day's reading for the child, we have an intervention that's called review mode that helps the child when they struggle. So when the child's actually reading we don't correct them and tell them they made a mistake we wanted to be completely positive experience. But what we do do it is at the beginning of each day we look back at the prior days reading, and we look for a passage that they really had trouble with. We implement several features that are part of the signs of reading and have been recommended was by the research committee that helped design study books. The first is we will model read that passage to the child so they know what it should sound like. So words that they might have guessed that they'll actually hear they will properly pronounce for example if they saw the word arrangement and they guessed it was a argument they'll actually hear that was properly read as arrangement. So we get to listen to how they read it and that's called self monitoring so they can see the difference between the modeling, the cook of how it should have been read, and what they actually did in self monitoring. Then we give the kids an extra cancer to reread that passage that they struggle with, and we see an improvement of about 25% in their fluency just from that type of review mode alone above and beyond anything the teacher. That's excellent I love how you keep it positive and really involve the student in their learning as well and in making those improvements and everything that's great and I know you also sort of have some some resources for folks in preets and a little bit of job assistance and job readiness can you tell us a little bit about that. Sure so so I've kind of described two of our different product lines one thing the buddy books reading system and the, the gamified education tools for kids with one below vision. We also have another product online that we've been building out under both national institutes of health and national institutes of disability and independent learning rehabilitation research and idler. So we've helped kids in the kind of the three x range is what 14 to 22 improve different skills. So the first one we started with was for kids with invasion impairment learning how to get a summer job and they play this what I'll call a virtual but also be called a choose your own adventure where kids get to experience the natural consequences of the decision they make the story. And the first story we did was getting a summer job and they would have to find what jobs are available by interacting with this story I'm applied to the job, do the interview, go through the first day of training and the better they do the better the job they get you know best job is say working with the front desk work job might be like collecting towels at a country's love from the pool. And then we did that when I found out how well it worked and how it feels for the, the young high school kids. We did the same thing for kids on the autism spectrum and that worked really well. And it dealt with some issues that kids with low vision or blind didn't deal with but relate to more dealing with different types of body language and expectations and behavioral behavior for kids on the autism spectrum. From there we did another one that was helping both kids with ADHD and kids on the autism spectrum. Build up a set of skills so that they wouldn't drop out of college in the first year there's a real problem with a lot of kids with disabilities they drop out of college in the first year because of, of not receiving enough independent skillsets and being kind of college capable but not college ready. And that ends up being a lot of frustrations in the first six months of the college experience and they end up dropping out and not continuing on to years two and three. So we thought well let's create a bunch of these virtual ventures for so kids get to experience what it would like so that when they encounter these situations in the real world. They'll be better at handling. Lasting example might be a kid has all the paperwork let's say the kid is ADHD get all that paperwork. They turned it into the office and disability services that says that they get after the test taking time. And then they go to class two weeks and semester the professor announces that there's a quiz today. It raises the hand and says you do know that I'm allowed to have a test taking time with the professors that will not in my class you don't. And they have to deal with this difficult situation do they argue with the professor right then there did they storm out of the classroom. Do they take the test and hope for the best do they head back over to office of disability services that they drop the class a lot of different options they can take and the story involves based on the decisions they make. So that way when this does happen and then they're again better prepared. And then finally we did one we're actually starting on our phase two of this teaching social skills to students who are blind below vision in middle school. And we did a pilot initially about a year two ago working so he researchers and practitioners. In the field, Dr. Penny Wilson bloomed up who's done a lot of work there, Dr. Sharon sacks who was the board chair of Santa's the lighthouse for the blind and number of other key researchers. We did the pilot it worked really well of the kind of piece of ability studying that that's one story. And now we're working on about five or six more stories as part of our phase two. I love that you're you're helping them from from early readers and kind of early adopters all the way up to getting that first job that summer job and even getting into college that's that's really great that you can help them along that that whole part of the life cycle. Marty, could you tell me a story, maybe about someone success using a really any or or any of these tools and how they really change their learning and their life. I think the coolest thing is during coven, there was a little girl she was about against. Third or fourth or fifth grade, and I would get videos from her and her. TV I on M from time to time. And she just went on and on about how much she loved the games and what she said is these games are so educational because she tested really practice skills that her teacher was teaching her, but in a fun way. And she also likes to see the results in the charts to actually see that she's getting better and better. And we've noticed across all the different tools, not all kids like using the tools, but they like to see that they're making progress so we make all that available on so the teacher can share with the student. Excellent, excellent. Marty if her listeners want to find out more about these tools how they can help how to get their hands on them and all that stuff what's a good way for them to do that. You can reach out to us at info@objectiveed.com or they can visit us at the website at www.objectiveed.com. That's O-B-J-E-C-T-I-V-E-E-D.com. Excellent, we will put all that in the show notes. I feel like I could talk all day and dig into everything Marty, but I don't want to run too much over on time. So thank you so much for coming on for telling us about all the great tools available through Objective Ed. Definitely folks go check it out because it's some very cool tools and I'm pretty sure if you work with any students with disabilities you're probably going to find at least one that's going to be able to help someone out there. Marty thank you so much for coming on and telling us all about it. You're fine, thank you. Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on an assistive technology update? If so, call our listener line at 317-721-7124, send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or shoot us a note on Twitter @indataproject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or INTRAC. You can find out more about INTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today's show was produced, edited, hosted and fraud over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads are supporting partners or this host. This was your assistive technology update. I'm Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye bye. (upbeat music)