Hi! I'm Vinitha Gadiraju and I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Today I will be presenting our work
"Exploring Technology Design for Students with Vision Impairment in the Classroom and Remotely."
and I am presenting on behalf of myself and my co-authors Olwyn Doyle and Shaun Kane.
Teachers of the Visually Impaired (TVIs) teach a wide array of academic and functional skills
that are necessary for supporting students with vision impairment and encouraging their development.
These multifaceted skills are outlined by the Expanded Core Curriculum (ECC), which I will refer to as "ECC."
ECC is a popular framework to teach visually impaired children and has been adopted at prominent schools around the United States,
such as the Perkins School for the Blind and the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
So this infographic we see on screen, we can see that at the center of Expanded Core Curriculum
is standard academic subjects like math, science, and art.
ECC then defines a set of behavioral skills, like independence and social interaction, that build onto core academics.
These skills are often intertwined in instruction and taught simultaneously.
Previous work has found that technology motivates children to engage in their learning
and can be a powerful tool for instructors to teach students Expanded Core Curriculum.
However, most educational games and toys for visually impaired children focus on single academic subjects like Braille or math.
Our work aims to learn how future technology can support educators in teaching ECC and students in learning these academic and social skills.
To do this, we studied instructional strategies that educators use in classrooms for visually impaired children.
We also observed how these classrooms use technology in general and worked with educators to develop design considerations for future classroom tools.
We observed educators and students in elementary school classes at a school for the blind for 6 weeks.
We primarily worked with the main elementary classroom teacher, the literacy teacher, and braille specialist instructor to study how Braille and literacy support ECC skills.
So we found that in the classroom educators often used academic skills, like literacy and Braille, to build functional and independence-based skills, like food preparation.
So for example, the students in the main classroom were reading the novel Because of Winn Dixie.
In the book, one character made egg salad sandwiches so the lesson plan for the next day was to make egg salad sandwiches
And as we on-screen, a student is making a sandwich using bread, eggs, and condiments.
This is an example of taking an expanded core curriculum skill, like food prep, and relating it back to a core academic subject like literacy.
We also found that educators and administration use complex reward systems to enforce positive behavior and teach students responsibility.
For example, the classrooms we observed had a disciplinary system called "Levels" as seen in the picture on-screen.
Students increase in level as they exhibit inappropriate behavior and eventually have privileges taken away from them.
Students also have a reward system called "Dojo Points" in which they collect points from good behavior and are given prizes as they reach point milestones.
Finally, our findings aligned with previous work that shows visually impaired people prefer sleek and mainstream-looking devices.
Additionally, children gravitated towards tools integrated with some kind of technology that provided them with auditory feedback.
On the screen there are two images of students completing the same Braille assessment testing.
On the left, the student is using a standard Perkins brailler, while on the right the other student is using a Smart brailler which has a screen and speakers for audio feedback.
Students consistently preferred using Smart braillers for testing and writing in general, as well as refreshable braille displays which connected to their iPad.
After 6 weeks of observation, the school we worked with switched to remote education due to Covid-19
We conducted interviews with educators over Zoom to gather their final thoughts on how technology can better support them remotely.
We designed mock-ups for educational games based on classroom activities that we observed. We then asked educators to adapt the games and add features for remote education.
Educators explained that technology for remote education needs to support both independent and collaborative play as there are benefits for both modes of learning.
Independent play is required as students are learning at home while collaborative play encourages social development skills and encourages students and engages them more in the learning process.
Educators also wanted additional ways to track student learning as well as the ability to personalize educational games so that each student could work on specific skills they need to improve.
Thank you for taking the time to listen to this work!
I would like to thank my co-authors Olwyn Doyle and Shaun Kane, my labmates in the Superhuman Computing Lab for their support of this work, and our participants for collaborating with us on this project.
I've linked our Twitter handles on-screen so please feel free to reach out with any questions or just to chat. Thank you!