Podcasts about Learning Ally

Each episode on Unstoppable Mindset I ask all of you and my guests to feel free to introduce me to others who would be good guests on our podcast. Our guest this time, Erin Edgar, is a guest introduced to me by a past podcast guest, Rob Wentz. Rob told me that Erin is inspirational and would be interesting and that she would have a lot to offer you, our audience. Rob was right on all counts. Erin Edgar was born blind. Her parents adopted an attitude that would raise their daughter with a positive attitude about herself. She was encouraged and when barriers were put in her way as a youth, her parents helped her fight to be able to participate and thrive. For a time, she attended the Indiana School for the Blind. Her family moved to Georgia where Erin attended high school. After high school, Erin wanted to go to college where she felt there would be a supportive program that would welcome her on campus. She attended the University of North Carolina at Chapple Hill. After graduating she decided to continue at UNC where she wanted to study law. The same program that gave her so much assistance during her undergraduate days was not able to provide the same services to Erin the graduate student. Even so, Erin had learned how to live, survive and obtain what she needed to go through the law program. After she received her law degree Erin began to do what she always wanted to do: She wanted to use the law to help people. So, she worked in programs such as Legal Aid in North Carolina and she also spent time as a mediator. She will describe all that for us. Like a number of people, when the pandemic began, she decided to pivot and start her own law firm. She focuses on estate planning. We have a good discussion about topics such as the differences between a will and a living trust. Erin offers many relevant and poignant thoughts and words of advice we all can find helpful. Erin is unstoppable by any standard as you will see. About the Guest: Erin Edgar, Esq., is a caring, heart-centered attorney, inspirational speaker and vocal artist. She loves helping clients: -- Plan for the future of their lives and businesses, ensuring that they have the support they need and helping them find ways to provide for their loved ones upon death. --Ensure that the leave a legacy of love and reflect client values -- Find creative ways that allow them to impact the world with a lasting legacy. She is passionate about connecting with clients on a heart level. She loves witnessing her clients as she guides them to transform their intentions for their loved ones into a lasting legacy through the estate planning process. Erin speaks about ways to meld proven legal tools, strategies, and customization with the creative process to design legal solutions that give people peace of mind, clarity, and the assurance that their loved ones will be taken care of, and the world will be left a better place Ways to connect with Erin: Facebook: https://facebook.com/erin-edgar-legal LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/erinedgar About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset . Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes: Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:21 Hi everyone, and welcome to another edition of unstoppable mindset. We're glad that you're here with us, wherever you may be. Hope the day is going well, and we have Erin Edgar on our episode today. Edgar is a very interesting person in a lot of ways. She's a caring, heart centered attorney. She is also an inspirational speaker and a vocal artist. I'm not sure whether vocal artistry comes into play when she's in the courtroom, but we won't worry about that too much. I assume that you don't sing to your judges when you're trying to deal with something. But anyway, I'll let her answer that. I'm just trying to cause trouble, but Erin again. We're really glad you're with us. We really appreciate you being here, and I know you do a lot with estate planning and other kinds of things that'll be fun to talk about. So welcome to unstoppable mindset.   Erin Edgar ** 02:14 Thank you, Michael. It's great to be here, and I haven't sung in a courtroom or a courthouse yet, but I wouldn't rule it out.   Michael Hingson ** 02:23 I have someone who I know who also has a guide dog and his diet. His guide dog, it's been a while since I've seen him, but his guide dog tended to be very vocal, especially at unexpected times, and he said that occasionally happened in the courtroom, which really busted up the place. Oh, dear.   Erin Edgar ** 02:45 I imagine that would draw some smiles, hopefully, smiles.   Michael Hingson ** 02:48 Well, they were, yeah, do you, do you appear in court much?   Erin Edgar ** 02:53 Um, no, the type of law that I practice, I'm usually, I don't think I've ever appeared in court after I've written people's wills, but I have done previous things where I was in court mediating disputes, which is a kind of a separate thing that I used to do, so I've been in court just not recently. Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 03:17 Well, that's understandable. Well, let's start a little bit with the early Erin and growing up and all that sort of stuff. Tell us about that? Sure.   Erin Edgar ** 03:26 So I was born in cold, gray Indiana, and, yeah, chilly in the wintertime, and I started out I was blind from birth, so my parents thought it would be a good idea to send me to the school for the blind for a while. And back when I was born, um, teen years ago, they did not mainstream visually impaired and disabled students in that state, so you went where you could, and I was at the blind school for until I reached third grade, and then we moved to Georgia, and I've been in the south ever since I live in North Carolina now, and I started going to public schools in fourth grade, and continued on that route all the way up through high school.   Michael Hingson ** 04:21 Oh, okay. And so then, what did you do?   Erin Edgar ** 04:29 So after, after that, I, you know, I was one of those high school students. I really wanted to get out of dodge and leave my high school behind. I went visiting a couple of colleges in Georgia, and I said to my parents, I said, I really don't like this. It's like going to high school again. Literally, I was meeting people I had been in high school with, and I decided, and was very grateful that my parents. Were able to rig it some way so that I could go to an out of state school. And I went to UNC Chapel Hill here in North Carolina, Tar Heels all the way. And I was there for undergrad. And then I got into law school there as well, which I was very excited about, because I didn't have to go anywhere, and graduated from law school again a while ago in the early 2000s   Michael Hingson ** 05:31 Okay, and so then you went straight into law from that.   Erin Edgar ** 05:37 I didn't I did some other things before I actually went into law itself. I worked with some local advocacy organizations, and I also mediated, as I said earlier, I did mediations with the county court, helping mediate criminal disputes. And we're talking about like things with you get in a dispute with your neighbor and you yell at each other, those kind of People's Court type things. They were fun and interesting. And then I did go into law. After that, I started working with Legal Aid of North Carolina, which is a an organization that helps people in poverty who cannot afford a lawyer to go and have have their options communicated to them and some help given to them regarding their public benefits or certain other, you know, public things that we could help with we weren't able to help with any personal injury, or, you know, any of the fun stuff you see on TV. So and then, when the pandemic hit, I started my own law practice and completely changed gears and went into writing estate plans and wills for a living.   Michael Hingson ** 07:07 Do you think that your time doing mediation work and so on taught you a lot about humanity and human nature and people?   Erin Edgar ** 07:16 It did. I bet it did. It was invaluable, actually, in that area taught me a lot about, I don't know necessarily, about human nature. However, it did teach me a lot about how to talk to people who were on different pages. You know, they had, perhaps, values and principles that weren't quite the same, where they had a different way of looking at the same exact situation, and how to bring those those people together and allow them to connect on a deeper level, rather than the argument we're able to get them to agree to kind of move forward from that, so nobody has to be found guilty, right? And you know a judge doesn't have and you don't have to drag a criminal conviction around with you. I think the most rewarding cases that I had, by far were the education cases. Because I don't know if anyone knows this, but in most states, in the United States, if you don't send your kids to school, you are guilty of a crime. It's called truancy, and you can be arrested. Well, the county that I live in was very forward thinking, and the school system and the court said, that's kind of dumb. We don't want to arrest parents if their kids aren't going to school, there's something behind it. You know, there the school is not providing what the child needs. The child's acting out for some reason, and we need to get to the bottom of it. So what they did was they set up a process whereby we come in as neutral observers. We did not work for the court. We were part of a separate organization, and have a school social worker there or counselor, and also have a parent there, and they could talk through the issues. And in a lot of cases, if the children were old enough, they were teenagers, they were there, and they could talk about it from their perspective. And truly amazing things came out of those situations. We could just we would discover that the children had a behavioral issue or even a disability that had not been recognized, and were able to come up with plans to address that with you know, or the school was with our help,   Michael Hingson ** 09:42 going back a little bit, how did your parents deal with the fact that you were blind? I gather it was a fairly positive experience   Erin Edgar ** 09:50 for me. It was positive. I was so fortunate, and I'm still so grateful to this day for having parents who you. I were very forward thinking, and advocated for me to have and do whatever, not whatever I wanted, because I was far from spoiled, but, you know, whatever, yeah, yeah, you know. But whatever, however I wanted to be successful, they advocated for me. And so my mother actually told me, you know, when I was born, they went through all the parent things like, oh, gosh, what did we do wrong? You know, why is God punishing us? You know, all that. And they, very early on, found support groups for, you know, parents with children with either blindness or disabilities of some sort, and that was a great source of help to them. And as I grew up, they made every effort to ensure that I had people who could teach me, if they couldn't, you know, how to interact with other children. I think, for a while when I was very little, and I actually kind of remember this, they hired an occupational therapist to come and teach me how to play with kids, because not only was I blind, but I was an only child, so I didn't have brothers and sisters to interact with, and that whole play thing was kind of a mystery to me, and I remember it sort of vaguely, but that's just A demonstration that they wanted me to have the best life possible and to be fully integrated into the sighted world as much as possible. So when I was at the blind school, and I was in this residential environment, and there was an added bonus that my parents didn't really weren't happy in their jobs either, and they weren't happy with the education I was getting, that they decided, well, we're just going to pick up and move and that was, quite frankly, as I look back on it now, a huge risk for them. And they did it, you know, 50% for me and 50% for them, maybe even 6040, but as I look back on it now, it's another demonstration of how supportive they were, and all the way through my school age years, were very active in ensuring that I had everything that I needed and that I had the support that I needed.   Michael Hingson ** 12:19 That's cool. How did it go when you went to college at UNC?   Erin Edgar ** 12:25 Yeah, that's an interesting question, a very good question.   Michael Hingson ** 12:29 You didn't play basketball, I assume? Oh no, I figured you had other things to do.   Erin Edgar ** 12:33 Yeah, I had other stuff to do. I sang in the choir and sang with the medieval chorus group, and, you know, all this other, like, musical geek, geeky stuff. But, or, and when we were looking for colleges and universities, one of the criteria was they had to have a solid kind of, like disability, slash visually impaired center, or, you know, support staff that would help in, you know, allow people with disabilities to go through the university. So at UNC Chapel Hill, the they had as part of their student affairs department Disability Services, and it just so happened that they were very aware of accommodations that blind people needed. I wasn't the first blind student to go through undergrad there. That's not law school, that's undergrad. And so you know, how much was it? Time and a half on on tests if I was doing them on the computer, double time if I was doing them in Braille. A lot of the tests were in Braille because they had the technology to do it. And also the gentleman who ran the Disability Services Department, I think, knew Braille, if I'm not mistaken, and could transcribe if necessary. But I was at the stage at that point where I was typing most of my exams anyway, and didn't need much that was in Braille, because I had books either electronically or they had a network of folks in the community that would volunteer to read if there was not, you know, available textbooks from RFD, and what is it, RFP and D? Now was at the time, yeah, now Learning Ally, there wasn't a Bookshare at that time, so we couldn't use Bookshare, but if there weren't textbooks available, they would have people in the community who would read them for them, and they would get paid a little bit. Now, when I went to law school, it was a totally different ball game, because I was the first law student who was blind, that UNC Chapel Hill had had, and it was a different school within the school, so that student affairs department was not part of law school anymore, and we had quite a time the first semester getting my book. Works in a format that I could read them in. They did eventually, kind of broker a deal, if you will, with the publishers who were either Thompson Reuters or Westlaw at the time to get electronic versions. They were floppy disks. This is how old I am. Floppy disks. They were in this weird format. I think it was word perfect or something. Usually it was, and they   Michael Hingson ** 15:27 didn't really have a lot of them new or no, they didn't know now, newer publishing system,   Erin Edgar ** 15:32 yeah, there wasn't PDF even, I don't think, at the time. And the agreement was I could get those, and I actually had to buy the print textbooks as well. So I have this whole bookcase of law books that are virgin, unopened, almost. And they are, you know, some of them almost 25 years old, never been opened and of no use to anyone. But I have them, and they look nice sitting down there in that bookshelf antiques books. They're antiques. So the first year was a little rough, because for a while I didn't have books, and we were able to make arrangements so that I could kind of make up some classes on a later year and switch things around a little bit. And it ended up all working out really well once we got started.   Michael Hingson ** 16:16 Yeah, I remember when I was going through getting my bachelor's and master's in physics, I needed the books in braille because, well, it's the only way to be able to really deal with the subject. You can't do it nearly as well from recordings, although now there's a little bit better capability through recording, because we have the DayZ format and so on. But still, it's not the same as reading it in Braille and for mathematics and physics and so on. I think that the only way to really do it is in Braille. And we had challenges because professors didn't want to decide what books to use until the last minute, because then, oh, a new book might be coming out and we want to get the latest book, and that didn't work for me, right? Because I had a network that I, in part, I developed with the Department of Rehabilitation out here, helped our office for disabled students didn't really have the resources to know it. They were very supportive. They just didn't really deal with it. But the bottom line is that we had to develop, I had to develop the network of transcribers, but they needed three to six months to do the books, at least three months and and sometimes I would get them one or two volumes at a time, and they barely kept ahead of the class. But, you know, it worked, but professors resisted it. And my the person who ran the Office for Students with Disabilities, said, Look, you have to work on these things, but if you're not getting cooperation from professors, and you come and tell me, and I will use the power of this office to get you what you need, there's another thing you might consider doing, she said. And I said, What's that? And Jan said, Go meet the chancellor. Make friends, yeah, friends in high places. And so I did. And Dan, oh, there you go. Became pretty good friends over the years, which was pretty cool,   Erin Edgar ** 18:15 you know, it was weird because we didn't, I didn't have that problem with the professors. They were, you know, I had a couple of old codgers, but they weren't really worried about the books. They were fine with me having the books, but it was the publishers. The publishers were irritated that that I needed them, and, you know, in an alternative format. And I didn't really, I was not. I was one of those people that if someone said they were going to do something for me, I kind of let people do it. And at the time, I was really not an advocate, advocator for myself, at that time, a very good self advocate. And so I kind of let the school interface with that. I think it would have been really interesting, if I look back on it, for me to have taken a hand in that. And I wonder what would have happened well, and at this point, you know, it's neither here nor there, but that's really fascinating. Making Friends with the chancellor, sometimes you have to do stuff like that   Michael Hingson ** 19:15 well. And the idea was really to get to know Him. And what there was, well, obviously other motivations, like, if we needed to go to a higher court to get help, we could go to the chancellor. I never had to do that, but, but the reason for meeting him and getting to know him was really just to do it and to have fun doing it. So we did,   Erin Edgar ** 19:36 yeah, and I kind of had a comparable experience. I met the Dean of the Law School for that very reason. And he said, you know, if you've got trouble, come to me, my parents got involved a little bit. And we all, you know, met together and maybe even separately at some points just to make sure that I had everything that I needed at various times. Mm. Yeah, and I made friends with the some of the assistant deans at the law school, in particular because of the situation, and one of whom was the Dean of the Law School Student Affairs, who was helping me to get what I needed. And for a while, when I was in law school and beyond. He was like, We lent books to each other. It was very funny. We found out we had the same reading tastes beyond law books. It wasn't, you know, legal at all, but we were like, trading books and things. So a lot of really good relationships came out of that.   Michael Hingson ** 20:37 And I think that's extremely important to to do. And I think that's one of the things that that offices for students with disabilities that tend to want to do everything for you. I think that's one of the things that it's a problem with those offices, because if you don't learn to do them, and if you don't learn to do them in college, how are you going to be able to be able to really act independently and as an advocate after college, so you have to learn that stuff   Erin Edgar ** 21:05 Absolutely. That's a very good point.   Michael Hingson ** 21:09 So I, I think it was extremely important to do it, and we did, and had a lot of fun doing it. So it was, was good. What are some of the biggest misconceptions you think that people had about you as a blind child growing up?   Erin Edgar ** 21:25 Oh yeah, that's a great question. I think that one of the biggest misconceptions that people had about me, especially when I was younger, is that I would know I would be sort of relegated to staying at home with parents all of my life, or being a stay at home parent and not able to be kind of professionally employed and earning, you know, earning a living wage. Now, I have my own business, and that's where most of my money goes at the same at this point. So, you know, earning a living wage might be up in the air at the moment. Ha, ha. But the the one thing I think that the biggest misconception that people had, and this is even like teachers at the blind school, it was very rare for blind children of my age to grow up and be, you know, professionals in, I don't want to say high places, but like people able to support themselves without a government benefit backing them up. And it was kind of always assumed that we would be in that category, that we would be less able than our sighted peers to do that. And so that was a huge misconception, even you know, in the school that I was attending. I think that was the, really the main one and one misconception that I had then and still have today, is that if I'm blind, I can't speak for myself. This still happens today. For instance, if I'm if I want, if I'm going somewhere and I just happen to be with someone sighted, they will talk whoever I'm, wherever I'm at, they will talk to the sighted person, right? They won't talk to you. They won't talk to me. And so, for instance, simple example, if I'm somewhere with my husband, and we happen to be walking together and we go somewhere that I need to go, they will talk to him because he's guiding me, and they won't talk. And he's like, don't talk to me. I have no idea, you know, talk to her, and part of that is I'm half a step behind him. People naturally gravitate to the people that are leading. However, I noticed, even when I was a young adult, and I would go, you know, to the doctor, and I would be with my my parents, like, maybe I'm visiting them, and I need to go to the doctor, they would talk to them and not me, yeah, which is kind of sad. And I think it happens a lot, a lot more than people realize.   Michael Hingson ** 24:10 Yeah, it does. And one of my favorite stories is, is this, I got married in 1982 and my wife has always been, or had always been. She passed away in 2022 but she was always in a wheelchair. And we went to a restaurant one Saturday for breakfast. We were standing at the counter waiting to be seated, and the hostess was behind the counter, and nothing was happening. And finally, Karen said to me, she doesn't know who to talk to, you know? Because Karen, of course, is, is in a wheelchair, so actually, she's clearly shorter than this, this person behind the counter, and then there's me and and, of course, I'm not making eye contact, and so Karen just said she doesn't know who to talk to. I said, you know? All she's gotta do is ask us where we would like to sit or if we'd like to have breakfast, and we can make it work. Well, she she got the message, and she did, and the rest of the the day went fine, but that was really kind of funny, that we had two of us, and she just didn't know how to deal with either of us, which was kind of cute. Mm, hmm. Well, you know, it brings up another question. You use the term earlier, visually impaired. There's been a lot of effort over the years. A lot of the professionals, if you will, created this whole terminology of visually impaired, and they say, well, you're blind or you're visually impaired. And visually impaired means you're not totally blind, but, but you're still visually impaired. And finally, blind people, I think, are starting to realize what people who are deaf learned a long time ago, and that is that if you take take a deaf person and you refer to them as hearing impaired, there's no telling what they might do to you, because they recognize that impaired is not true and they shouldn't be equated with people who have all of their hearing. So it's deaf or hard of hearing, which is a whole lot less of an antagonistic sort of concept than hearing impaired. We're starting to get blind people, and not everyone's there yet, and we're starting to get agencies, and not every agency is there yet, to recognize that it's blind or low vision, as opposed to blind or here or visually impaired, visually impaired. What do you think about that? How does and how does that contribute to the attitudes that people had toward you?   Erin Edgar ** 26:38 Yeah, so when I was growing up, I was handicapped, yeah, there was that too, yeah, yeah, that I was never fond of that, and my mother softened it for me, saying, well, we all have our handicaps or shortcomings, you know, and but it was really, what was meant was you had Something that really held you back. I actually, I say, this is so odd. I always, I usually say I'm totally blind. Because when I say blind, the immediate question people have is, how blind are you? Yeah, which gets back to stuff, yeah, yeah. If you're blind, my opinion, if you're blind, you're you're blind, and if you have low vision, you have partial sight. And visually impaired used to be the term, you know, when I was younger, that people use, and that's still a lot. It's still used a lot, and I will use it occasionally, generally. I think that partially sighted, I have partial vision is, is what I've heard people use. That's what, how my husband refers to himself. Low Vision is also, you know, all those terms are much less pejorative than actually being impaired,   Michael Hingson ** 27:56 right? That's kind of really the issue, yeah. My, my favorite example of all of this is a past president of the National Federation of the Blind, Ken Jernigan, you've heard of him, I assume, Oh, sure. He created a document once called a definition of blindness, and his definition, he goes through and discusses various conditions, and he asks people if, if you meet these conditions, are you blind or not? But then what he eventually does is he comes up with a definition, and his definition, which I really like, is you are blind if your eyesight has decreased to the point where you have to use alternatives to full eyesight in order to function, which takes into account totally blind and partially blind people. Because the reality is that most of those people who are low vision will probably, or they may probably, lose the rest of their eyesight. And the agencies have worked so hard to tell them, just use your eyesight as best you can. And you know you may need to use a cane, but use your eyesight as best you can, and if you go blind, then we're going to have to teach you all over again, rather than starting by saying blindness is really okay. And the reality is that if you learn the techniques now, then you can use the best of all worlds.   Erin Edgar ** 29:26 I would agree with that. I would also say you should, you know, people should use what they have. Yeah, using everything you have is okay. And I think there's a lot of a lot of good to be said for learning the alternatives while you're still able to rely on something else.   Michael Hingson ** 29:49 Point taken exactly you know, because   Erin Edgar ** 29:53 as you age, you get more and more in the habit of doing things one way, and it's. Very hard to break out of that. And if you haven't learned an alternative, there's nothing you feel like. There's nothing to fall back on, right? And it's even harder because now you're in the situation of urgency where you feel like you're missing something and you're having to learn something new, whereas if you already knew it and knew different ways to rely on things you would be just like picking a memory back up, rather than having to learn something new. Well, I've never been in that position, so I can't say, but in the abstract, I think that's a good definition.   Michael Hingson ** 30:34 Well, there are a lot of examples, like, take a person who has some eyesight, and they're not encouraged to use a cane. And I know someone who was in this situation. I think I've told the story on this podcast, but he lived in New Jersey and was travel. And traveled every day from New Jersey into Philadelphia to work, and he was on a reasonably cloudy day, was walking along. He had been given a cane by the New Jersey Commission for the Blind, but he they didn't really stress the value of using it. And so he was walking along the train to go in, and he came to the place where he could turn in and go into the car. And he did, and promptly fell between two cars because he wasn't at the right place. And then the train actually started to move, but they got it stopped, and so he was okay, but as as he tells the story, he certainly used his cane from then on. Because if he had been using the cane, even though he couldn't see it well because it was dark, or not dark, cloudy, he would have been able to see that he was not at the place where the car entrance was, but rather he was at the junction between two cars. And there's so many examples of that. There's so many reasons why it's important to learn the skills. Should a partially blind or a low vision person learn to read Braille? Well, depends on circumstances, of course, I think, to a degree, but the value of learning Braille is that you have an alternative to full print, especially if there's a likelihood that you're going to lose the rest of your eyesight. If you psychologically do it now, that's also going to psychologically help you prepare better for not having any eyesight later.   Erin Edgar ** 32:20 And of course, that leads to to blind children these days learn how to read, yeah, which is another issue.   Michael Hingson ** 32:28 Which is another issue because educators are not teaching Braille nearly as much as they should, and the literacy rate is so low. And the fact of the matter is even with George Kircher, who invented the whole DAISY format and and all the things that you can do with the published books and so on. The reality is there is still something to be said for learning braille. You don't have sighted children just watching television all the time, although sometimes my parents think they do, but, but the point is that they learn to read, and there's a value of really learning to read. I've been in an audience where a blind speaker was delivering a speech, and he didn't know or use Braille. He had a device that was, I think what he actually used was a, was, it was a Victor Reader Stream, which is   Erin Edgar ** 33:24 one of those, right?   Michael Hingson ** 33:25 I think it was that it may have been something else, but the bottom line is, he had his speech written out, and he would play it through earphones, and then he would verbalize his speech. Oh, no, that's just mess me up. Oh, it would. It was very disjointed and and I think that for me, personally, I read Braille pretty well, but I don't like to read speeches at all. I want to engage the audience, and so it's really important to truly speak with the audience and not read or do any of those other kinds of things.   Erin Edgar ** 33:57 I would agree. Now I do have a Braille display that I, I use, and, you know, I do use it for speeches. However, I don't put the whole speech on   Michael Hingson ** 34:10 there that I me too. I have one, and I use it for, I know, I have notes. Mm, hmm,   Erin Edgar ** 34:16 notes, yeah. And so I feel like Braille, especially for math. You know, when you said math and physics, like, Yeah, I can't imagine doing math without Braille. That just doesn't, you know, I can't imagine it, and especially in, you know, geometry and trigonometry with those diagrams. I don't know how you would do it without a Braille textbook, but yeah, there. There's certainly something to be said for for the the wonderful navigation abilities with, you know, e published audio DAISY books. However, it's not a substitute for knowing how to   Michael Hingson ** 34:55 read. Well, how are you going to learn to spell? How are you going to really learn sit? Structure, how are you going to learn any of those basic skills that sighted kids get if you don't use Braille? Absolutely, I think that that's one of the arenas where the educational system, to a large degree, does such a great disservice to blind kids because it won't teach them Braille.   Erin Edgar ** 35:16 Agreed, agreed. Well, thank you for this wonderful spin down Braille, Braille reading lane here. That was fun.   Michael Hingson ** 35:27 Well, so getting back to you a little bit, you must have thought or realized that probably when you went into law, you were going to face some challenges. But what was the defining moment that made you decide you're going to go into law, and what kind of challenges have you faced? If you face challenges, my making an assumption, but you know what?   Erin Edgar ** 35:45 Oh, sure. So the defining moment when I decided I wanted to go into law. It was a very interesting time for me. I was teenager. Don't know exactly how old I was, but I think I was in high school, and I had gone through a long period where I wanted to, like, be a music major and go into piano and voice and be a performer in those arenas, and get a, you know, high level degree whatnot. And then I began having this began becoming very interested in watching the Star Trek television series. Primarily I was out at the time the next generation, and I was always fascinated by the way that these people would find these civilizations on these planets, and they would be at odds in the beginning, and they would be at each other's throats, and then by the end of the day, they were all kind of   Michael Hingson ** 36:43 liking each other. And John Luke Picard didn't play a flute,   Erin Edgar ** 36:47 yes, and he also turned into a Borg, which was traumatic for me. I had to rate local summer to figure out what would happen. I was in I was in trauma. Anyway, my my father and I bonded over that show. It was, it was a wonderful sort of father daughter thing. We did it every weekend. And I was always fascinated by, like, the whole, the whole aspect of different ideologies coming together. And it always seemed to me that that's what human humanity should be about. As I, you know, got older, I thought, how could I be involved in helping people come together? Oh, let's go into law. Because, you know, our government's really good at that. That was the high school student in me. And I thought at the time, I wanted to go into the Foreign Service and work in the international field and help, you know, on a net, on a you know, foreign policy level. I quickly got into law school and realized two things simultaneously in my second year, international law was very boring, and there were plenty of problems in my local community that I could help solve, like, why work on the international stage when people in my local community are suffering in some degree with something and so I completely changed my focus to wanting to work in an area where I could bring people together and work for, you know, work on an individualized level. And as I went into the legal field, that was, it was part of the reason I went into the mediation, because that was one of the things that we did, was helping people come together. I realized, though, as I became a lawyer and actually started working in the field, most of the legal system is not based on that. It's based on who has the best argument. I wanted no part of that. Yeah, I want no part of that at all. I want to bring people together. Still, the Star Trek mentality is working here, and so when I when I started my own law firm, my immediate question to myself was, how can I now that I'm out doing my own thing, actually bring people together? And the answer that I got was help families come together, especially people thinking about their end of life decisions and gathering their support team around them. Who they want to help them? If they are ever in a situation where they become ill and they can't manage their affairs, or if you know upon their death, who do they want to help them and support them. And how can I use the law to allow that to happen? And so that's how I am working, to use the law for healing and bringing people together, rather than rather than winning an argument.   Michael Hingson ** 39:59 Yeah. Yeah, well, and I think there's a lot of merit to that. I I value the law a great deal, and I I am not an attorney or anything like that, but I have worked in the world of legislation, and I've worked in the world of dealing with helping to get legislation passed and and interacting with lawyers. And my wife and I worked with an attorney to set up our our trust, and then couple of years ago, I redid it after she passed away. And so I think that there was a lot of a lot of work that attorneys do that is extremely important. Yeah, there are, there are attorneys that were always dealing with the best arguments, and probably for me, the most vivid example of that, because it was so captivating when it happened, was the whole OJ trial back in the 1990s we were at a county fair, and we had left going home and turned on the radio, only To hear that the police were following OJ, and they finally arrested him. And then when the trial occurred, we while I was working at a company, and had a radio, and people would would come around, and we just had the radio on, and followed the whole trial. And it was interesting to see all the manipulation and all the movement, and you're right. It came down to who had the best argument, right or wrong?   Erin Edgar ** 41:25 The bloody glove. If it doesn't fit, you must acquit. Yeah, yep, I remember that. I remember where I was when they arrested him, too. I was at my grandparents house, and we were watching it on TV. My grandfather was captivated by the whole thing. But yes, there's certainly, you know, some manipulation. There's also, there are also lawyers who do a lot of good and a lot of wonderful things. And in reality, you know, most cases don't go to trial. They're settled in some way. And so, you know, there isn't always, you know, who has the best argument. It's not always about that, right? And at the same time, that is, you know, what the system is based on, to some extent. And really, when our country was founded, our founding fathers were a bunch of, like, acted in a lot of ways, like a bunch of children. If you read books on, you know, the Constitution, it was, it was all about, you know, I want this in here, and I want that in here. And, you know, a lot of argument around that, which, of course, is to be expected. And many of them did not expect our country's government to last beyond their lifetimes. Uh, James Madison was the exception, but all the others were like, Ed's going to fail. And yet, I am very, very proud to be a lawyer in this country, because while it's not perfect, our founding documents actually have a lot of flexibility and how and can be interpreted to fit modern times, which is, I think the beauty of them and exactly what the Founders intended for.   Michael Hingson ** 43:15 Yeah, and I do think that some people are taking advantage of that and causing some challenges, but that's also part of our country and part of our government. I like something Jimmy Carter once said, which was, we must adjust to changing times while holding to unwavering principles. And I think absolutely that's the part that I think sometimes is occasionally being lost, that we forget those principles, or we want to manipulate the principles and make them something that they're not. But he was absolutely right. That is what we need to do, and we can adjust to changing times without sacrificing principles. Absolutely.   Erin Edgar ** 43:55 I firmly believe that, and I would like to kind of turn it back to what we were talking about before, because you actually asked me, What are some challenges that I have faced, and if it's okay with you, I would like to get back to that. Oh, sure. Okay. Well, so I have faced some challenges for you know, to a large extent, though I was very well accommodated. I mean, the one challenge with the books that was challenging when I took the bar exam, oh, horror of horrors. It was a multiple, multiple shot deal, but it finally got done. However, it was not, you know, my failing to pass the first time or times was not the fault of the actual board of law examiners. They were very accommodating. I had to advocate for myself a little bit, and I also had to jump through some hoops. For example, I had to bring my own person to bubble in my responses on the multiple choice part, it. And bring my own person in to kind of monitor me while I did the essay portion. But they allowed me to have a computer, they allowed me to have, you know, the screen reader. They allowed me to have time and a half to do the the exam. And so we're accommodating in that way. And so no real challenges there. You know, some hoops to jump through. But it got all worked out.   Michael Hingson ** 45:23 And even so, some of that came about because blind people actually had to go all the way to the Supreme Court. Yes, the bar to the Bar Association to recognize that those things needed to be that way,   Erin Edgar ** 45:37 absolutely. And so, you know, I was lucky to come into this at a time where that had already been kind of like pre done for me. I didn't have to deal with that as a challenge. And so the only other challenges I had, some of them, were mine, like, you know, who's going to want to hire this blind person? Had a little bit of, you know, kind of challenge there, with that mindset issue for a while there, and I did have some challenges when I was looking for employment after I'd worked for legal aid for a while, and I wanted to move on and do something else. And I knew I didn't want to work for a big, big firm, and I would, I was talking to some small law firms about hiring me, small to mid size firms. And I would get the question of, well, you're blind, so what kind of accommodations do you need? And we would talk about, you know, computer, special software to make a talk, you know, those kinds of things. And it always ended up that, you know, someone else was hired. And I can, you know, I don't have proof that the blindness and the hesitancy around hiring a disabled person or a blind person was in back of that decision. And at the same time, I had the sense that there was some hesitation there as well, so that, you know, was a bit of a challenge, and starting my own law firm was its own challenge, because I had to experiment with several different software systems to Find one that was accessible enough for me to use. And the system I'm thinking about in particular, I wouldn't use any other system, and yet, I'm using practically the most expensive estate planning drafting system out there, because it happens to be the most accessible. It's also the most expensive. Always that. There's always that. And what's it called? I'm curious. It's called wealth Council, okay, wealth. And then the word councils, Council, SEL, and it's wonderful. And the folks there are very responsive. If I say something's not accessible, I mean, they have fixed things for me in the past. Isn't that great? And complain, isn't that wonderful? It is wonderful. And that's, that's awesome. I had a CRM experience with a couple of different like legal CRM software. I used one for a while, and it was okay. But then, you know, everyone else said this other one was better and it was actually less accessible. So I went back to the previous one, you know. So I have to do a lot of my own testing, which is kind of a challenge in and of itself. I don't have people testing software for me. I have to experiment and test and in some cases, pay for something for a while before I realize it's not, you know, not worth it. But now I have those challenges pretty much ironed out. And I have a paralegal who helps me do some things that, like she proof reads my documents, for instance, because otherwise there may be formatting things that I'm not, that I miss. And so I have the ability to have cited assistance with things that I can't necessarily do myself, which is, you know, absolutely fine,   Michael Hingson ** 49:04 yeah. Now, do you use Lexus? Is it accessible?   Erin Edgar ** 49:08 I don't need Lexus, yeah, yeah. I mean, I have, I'm a member of the Bar Association, of my, my state bar association, which is not, not voluntary. It's mandatory. But I'm a member primarily because they have a search, a legal search engine that they work with that we get for free. I mean, with our members, there you go. So there you go. So I don't need Lexus or West Law or any of those other search engines for what I do. And if I was, like, really into litigation and going to court all time and really doing deep research, I would need that. But I don't. I can use the one that they have, that we can use so and it's, it's a entirely web based system. It's fairly accessible   Michael Hingson ** 49:58 well, and. That makes it easier to as long as you've got people's ears absolutely make it accessible, which makes a lot of sense.   Erin Edgar ** 50:08 Yeah, it certainly does well.   Michael Hingson ** 50:10 So do you regard yourself as a resilient person? Has blindness impacted that or helped make that kind of more the case for you? Do you think I do resilience is such an overused term, but it's fair. I know   Erin Edgar ** 50:24 I mean resilience is is to my mind, a resilient person is able to face uh, challenges with a relatively positive outlook in and view a challenge as something to be to be worked through rather than overcome, and so yes, I do believe that blindness, in and of itself, has allowed me to find ways to adapt to situations and pivot in cases where, you know, I need to find an alternative to using a mouse. For instance, how would I do that? And so in other areas of life, I am, you know, because I'm blind, I'm able to more easily pivot into finding alternative solutions. I do believe that that that it has made me more resilient.   Michael Hingson ** 51:25 Do you think that being blind has caused you, and this is an individual thing, because I think that there are those who don't. But do you think that it's caused you to learn to listen better?   Erin Edgar ** 51:39 That's a good question, because I actually, I have a lot of sighted friends, and one of the things that people just assume is that, wow, you must be a really good listener. Well, my husband would tell you that's not always the case. Yeah. My wife said the same thing, yeah. You know, like everyone else, sometimes I hear what I want to hear in a conversation and at the same time, one of the things that I do tell people is that, because I'm blind, I do rely on other senses more, primarily hearing, I would say, and that hearing provides a lot of cues for me about my environment, and I've learned to be more skillful at it. So I, I would say that, yes, I am a good listener in terms of my environment, very sensitive to that in in my environment, in terms of active listening to conversations and being able to listen to what's behind what people say, which is another aspect of listening. I think that that is a skill that I've developed over time with conscious effort. I don't think I'm any better of a quote, unquote listener than anybody else. If I hadn't developed that primarily in in my mediation, when I was doing that, that was a huge thing for us, was to be able to listen, not actually to what people were saying, but what was behind what people were saying, right? And so I really consciously developed that skill during those years and took it with me into my legal practice, which is why I am very, very why I very much stress that I'm not only an attorney, but I'm also a counselor at law. That doesn't mean I'm a therapist, but it does mean I listen to what people say so that and what's behind what people say, so that with the ear towards providing them the legal solution that meets their needs as they describe them in their words.   Michael Hingson ** 53:47 Well, I think for me, I learned to listen, but it but it is an exercise, and it is something that you need to practice, and maybe I learned to do it a little bit better, because I was blind. For example, I learned to ride a bike, and you have to learn to listen to what's going on around you so you don't crash into cars. Oh, but I'd fall on my face. You can do it. But what I what I really did was, when I was I was working at a company, and was told that the job was going to be phased out because I wasn't a revenue producer, and the company was an engineering startup and had to bring in more revenue producers. And I was given the choice of going away or going into sales, which I had never done. And as I love to tell people, I lowered my standards and went from science to sales. But the reality is that that I think I've always and I think we all always sell in one way or another, but I also knew what the unemployment rate among employable blind people was and is, yeah, and so I went into sales with with no qualms. But there I really learned to listen. And and it was really a matter of of learning to commit, not just listen, but really learning to communicate with the people you work with. And I think that that I won't say blindness made me better, but what it did for me was it made me use the technologies like the telephone, perhaps more than some other people. And I did learn to listen better because I worked at it, not because I was blind, although they're related   Erin Edgar ** 55:30 exactly. Yeah, and I would say, I would 100% agree I worked at it. I mean, even when I was a child, I worked at listening to to become better at, kind of like analyzing my environment based on sounds that were in it. Yeah, I wouldn't have known. I mean, it's not a natural gift, as some people assume, yeah, it's something you practice and you have to work at. You get to work at.   Michael Hingson ** 55:55 Well, as I point out, there are people like SEAL Team Six, the Navy Seals and the Army Rangers and so on, who also practice using all of their senses, and they learn, in general, to become better at listening and other and other kinds of skills, because they have to to survive, but, but that's what we all do, is if we do it, right, we're learning it. It's not something that's just naturally there, right? I agree, which I think is important. So you're working in a lot of estate planning and so on. And I mentioned earlier that we it was back in 1995 we originally got one, and then it's now been updated, but we have a trust. What's the difference between having, like a trust and a will?   Erin Edgar ** 56:40 Well, that's interesting that you should ask. So A will is the minimum that pretty much, I would say everyone needs, even though 67% of people don't have one in the US. And it is pretty much what everyone needs. And it basically says, you know, I'm a, I'm a person of sound mind, and I know who is important to me and what I have that's important to me. And I wanted to go to these people who are important to me, and by the way, I want this other person to manage things after my death. They're also important to me and a trust, basically, there are multiple different kinds of trusts, huge numbers of different kinds. And the trust that you probably are referring to takes the will to kind of another level and provides more direction about about how to handle property and how how it's to be dealt with, not only after death, but also during your lifetime. And trusts are relatively most of them, like I said, there are different kinds, but they can be relatively flexible, and you can give more direction about how to handle that property than you can in a will, like, for instance, if you made an estate plan and your kids were young, well, I don't want my children to have access to this property until they're responsible adults. So maybe saying, in a trust until they're age 25 you can do that, whereas in a will, you it's more difficult to do that.   Michael Hingson ** 58:18 And a will, as I understand it, is a lot more easily contested than than a trust.   Erin Edgar ** 58:24 You know, it does depend, but yes, it is easily contested. That's not to say that if you have a trust, you don't need a will, which is a misconception that some, yeah, we have a will in our trust, right? And so, you know, you need the will for the court. Not everyone needs a trust. I would also venture to say that if you don't have a will on your death, the law has ideas about how your property should be distributed. So if you don't have a will, you know your property is not automatically going to go to the government as unclaimed, but if you don't have powers of attorney for your health care and your finance to help you out while you're alive, you run the risk of the A judge appointing someone you would not want to make your health care and financial decisions. And so I'm going to go off on a tangent here. But I do feel very strongly about this, even blind people who and disabled people who are, what did you call it earlier, the the employable blind community, but maybe they're not employed. They don't have a lot of   Michael Hingson ** 59:34 unemployed, unemployed, the unemployable blind people, employable   Erin Edgar ** 59:38 blind people, yes, you know, maybe they're not employed, they're on a government benefit. They don't have a lot of assets. Maybe they don't necessarily need that will. They don't have to have it. And at the same time, if they don't have those, those documents that allow people to manage their affairs during their lifetime. Um, who's going to do it? Yeah, who's going to do that? Yeah, you're giving up control of your body, right, potentially, to someone you would not want, just because you're thinking to yourself, well, I don't need a will, and nothing's going to happen to me. You're giving control of your body, perhaps, to someone you don't want. You're not taking charge of your life and and you are allowing doctors and hospitals and banks to perpetuate the belief that you are not an independent person, right? I'm very passionate about it. Excuse me, I'll get off my soapbox now. That's okay. Those are and and to a large extent, those power of attorney forms are free. You can download them from your state's website. Um, they're minimalistic. They're definitely, I don't use them because I don't like them for my state. But you can get you can use them, and you can have someone help you fill them out. You could sign them, and then look, you've made a decision about who's going to help you when you're not able to help yourself,   Michael Hingson ** 1:01:07 which is extremely important to do. And as I mentioned, we went all the way and have a trust, and we funded the trust, and everything is in the trust. But I think that is a better way to keep everything protected, and it does provide so much more direction for whoever becomes involved, when, when you decide to go elsewhere, then, as they put it, this mortal coil. Yes, I assume that the coil is mortal. I don't know.   Erin Edgar ** 1:01:37 Yeah, who knows? Um, and you know trusts are good for they're not just for the Uber wealthy, which is another misconception. Trust do some really good things. They keep your situation, they keep everything more or less private, like, you know, I said you need a will for the court. Well, the court has the will, and it most of the time. If you have a trust, it just says, I want it to go, I want my stuff to go into the Michael hingson Trust. I'm making that up, by the way, and I, you know, my trust just deals with the distribution, yeah, and so stuff doesn't get held up in court. The court doesn't have to know about all the assets that you own. It's not all public record. And that's a huge, you know, some people care. They don't want everyone to know their business. And when I tell people, you know, I can go on E courts today and pull up the estate of anyone that I want in North Carolina and find out what they owned if they didn't have a will, or if they just had a will. And people like, really, you can do that? Oh, absolutely, yeah. I don't need any fancy credentials. It's all a matter of public record. And if you have a trust that does not get put into the court record unless it's litigated, which you know, it does happen, but not often,   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:56 but I but again, I think that, you know, yeah, and I'm not one of those Uber wealthy people. But I have a house. We we used to have a wheelchair accessible van for Karen. I still have a car so that when I need to be driven somewhere, rather than using somebody else's vehicle, we use this and those are probably the two biggest assets, although I have a bank account with with some in it, not a lot, not nearly as much as Jack Benny, anyway. But anyway, the bottom line is, yeah, but the bottom line is that I think that the trust keeps everything a lot cleaner. And it makes perfect sense. Yep, it does. And I didn't even have to go to my general law firm that I usually use. Do we cheat them? Good, and how so it worked out really well. Hey, I watched the Marx Brothers. What can I say?   Erin Edgar ** 1:03:45 You watch the Marx Brothers? Of course.   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:49 Well, I want to thank you for being here. This has been a lot of fun, and I'm glad that we did it and that we also got to talk about the whole issue of wills and trusts and so on, which is, I think, important. So any last things that you'd like to say to people, and also, do you work with clients across the country or just in North Carolina?   Erin Edgar ** 1:04:06 So I work with clients in North Carolina, I will say that. And one last thing that I would like to say to people is that it's really important to build your support team. Whether you're blind, you know, have another disability, you need people to help you out on a day to day basis, or you decide that you want people to help you out. If you're unable to manage your affairs at some point in your life, it's very important to build that support team around you, and there is nothing wrong. You can be self reliant and still have people on your team yes to to be there for you, and that is very important. And there's absolutely no shame, and you're not relinquishing your independence by doing that. That. So today, I encourage everyone to start thinking about who's on your team. Do you want them on your team? Do you want different people on your team? And create a support team? However that looks like, whatever that looks like for you, that has people on it that you know, love and trust,   Michael Hingson ** 1:05:18 everybody should have a support team. I think there is no question, at least in my mind, about that. So good point. Well, if people want to maybe reach out to you, how do they do that?   Erin Edgar ** 1:05:29 Sure, so I am on the interwebs at Erin Edgar legal.com that's my website where you can learn more about my law firm and all the things that I do,   Michael Hingson ** 1:05:42 and Erin is E r i n, just Yes, say that Edgar, and   Erin Edgar ** 1:05:45 Edgar is like Edgar. Allan Poe, hopefully less scary, and you can find the contact information for me on the website. By Facebook, you can find me on Facebook occasionally as Erin Baker, Edgar, three separate words, that is my personal profile, or you can and Michael will have in the show notes the company page for my welcome as   Michael Hingson ** 1:06:11 well. Yeah. Well, thank you for being here, and I want to thank all of you for listening. This has been a fun episode. It's been great to have Erin on, love to hear your thoughts out there who have been listening to this today. Please let us know what you think. You're welcome to email me at Michael H i@accessibe.com M, I, C, H, A, E, L, H i at accessibe, A, C, C, E, S, S, i, b, e.com, or go to our podcast page, www, dot Michael hingson.com/podcast, I wherever you're listening, please give us a five star rating. We really appreciate getting good ratings from people and reading and getting to know what you think. If you know anyone who you think might be a good guest, you know some people you think ought to come on unstoppable mindset. Erin, of course, you as well. We would appreciate it if you'd give us an introduction, because we're always looking for more people to have come on and help us show everyone that we're all more unstoppable than we think we are, and that's really what it's all about, and what we want to do on the podcast. So hope that you'll all do that, and in the meanwhile, with all that, Erin, I want to thank you once more for being here and being with us today. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much,   Erin Edgar ** 1:07:27 Michael. I very much enjoyed it.   Michael Hingson ** 1:07:34 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite

In this episode of the Executive Function Braintrainer Podcast, hosts Darius Namdaran and Dr. Erica Warren explore how AI and assistive technology are revolutionizing the landscape of learning disabilities. They discuss the potential of AI tools like Speechify, Google Classroom, and Notebook LM in leveling the playing field for students with dyslexia, ADHD, and other learning differences. The conversation delves into how these technologies can turn traditional disabilities into strengths by accommodating various processing styles and offering personalized learning experiences. Additionally, they touch on the concept of executive dysfunction and the potential for AI to aid in developing better organization and planning skills. The episode aims to provide insights into how AI can empower both students and educators to enhance learning and teaching experiences.LinksSpeechify: https://share.speechify.com/mzxDU3e Use this link to get $60 off Speechify and 1 month FREE when they sign up for Premium.Shovel: Shovel Referral ID for 20% off: Go to https://shovelapp.io/dig/108/   Use coupon code:DRWARREN Student Processing Profile: https://goodsensorylearning.com/search?type=product&q=yppi Your Professional Processing Inventory: https://goodsensorylearning.com/search?type=product&q=yppi Voice Dream Reader: https://www.voicedream.com/ Elevenlabs: https://elevenlabs.io/ Bookshare: https://www.bookshare.org/ Learning Ally: https://learningally.org/ Executive Function: https://goodsensorylearning.com/blogs/news/tagged/executive-functioning Cognitive Flexibility:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://goodsensorylearning.com/blogs/news/dyslexia-and-executive-function Dyslexia Quiz: ⁠⁠https://bulletmapacademy.com/dyslexia-quiz/⁠⁠Inhibitory Control:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://goodsensorylearning.com/blogs/news/poor-executive-functioning?_pos=3&_sid=19d2b3888&_ss=r Visualization:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://goodsensorylearning.com/blogs/news/the-key-to-improved-attention-and-memory-for-optimal-learning?_pos=8&_sid=a9d61809a&_ss=r Inner Voice:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://goodsensorylearning.com/blogs/news/inner-voice-app?_pos=1&_sid=604e0b13e&_ss=r Working Memory: https://goodsensorylearning.com/blogs/news/tagged/working-memory Brought to you by:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ivvi.app⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://goodsensorylearning.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://learningspecialistcourses.com⁠⁠⁠⁠https://goodsensorylearning.com/products/executive-functioning-coaching-assessment⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dropintoyourbestself.com/https://learningtolearn.biz/

This edWeb podcast is sponsored by Learning Ally. You can access the webinar recording here.The types of texts students encounter in school play a critical role in their reading development, yet many education leaders may not fully understand their distinct purposes and impacts. This engaging edWeb podcast demystifies the role of various text types—from traditional books and decodables to ebooks—and how each supports literacy growth.Join literacy experts and education leaders as they discuss building a text-rich environment that supports all readers, especially those with diverse learning needs. Learn how decodable texts reinforce foundational skills, how traditional books foster comprehension and critical thinking, and how ebooks and audiobooks provide equitable access to grade-level content. Key takeaways include:How to evaluate and select the right mix of texts for your school or districtStrategies for using text diversity to meet the needs of struggling readers and students with dyslexiaHow to repurpose leveled textsGuidance on how to match text types to student needs and abilitiesEmpower your educators and students with the right texts at the right time and lead your school toward stronger, more equitable literacy outcomes. This edWeb podcast is of interest to K-12 school leaders, district leaders, librarians, and education technology leaders.Learning AllyUnlocking Student Potential Through Improved LiteracyDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Learn more about viewing live edWeb presentations and on-demand recordings, earning CE certificates, and using accessibility features.

Curious about how private podcasts can elevate your online events?Join us for an inspiring conversation with Brenna McGowan, a seasoned launch strategist and the creative force behind the successful audio summit series Behind the Launch. In this episode, you'll gain valuable insights into tailoring content to your audience's preferences, ensuring it's both accessible and engaging. Plus, discover how incorporating charitable contributions into your business model can add purpose and impact to your events.Timestamps:[0:00] Introduction to the episode and Brenna McGowan's journey from traditional MP3 hosting to innovative private podcasting [4:15] The inception and evolution of the Behind the Launch audio summit series.[6:10] Benefits of private podcasting for event hosting and its impact on listener engagement.[9:34] Integrating philanthropy into business through events, supporting Learning Ally.[13:03] Audience-Centric Approach: Tailoring content for enhanced accessibility and engagement.[15:47] The challenges and technological shifts in creating and hosting audio content.[24:56] Future directions for Behind the Launch and exploring new possibilities in private podcasting.[27:32] The power of community and building connections through specialized content for targeted audiences.[30:45] Concluding thoughts on the personal and professional impacts of private podcasting in education and business.[34:22] Brenna discusses the broader implications of her work and the future of private podcasting in business strategy.[37:19] Closing remarks and how listeners can engage with and learn more from Behind the Launch.Links mentioned:https://www.instagram.com/brennamcgowanco/https://www.facebook.com/groups/behindthelaunchwithbrennamcgowanhttps://brennamcgowan.co/

On this episode of the Learning Ally Literacy Leadership Podcast, host Dr. Terrie Noland, CALP, speaks with Tiffany Dudley, who brings 19 years of experience in education. Her roles include an elementary educator, gifted and talented specialist, library media specialist, and currently the State Program Manager for Learning Ally. Throughout her career, Tiffany has made a significant impact, particularly through her advocacy for the Great Reading Games, an initiative designed to inspire students to engage in reading. She highlights teachers' powerful role as "reader leaders," Whether teachers realize it or not, their actions and enthusiasm for books profoundly shape students' attitudes toward reading. Feeling inspired? We've got the tools, resources, and support to help you challenge your students to take their reading to the next level in this year's Great Reading Games. For more information, click here.

In this episode, we're joined by Peggy Stern for a conversation about a whole-child approach where each child no matter how he or she learns, is respected and heard, and the emotional and academic tools we can provide to develop strategies for success! Peggy Stern is an Academy Award-winning film Producer/Director with more than 30 years of experience. Her dyslexia led her to filmmaking and animation at a young age, and in March 2006 Stern won the Oscar for Best Animated Short. Stern has produced for PBS, HBO, Teachers College at Columbia University, The National PTA, and the National YWCA among others. She received her BA from Harvard University and her senior thesis film STEPHANIE, was turned into a PBS documentary special and broadcast nationally. SuperDville is a family affair, as her dyslexic daughter Emma has been a key advisor! Since the launch of SuperDville, Peggy has spoken at many webinars and on many podcasts, including the Dyslexia Narrative Conference, the Dyslexia Training Institute Virtual Conference, Learning Ally's Spotlight on Early Literacy Virtual Conference, Embracing the Whole Child with Punkinfutz, The Virtual Summer Dyslexia Institute Conference, The Pakistan Grower's Circle Webinar, Denver Courage to Risk Conference, Stand Up LD Panel Discussion, and the UK Rebel Voices Virtual International Dyslexia Conference. Connect with our guest, Peggy Stern! Visit her website, Super Dville, or email her at peggy@superdville.com. Resources mentioned in this episode: The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation The Teacher's Toolbox for Every Child We officially have merch! Show your love for the Together in Literacy podcast! If you like this episode, please take a few minutes to rate, review, and subscribe. Your support and encouragement are so appreciated! Have a question you'd like us to cover in a future episode of Together in Literacy? Email us at support@togetherinliteracy.com! If you'd like more from Together in Literacy, you can check out our website, Together in Literacy, or follow us on Facebook and Instagram. For more from Emily, check out The Literacy Nest. For more from Casey, check out The Dyslexia Classroom. We're looking for topic and guest suggestions for season 4 of the Together in Literacy Podcast! Let us know what you want to hear this season! Thank you for listening and joining us in this exciting and educational journey into dyslexia as we come together in literacy!

In this episode, host Dr. Terrie Noland, CALP talks with with the remarkable Kenia Flores, the Manager of Government Relations at Learning Ally. A true Literacy Leader, Kenia lives the Learning Ally mission each and every day. Kenia, who was born blind, narrates her personal and professional journey, highlighting the impact of mentors and advocacy in her life. She emphasizes the transformative power of education for students with disabilities, as well as her efforts in advocating for accessible absentee voting in North Carolina and delivering a TED Talk on overcoming low expectations. The discussion advocates for increased inclusivity, the importance of lived experiences, and active community engagement in the democratic process. Listen to Kenia's TED Talk here, and learn more about her recent accomplishment of being named a Democracy Hero here. 

In this episode: Dr. Noland, VP of Thought Leadership & Community at Learning Ally and Elizabeth Zwerg, Educator Community Manager at Learning Ally discuss the importance of honoring and appreciating teachers beyond Teacher Appreciation Week, what Teacher Appreciation week should be about, why community it important for educators and we share about one of our own "red threads" in the work we do; Spotlight on Dyslexia. Join us in this episode as we laugh, love, and honor educators. Grab your Gold ticket, a $99/value for $75 this week only when you bring a friend. Use code SPOD24Buddy at checkout! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/learning-ally/message

In this episode of the Change-makers podcast miniseries from Learning Ally, literacy experts discuss strategies, opportunities, and challenges in improving literacy for multilingual learners. The discussion is led by co-hosts Linda Diamond, Dr. Terrie Noland, Dr. Tracy Weeden, and Dr. Tim Odegard, as they talk with featured guest Dr. Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan, a bilingual expert and literacy advocate. The conversation delves into the importance of literacy for multilingual learners, the role of educators in creating an inclusive and enriching learning environment, and strategies to effectively teach reading to multilingual learners. They also address the need for effective screening, assessment, and early, targeted intervention in literacy education for multilingual learners. Additionally, the complexities of aligning the science of reading to the needs of multilingual learners are discussed, with a focus on the challenges and potential solutions for implementing evidence-based practices in classrooms. Key Points: 00:04 Introduction to Literacy Transformation 00:57 Introducing the Guest Speaker: Dr. Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan 02:25 Understanding the Science of Reading for Multilingual Learners 04:53 The Importance of Oral Language Proficiency in Literacy 05:43 The Role of Phoneme Awareness in Multilingual Learning 06:33 The Impact of Vocabulary and Comprehension on Multilingual Learning 06:49 The Importance of Evidence-Based Practices in Multilingual Learning 07:41 Specific Considerations for Improving Literacy Outcomes for Multilingual Learners 08:58 The Role of Phoneme Awareness in Multilingual Learning 11:00 The Importance of Fluency and Vocabulary in Multilingual Learning 16:02 The Challenges and Barriers to Implementing Multilingual Learning Practices 19:29 Effective and Appropriate Ways to Assess and Screen Multilingual Learners 26:43 The Importance of Data in Multilingual Learning 29:16 Finding Common Ground Between Advocates of Multilingual Students and the Science of Reading 33:14 Discussing Change Management and Social Contracts 33:45 The Role of Grassroots Activism in Social Change 34:35 Personal and Professional Lessons from Activism 35:36 The Importance of Community Involvement in Change 37:50 The Impact of Literacy on Job Opportunities 39:11 The Role of AI in the Knowledge Economy 40:13 The Power of Partnerships in Achieving Goals 40:32 The Importance of Individual Action in Change 41:22 The Role of Leadership in Community Change 41:53 The Importance of Involving Others in Change 42:36 The Role of Literacy in Community Development 44:51 The Challenges of Marginalized Communities 51:03 The Importance of Early Intervention in Literacy 51:59 The Impact of Legislation on Literacy Education 52:36 The Role of Technology in Addressing Literacy Gaps 59:16 The Importance of Parental Involvement in Literacy Education 01:04:02 Closing Remarks and Reflections on Literacy Leadership --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/learning-ally/message

In this episode, guest Dr. Rebecca Tolson shares her valuable insights on literacy leadership, transformation, and the importance of professional development. She emphasizes the need for a holistic approach to literacy, incorporating structured literacy, and stresses the importance of coaching and support for teachers' growth. The need for decision-making based on a balance of qualitative and quantitative data, as well as the elimination of silos in education systems, is also discussed. Rebecca also highlights some practical examples of leadership and change within Ohio's educational landscape. The discussion concludes with thoughts on the importance of empowering teachers and students, particularly in marginalized communities. Don't miss this thoughtful episode, and check out Learning Ally's ⁠Solutions for Schools⁠! Key Points: 00:04 Introduction and Welcome 01:45 Introducing the Guest Speaker 03:30 Guest Speaker's Journey in Literacy Education 05:55 The Importance of Professional Development in Literacy 09:51 The Role of Screening and Intervention in Literacy Education 24:37 The Importance of Leadership in Literacy Transformation 30:26 The Role of Compliance and Passion in Literacy Education 32:31 The Importance of Emotional Connection in Teaching 32:55 The Role of Superintendents in Education 33:29 The Power of Data in Education 33:51 Addressing Defiance in the Classroom 34:59 The Need for a Structured Approach in Multilingual Education 35:58 The Journey of Teaching and Learning 36:11 The Importance of Oral Language and Listening Comprehension 37:11 The Role of Professional Development in Education 37:59 The Importance of Small Steps in Teaching 38:27 The Challenges of Teaching Writing 39:41 The Role of Data in Education 43:44 The Importance of Accountability in Education 44:48 The Role of Effective Professional Development and Coaching 53:41 The Importance of Triangulating Data in Education 56:07 The Role of Leadership in Education 58:16 The Importance of Literacy for Life 58:43 The Impact of Qualitative Conditions on Teachers 01:03:05 Closing Remarks and Reflections --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/learning-ally/message

In this episode, Dr. Michelle Rodriguez discusses her work as Superintendent of Pajaro Valley Unified School District in transforming literacy education. She shares how implementing targeted literacy programs, committing administrators to learning, and directly working with teachers and the community have led to major improvements. The discussion focuses on the district's success with systemic programs to make reading skills automatic, while emphasizing the vital roles of piloting to scale, consistency, sustainability, and using data to validate effectiveness. Check out Learning Ally's ⁠Spotlight on Literacy Leadership⁠ event, now on-demand, for a great place to start learning! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/learning-ally/message

Welcome to Hot Topics! Gabrielle Crichlow talks to guest Richard Rieman about audiobooks for children with special needs, like blindness or deafness.In this episode, Gabrielle and Richard discuss the importance of making children's illustrated books accessible to blind, deaf, and neurodiverse children. Richard, the founder and CEO of Imagination Storybooks, explains how he and his team add audio description, sign language, captions, and Braille files to make the books accessible. Gabrielle and Richard emphasize the need to fill the gap in access to books for children with special needs, as over 5 million children in the US between the ages of three and eight are underserved.Gabrielle and Richard also discuss the challenges faced by blind and low vision children who are not being taught Braille, and the difficulties faced by deaf children in finding books with sign language interpretation. They highlight the importance of reading for all children, as it opens up new worlds and experiences. Imagination Storybooks, Richard's organization, is a nonprofit organization that creates audio books with audio description for all children, not just those with special needs. Their service can be accessed through the Imagination Storybooks website, and they offer a Storybooks Club for members to access the videos and audios. They have also collaborated with the Described and Captioned Media Program to provide free access to their videos for qualified individuals.Richard emphasizes the importance of using live voice actors instead of artificial voices in audio books to capture the emotion and nuance of the stories. Imagination Storybooks aims to make children's books accessible to all children, not just those with disabilities. They are working with major publishers to create accessible books and are converting their books into different languages and Braille.Overall, the episode highlights the unique approach of Imagination Storybooks in making children's illustrated books more accessible and the positive impact it has on children with special needs.Who is Richard Rieman?Richard Rieman (Ree' man) wanted to be Superman, but he couldn't fly, so he decided to be Clark Kent instead. After a long career as a radio news reporter, anchor, and Washington Bureau Chief, Richard turned his storytelling skills to the world of audiobooks. He has narrated and produced hundreds of Indie-published audiobooks and is the author of the award-winning book, “The Author's Guide to Audiobook Creation.” Richard was a volunteer narrator for Learning Ally, reading books for the blind, as well as being a ski guide for blind skiers. Combining both interests, Richard created the “Imagination Storybooks” Nonprofit to make children's illustrated books accessible to all children by creating audiobooks with audio description of the pictures for blind children, and video books with captions and sign language for deaf and neurodiverse children with learning challenges.You can find Richard:On the web # 1: https://imaginationstorybooks.org/On the web # 2: https://imaginationstorybooks.org/join-the-storybooks-club/On Facebook # 1: https://www.facebook.com/imaginationstorybooksOn Facebook # 2: https://www.facebook.com/AudiobookCreationOn Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/imaginationstorybooks/On Twitter: https://twitter.com/IStorybooksClubOn LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardrieman/Promo:Bring the magic of books to all children. Join the Imagination Storybooks Club! Club members will receive access to our library of children's illustrated books in three formats:1) Videos with ASL (American Sign Language) and captions2) Videos with AD (Audio Description)3) Audio files with ADA new video every week! Bonus content for teachers and even personal Happy Birthday wishes from Winnie-the-Pooh.Richard has a podcast. Listen and subscribe here: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/audiobookwizardWatch this episode on YouTube: https://youtube.com/live/EJaokCimA9k**********************************Follow A Step Ahead Tutoring Services:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/astep...Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aste...Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/ASATS2...YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@astepaheadtutoringservicesTik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@asats2013Eventbrite: https://astepaheadtutoringserv...Visit our website: https://www.astepaheadtutoring...Sign up for our tutoring email list: https://squareup.com/outreach/...Check out our entire "Hot Topics!" podcast: https://www.astepaheadtutoring...Support us:Cash App: https://cash.app/$ASATS2013PayPal: https://paypal.me/ASATS2013Venmo: https://venmo.com/u/ASATS2013Zelle: success@astepaheadtutoringservices.comOriginal date of episode: April 13, 2023

Welcome to an eye-opening episode where we're joined by Dr. Allison Peck, a leading expert in literacy education from the Neuhaus Education Center. Dr. Peck delves into the pivotal topic of the implementation of the Science of Reading and its potentially profound impact on our schools and communities. We'll discuss the pressing need for structured literacy and how it's transforming the way we teach reading. Education leaders need to be knowledgeable and well-prepared in structured literacy and backed by ongoing support and professional development. The benefits for students are immense. Dr. Peck passionately advocates for a system where every student, regardless of background, has the opportunity to develop strong reading skills. Join us as we embark on a journey to empower our schools, our teachers, and most importantly, our students through the science of reading. It's a conversation that will reshape your perspective on education. Don't miss it, and check out Learning Ally's Solutions for Schools! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/learning-ally/message

A VISIT WITH  DR. MOLLY NESS, VP of Academic Content at Learning Ally, all about  her newest book "READ ALOUDS FOR ALL LEARNERS;A COMPREHENSIVE PLAN FOR EVERY SUBJECT.EVERY DAY. GRADES K-8". BTW, Learning Ally is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year

A VISIT WITH  DR. MOLLY NESS, VP of Academic Content at Learning Ally, all about  her newest book "READ ALOUDS FOR ALL LEARNERS;A COMPREHENSIVE PLAN FOR EVERY SUBJECT.EVERY DAY. GRADES K-8". BTW, Learning Ally is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year

In this episode, our esteemed co-hosts share their personal journeys and highlight the characteristics of effective literacy leaders. They emphasize the need for leaders who are constant learners, empower their educators, and provide the necessary resources and support. They also discuss the moral imperative of ensuring literacy for all children and the transformative power of words and storytelling. Overall, the episode emphasizes the important role of literacy leaders in creating a brighter, more literate future. Check out Learning Ally's Spotlight on Literacy Leadership event, now on-demand, for a great place to start! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/learning-ally/message

Dr Terrie Noland from Learning Ally returns to our show. Its all about Liiteracy for every student as we celebrate Dyslexia Awareness Month. Terrie is the host of Learning Ally's Spotlight on Dyslexia podcast. and here are some other information sources  for you  ,https://learningally.org/Solutions-for-School , https://learningally.org/Conferences/Spotlight-Learning-Series/SLS-June-2023 , and https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/literacy-leadership-the-learning-ally-podcast-with/id1560773921 as recommended by Terrie

Dr Terrie Noland from Learning Ally returns to our show. Its all about Liiteracy for every student as we celebrate Dyslexia Awareness Month. Terrie is the host of Learning Ally's Spotlight on Dyslexia podcast. and here are some other information sources  for you  ,https://learningally.org/Solutions-for-School , https://learningally.org/Conferences/Spotlight-Learning-Series/SLS-June-2023 , and https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/literacy-leadership-the-learning-ally-podcast-with/id1560773921 as recommended by Terrie

Jason Broughton and Dominick Spinelli are “living a librarian's dream” at the Library of Congress' National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled. Broughton is the director of the NLS after a long career in librarianship, education and workforce development. Spinelli serves as the head of the NLS' Collection Development Section, where he leads a team of librarians to build a catalog of accessible reading materials and support a nationwide network of nearly 100 partnering libraries and outreach centers. Broughton and Spinelli discuss how they leverage feedback from library patrons to help ensure that individuals across the nation, including people with disabilities and veterans, can obtain accessible print and reading materials that meet their needs. Additional Resources: Learn more about the Marrakesh Treaty.  NLS resources for Veterans.  Learn more about ⁠Learning Ally's Audiobook Solution⁠ program.    A complete transcript of this episode can be found here.

In this episode of "The Truth About Dyslexia," we dive into the world of alternative learning strategies tailored specifically for dyslexic and ADHD learners. Join us as we explore cutting-edge techniques, tools, and technologies that empower individuals to succeed academically and leverage their unique cognitive styles. Discover how assistive technology, mind-mapping tools, multisensory learning apps, gamified learning platforms, and personalized learning platforms can revolutionize the educational experience for dyslexic and ADHD students. Show Notes: Video tool I mention: https://loom.com iPhone app I use: https://imprintapp.com - Assistive Technology: We discuss the power of speech-to-text software, such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Google Docs Voice Typing, to help dyslexic and ADHD learners bypass writing and spelling challenges. We also explore text-to-speech software like Read&Write, NaturalReader, and Voice Dream Reader, which enhance reading comprehension and reduce reading-related difficulties. - Mind-Mapping Tools: Learn about mind-mapping software like MindMeister and XMind, enabling dyslexic and ADHD learners to organize thoughts, visualize concepts, and create structured outlines for essays or study materials. - Multisensory Learning Apps: Discover the Learning Ally app, offering a vast collection of audiobooks and educational resources to support dyslexic learners in improving reading comprehension. We also explore EquatIO, a tool that helps dyslexic and ADHD students create mathematical expressions digitally, reducing handwriting and formatting challenges. - Gamified Learning Platforms: Explore BrainPOP, an educational platform that utilizes animated videos, quizzes, and interactive games to make learning engaging and accessible for dyslexic and ADHD students. We also discuss Kahoot!, a platform for creating fun and interactive quizzes to reinforce knowledge and enhance retention. - Personalized Learning Platforms: Learn about Khan Academy, a platform providing personalized educational content, adaptive assessments, and progress tracking, catering to the individual learning needs of dyslexic and ADHD students. We also delve into Duolingo, an adaptive language learning app available on iOS and Android devices, offering bite-sized lessons and gamified exercises to support dyslexic and ADHD learners in acquiring new languages.

This week Dr. Terrie Noland sits down with Dr. Molly Ness to dive in to the history and the current impact of Learning Ally's Spotlight on Dyslexia conference. They highlight some speakers and bring to light the energy and the feeling of community that is found at this epic event. Join us! Register at www.learningally.org/SPOD Use coupon code SPOD23PODCAST for $20.00 off --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/learning-ally/message

In this episode I chat with the Audio Book Wizard, Richard Rieman about making illustrated children's books accessible to all children. After a long career as a radio news reporter, anchor, and Washington Bureau Chief, Richard turned his storytelling skills to the world of audiobooks. He has narrated and produced hundreds of Indie-published audiobooks and is the author of the award-winning book, “The Author's Guide to Audiobook Creation.” Richard was a volunteer narrator for Learning Ally, reading books for the blind, as well as being a ski guide for blind skiers. Combining both interests, Richard created the “Imagination Storybooks” Nonprofit to make children's illustrated books accessible to all children by creating audiobooks with audio description of the pictures for blind children, and videobooks with captions and sign language for deaf and neurodiverse children with learning challenges. Find Imagination Storybooks at: Website: https://imaginationstorybooks.org Email: richard@imaginationstorybooks.org Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/imaginationstorybooks/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardrieman/ I'd love to hear from you – contact me at Web: https://www.loisstrachan.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/loisstrachanspeaker This episode edited by Craig Strachan using Hindenburg PRO – find out more on Hindenburg.com Credits and music by Charlie Dyasi of Naledi Media.

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week to this podcast community! This week, Dr. Terrie Noland is joined by Elizabeth Zwerg, Community Manager at Learning Ally for a conversation around teacher appreciation. The Learning Ally Educator Community is a place of love and literacy leadership for everyone in it. In the conversation, we discuss: how big of a splash Teacher Appreciation Week is at Learning Ally, some inspirational quotes around leadership and education, stay tuned at the end of the podcast for some very special community member shout outs, and don't forget to join the Educator Community for a week of goodies and surprises! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/learning-ally/message

Dr Molly Ness of Learning Ally is our guest about Taking a Broader View of Essential Early Literacy Instruction.  More info at https://learningally.org/Solutions-for-School/Educator-Blog/building-reading-resolutions-for-the-new-year...at Excite Reading: https://learningally.org/Solutions-for-School/Early-Literacy/Excite-Reading and Beyond the Buzzwords: A Guide and Glossary for Brain-Based Reading Instruction https://learningally.org/Portals/6/Docs/Collateral/Glossary_Final_10.12.pdf

Dr Molly Ness of Learning Ally is our guest about Taking a Broader View of Essential Early Literacy Instruction.  More info at https://learningally.org/Solutions-for-School/Educator-Blog/building-reading-resolutions-for-the-new-year...at Excite Reading: https://learningally.org/Solutions-for-School/Early-Literacy/Excite-Reading and Beyond the Buzzwords: A Guide and Glossary for Brain-Based Reading Instruction https://learningally.org/Portals/6/Docs/Collateral/Glossary_Final_10.12.pdf

EPISODE 168 - Richard Rieman, Founder and CEO of Imagination Storybooks - Making Storybooks Accessible to All ChildrenRichard RiemanRichard Rieman, “The Audiobook Wizard,” is an acclaimed authority on audio and video self-publishing. He has narrated and produced hundreds of Indie-published audiobooks. He is the author of the Global eBook Awards Gold Medal Winner in Writing/Publishing, “The Author's Guide to Audiobook Creation.”Richard is a Gold Medal National Ben Franklin Independent Book Publishers Assn. (IBPA) Award Winner for Audiobook Nonfiction, an Audible Approved Audiobook Producer, and a 5-time winner of the EVVY Award for audiobook narration and production.Richard is a former guide and racing instructor for visually impaired skiers, a volunteer narrator for Learning Ally; and a member of the Audiobook Narrators of America, the Audio Description Network Alliance, and the Audio Description Project.https://imaginationstorybooks.org/___https://livingthenextchapter.com/podcast produced by: https://truemediasolutions.ca/A podcast is an excellent business card for your book, coaching program or business! Build a community away from the rented land of social media - speak directly to your community and position yourself as the expert that you truly are!Take your passion to the next level - let us help you start and grow your podcast! Podcasts work. Visit https://truemediasolutions.ca/Dave's Audio Book Recommendation for Spring 2023Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling A five-time Moth Grand SLAM winner and bestselling novelist shows how to tell a great story - and why doing so matters. Whether we realize it or not, we are always telling stories. On a first date or job interview, at a sales presentation or therapy appointment, with family or friends, we are constantly narrating events and interpreting emotions and actions. In this compelling book, storyteller extraordinaire Matthew Dicks presents wonderfully straightforward and engaging tips and techniques for constructing, telling, and polishing stories that will hold the attention of your audience (no matter how big or small). He shows that anyone can learn to be an appealing storyteller, that everyone has something “storyworthy” to express, and, perhaps most important, that the act of creating and telling a tale is a powerful way of understanding and enhancing your own life.Dave's Affiliate Link - Support our show by clicking the link belowUS Audible LinkCanadian Audible LinkUK Audible LinkSupport the show!...

This edWeb podcast is sponsored by Learning Ally.The edLeader Panel recording can be accessed here.In this edWeb podcast, you hear from a group of researchers and practitioners who have dubbed themselves the “Reading Peaceniks” after meeting for two years and searching for ways to end the divisiveness of the reading wars. The goal of the Peaceniks is to bring together a broad spectrum across disciplines within literacy education to realize that there is more in common than there are differences. There are meaningful ways to present essential direct instruction that provide children with oral language development and the alphabetic coding that research has shown they need to develop into joyful readers and writers.With the recent paper Print-to-Speech and Speech-to-Print: Mapping Early Literacy, published by Reading Rockets, the panelists, who are authors and contributing editors of the paper, have chosen to address essential components of instructional approaches at their earliest roots—PreK to Grade 1 or 2. In this paper, they found consensus with 35 renowned literacy thought leaders and researchers after much discussion and editing. It suggests “good practices” for early literacy that they hope will address that yearning for meaningfulness on both sides. Listen to this edWeb podcast to:Explore the viewpoints, priorities, and commonalities from the many literacy disciplinesDiscuss the importance of including encoding and decoding that leads to reading and writingLearn about actions you can take to promote harmony while spearheading a literacy revolutionThis edWeb podcast is of interest to K-12 teachers and school and district leaders.Learning Ally Unlocking Student Potential Through Improved LiteracyLearn more about viewing live edWeb presentations and on-demand recordings, earning CE certificates, and using accessibility features.

Dr. LaTisha Smith, Director of Professional Development at St. Louis Public Schools in Missouri joins this week to share about why she has committed herself to the growth and development of thousands of educators in her district. She understands first-hand the power that comes along with professional learning and why it matters so much in literacy. In this podcast, we will highlight the leader moves that Dr. Smith is making to drive toward educator and student success. Her passion and purpose shines through. Learn more about Dr. LaTisha Smith Learn more about Learning Ally's Professional Learning --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/learning-ally/message

For 25 years, Dr. Terrie Noland has put her energy into leadership and literacy; first as a teacher and administrator, and now as a national non-profit Literacy Leader. Terrie mentor's leaders about the latest research around the science of reading. She hosts a podcast, Learning Ally Literacy Leadership, to build a community of literacy champions. Recognized as a national thought-leader, Terrie speaks to crowds to hear captivating stories, leadership principles, research, and best practices in Literacy, which she always delivers with humor, and inspiration.  Terrie is a Certified Academic Language Practitioner and has a Ph.D. in Literacy. She is Maxwell Leadership Certified and a member of the President's Advisory Council. She hosts the Spotlight Learning Series by Learning Ally and builds communities of educators to lead large in Literacy. Terrie's passion runs deep for children and she is truly an advocate for them and the educators who serve them.   Episode 108 of the Better Learning Podcast   Kevin Stoller is the host of the Better Learning Podcast and Co-Founder of Kay-Twelve, a national leader for educational furniture. Learn more about creating better learning environments at www.Kay-Twelve.com.   Who made this episode possible? Terri Noland Learning Ally Connect on LinkedIn! Follow on Twitter! Kevin Stoller Connect on LinkedIn! Follow on Twitter! Kay-Twelve Kay-Twelve Website LinkedIn Profile Twitter Profile Better Learning Podcast Better Learning Podcast Website Follow on YouTube! Association for Learning Environments (A4LE) The Association for Learning Environments Website LinkedIn Profile Twitter Profile Education Leaders' Organization The Education Leaders' Organization Website LinkedIn Profile Twitter Profile Second Class Foundation The Second Class Foundation Website

PARTNERING WITH STATES ON  EARLY LITERACY  Patrick Brennan, the Government Relations Liason of Learning Ally is my guest to discuss  how the industry  works with state and Federal government to make great education happen.contact patrick at pbrennan@learningally.com Educators, join the Consortium  for Equity, FREE ...See all we do for Equity at ace-ed.org

PARTNERING WITH STATES ON  EARLY LITERACY  Patrick Brennan, the Government Relations Liason of Learning Ally is my guest to discuss  how the industry  works with state and Federal government to make great education happen.contact patrick at pbrennan@learningally.com Educators, join the Consortium  for Equity, FREE ...See all we do for Equity at ace-ed.org

 IMPROVING TEACHER EFFECTIVENESS AND RETENTION WITH THE RIGHT PROFESSIONAL LEARNING FOR THESE TIMES   Teaching the Science of Reading and Brain Based Literacy to educators  in an ongoing approach improves their teaching  and their job fulfillment in an age when we must do all we can to help teacher retention with Learning Ally's  Director of Professional Learning  Brent Hartsell. PLEASE SEE ALL WE DO AT ACE-ED.ORG  

 IMPROVING TEACHER EFFECTIVENESS AND RETENTION WITH THE RIGHT PROFESSIONAL LEARNING FOR THESE TIMES   Teaching the Science of Reading and Brain Based Literacy to educators  in an ongoing approach improves their teaching  and their job fulfillment in an age when we must do all we can to help teacher retention with Learning Ally's  Director of Professional Learning  Brent Hartsell. PLEASE SEE ALL WE DO AT ACE-ED.ORG  

This week we will be taking a journey through the history of Learning Ally to discover leadership moves that needed to be made to propel our organization to a multi-solution literacy provider. You will learn about the rich history of the organization as well as how literacy leaders need to pull some levers while leaving other levers unmoved. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/learning-ally/message

Richard Rieman, “The Audiobook Wizard,” is an acclaimed authority on audio and video self-publishing. He has narrated and produced hundreds of Indie-published audiobooks. He is the author of the Global eBook Awards Gold Medal Winner in Writing/Publishing, “The Author's Guide to Audiobook Creation”. Richard is a Gold Medal National Ben Franklin Independent Book Publishers Assn. (IBPA) Award Winner for Audiobook Nonfiction, an Audible Approved Audiobook Producer, and a 5-time winner of the EVVY Award for audiobook narration and production. Richard is a former guide and racing instructor for visually impaired skiers, a volunteer narrator for Learning Ally; and a member of the Audiobook Narrators of America, the Audio Description Network Alliance, and the Audio Description Project. Join me in this episode and learn why Richard Rieman is a Kickass Boomer!    [00:01 - 07:01] Making Books Accessible for Deaf and Blind Children Started in radio and transitioned to narrating for audio books Being inspired by a friend to do rich audio descriptions of pictures Broadcasting videos for free for blind, deaf and neurodiverse children Selecting books that feature children with differences  [07:02 - 13:10] Creating Audio Description Books Accessible  Audio description books is good for all children  Starting a nonprofit organization for the purpose of giving back   Getting the moniker of “Audiobook Wizard” Finding support for the work he is doing  [13:11 - 24:34] Closing Segment  Doing audiobooks for charity  Read to your children and grandchildren Seeing the rise of audiobook listeners    Connect with Richard Rieman: Email: richard@imaginationstorybooks.org Website:imaginationvideobooks.org   Get the audiobook of “The Author's Guide to Audiobook Creation" by clicking here   Tweetable Quote: “Read to your children, read to your grandchildren. That is the most important thing. And then start early. Start when they're three or even two.And just read these story books to them.Open up these worlds that exist beyond the four walls that they live in and have them love books.” - Richard Rieman ----- BEE BOLD, NOT OLD.  LEAVE A REVIEW and join me on my journey to become and stay a Kickass Boomer! Visit http://kickassboomers.com/ to listen to the previous episodes. Also check us out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.   You can also connect with me by emailing terry@kickassboomers.com

Richard Rieman, “The Audiobook Wizard,” is an acclaimed authority on audio and video self-publishing. He has narrated and produced hundreds of Indie-published audiobooks. He is the author of the Global eBook Awards Gold Medal Winner in Writing/Publishing, “The Author's Guide to Audiobook Creation”. Richard is a Gold Medal National Ben Franklin Independent Book Publishers Assn. (IBPA) Award Winner for Audiobook Nonfiction, an Audible Approved Audiobook Producer, and a 5-time winner of the EVVY Award for audiobook narration and production. Richard is a former guide and racing instructor for visually impaired skiers, a volunteer narrator for Learning Ally; and a member of the Audiobook Narrators of America, the Audio Description Network Alliance, and the Audio Description Project. Join me in this episode and learn why Richard Rieman is a Kickass Boomer!    [00:01 - 07:01] Making Books Accessible for Deaf and Blind Children Started in radio and transitioned to narrating for audio books Being inspired by a friend to do rich audio descriptions of pictures Broadcasting videos for free for blind, deaf and neurodiverse children Selecting books that feature children with differences  [07:02 - 13:10] Creating Audio Description Books Accessible  Audio description books is good for all children  Starting a nonprofit organization for the purpose of giving back   Getting the moniker of “Audiobook Wizard” Finding support for the work he is doing  [13:11 - 24:34] Closing Segment  Doing audiobooks for charity  Read to your children and grandchildren Seeing the rise of audiobook listeners    Connect with Richard Rieman: Email: richard@imaginationstorybooks.org Website:imaginationvideobooks.org   Get the audiobook of “The Author's Guide to Audiobook Creation" by clicking here   Tweetable Quote: “Read to your children, read to your grandchildren. That is the most important thing. And then start early. Start when they're three or even two.And just read these story books to them.Open up these worlds that exist beyond the four walls that they live in and have them love books.” - Richard Rieman ----- BEE BOLD, NOT OLD.  LEAVE A REVIEW and join me on my journey to become and stay a Kickass Boomer! Visit http://kickassboomers.com/ to listen to the previous episodes. Also check us out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.   You can also connect with me by emailing terry@kickassboomers.com

THE  COALITION FOR LITERACY EQUITY Favorite guest and fellow podcast host Molly Ness is back to speak on book deserts and their effect on learning and what we can do about it. Molly is also the VP of Academic Content at Learning Ally. This podcast is archived where everything we do is located or linked at ace-ed.org

THE  COALITION FOR LITERACY EQUITY Favorite guest and fellow podcast host Molly Ness is back to speak on book deserts and their effect on learning and what we can do about it. Molly is also the VP of Academic Content at Learning Ally. This podcast is archived where everything we do is located or linked at ace-ed.org

Dr. Molly Ness, Vice-President of Academic Content at Learning Ally shares information about the current release of the NAEP Scores (National Assessment of Educational Progress). Rather than looking at the NAEP scores as an alarm with doom and gloom outcomes, Dr. Ness reminds us that they should be merely used to understand the temperature of where we are as a nation and serve as a tool to help us march toward a clear vision of reading instruction for the future. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/learning-ally/message

THE ESSENTIAL LEADERSHIP OF SCHOOL LIBRARIES IN LITERACY: AASL President Kathy Lester is joined by  Dr. Molly Ness of Learning Ally, founder of The Coalition of Literacy Equity, member of the  Board of Directors at ILA . Read the ILA report we spoke about at https://www.literacyworldwide.org/docs/default-source/where-we-stand/the-essential-leadership-of-school-librarians.pdf_  *********************************** Everything we do is linked at the home website of The American Consortium for Equity in Education  at ace-ed.org: 1.Teacher-Retention.com and Teaching Reset Professional Development 2. SELtoday.org 3The Excellence in Equity Awards Program 4.Our online journal 'Equity& Access PreK12

THE ESSENTIAL LEADERSHIP OF SCHOOL LIBRARIES IN LITERACY: AASL President Kathy Lester is joined by  Dr. Molly Ness of Learning Ally, founder of The Coalition of Literacy Equity, member of the  Board of Directors at ILA . Read the ILA report we spoke about at https://www.literacyworldwide.org/docs/default-source/where-we-stand/the-essential-leadership-of-school-librarians.pdf_  *********************************** Everything we do is linked at the home website of The American Consortium for Equity in Education  at ace-ed.org: 1.Teacher-Retention.com and Teaching Reset Professional Development 2. SELtoday.org 3The Excellence in Equity Awards Program 4.Our online journal 'Equity& Access PreK12

This edWeb podcast is sponsored by Learning Ally.The edLeader Panel recording can be accessed here.Listen to this edWeb podcast with Rebecca Miles to hear a practitioner's story, an account of the transformation of her school of origin, and her attempt to replicate the success at a county level as an early literacy coach consultant. Through her successes and failures, she has developed The Simple View of Educational Success: A Formula for Equitable Instruction. Rebecca will share what she has learned from schools and their leadership about those that succeed against the odds. This edWeb podcast is of interest to K-12 teachers and school and district leaders.

James Boehm is a Clinical Mental Health Counselor and the Accessibility Coordinator at The Refuge Center in Franklin, TN. James is a passionate leader and an advocate who values empowering others to their fullest potential. His specialties within counseling include, but are not limited to, adjustment to disability, depression, anxiety, chronic pain, suicidal ideation, and addiction. Boehm believes strongly in advocacy and equality for all individuals, including people with disabilities. James serves on the Nashville Mayor's Advisory Committee for People with Disabilities, is the former President of the Nashville Chapter and state VP of the National Federation of the Blind, and is Founder and President of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit You Cane Give with his wife, Wendy Boehm. He also founded and served on the TN Association of Guide Dog Users (he has an amazing guide dog named Bogey) and has been a mentor to college students with Learning Ally. In this episode, James shares his story of battling mental illness, becoming blind as an adult and how he's learned to handle life's various chapters with honesty and optimism, and through healing, collaboration and empowerment.

There is a world of difference between disability accommodations in the K-12 system and disability accommodations in the postsecondary system.  Today's episode addresses some of those differences in accommodations that parents and teachers need to be aware of when students with disabilities plan for college.   Just because your child or student had a specific accommodation in high school does not mean they will get the same accommodation in college.   You will also be able to download a tip sheet put out by Learning Ally that shares many examples of common accommodations for K-12 students with dyslexia.  I used the tip sheet to show how many of the accommodations your child might have in K-12  for reading, spelling, writing, math, homework, and testing that may not apply to college. Learning Ally Accommodation Tip Sheet for Students with Dyslexia#57 Math Differences from High School to College with Dr. Paul NoltingGet the latest episode of College, Disabilities, and Success delivered to your inbox!FREE Copy of Mickie Teaches "The Americans with Disabilities Act -Chapter 2" from College & Disabilities: 9 Changes Every Parent Should Know

Facilitators: Terry-Ann and Sandhya Topics: : How to set a reminder; taps not working in Bard app; using Siri to call a business; app for reading text books - Learning Ally; shift enter to enter a hard return in text message; navigating e-mail with lots of links and headings; app; transportation apps - Moovit, All Aboard; trouble downloading a book on BARD; iBUG Bytes - the Clock app; iToys segment - Marty iWalk charger - can charge iPHone and Apple Watch, has built-in lightening cable. using screen recognition to improve access to inaccessible banking app.

This week on Inspirational Journeys, my special guest and I had a fabulous conversation about producing audio/video books for visually impaired and hearing impaired children. We talked about the importance of sharing audio described picture books in audio format to sighted children, so they could enjoy the book alongside their visually impaired peers. Imagination Videobooks Founder and CEO Richard Rieman Ree-man), “The Audiobook Wizard,” is an acclaimed authority on audio and video self-publishing. He has narrated and produced hundreds of Indie-published audiobooks. He is the author of the Global eBook Awards Gold Medal Winner in Writing/Publishing, “The Author's Guide to Audiobook Creation.” Richard is a Gold Medal National Ben Franklin Independent Book Publishers Assn. (IBPA) Award Winner for Audiobook Nonfiction, an Audible Approved Audiobook Producer, and a 5-time winner of the EVVY Award for audiobook narration and production. Richard is a former guide and racing instructor for visually impaired skiers, a volunteer narrator for Learning Ally; and a member of the Audiobook Narrators of America, the Audio Description Network Alliance, and the Audio Description Project. Connect with Richard at the following links: Home - (imaginationvideobooks.org) (19) Imagination Videobooks | Facebook (13) Richard Rieman | LinkedIn (20) Imagination Videobooks (@IVideobooks) / Twitter Subscribe to the Imagination Videobooks podcast: https://anchor.fm/audiobookwizard If you're looking for high quality editing services at reasonable prices, send queries to theplotstitch@gmail.com Visit www.everyday-excellence.com and use promo code Inspirational Journeys to get 10% off any product on the site. Support this podcast with a monthly donation: https://anchor.fm/inspirational-journeys/support or you can give a one-time donation via PayPal at: https://paypal.me/annHarrisonBarnes?country.x=US&locale.x=en_US --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/inspirational-journeys/message

This edWeb podcast is sponsored by Learning Ally.The edLeader Panel recording can be accessed here.This edWeb podcast is a chance to hear from school leaders and agents of change about their experiences in transforming school literacy systems and curricula. As thought leaders from the field pose questions relating to the journey, school leaders each discuss aspects of the shifts in instructional practices within their schools and districts and the positive results they have seen. In their willingness to share both the joys and challenges in switching to an approach based on the science of how children learn to read, this discussion is intended to reflect both the unity and the openness to ongoing learning needed at all levels as the current literacy crisis is addressed. This edWeb podcast is of interest to K-12 school and district leaders.Learning Ally Unlocking Student Potential Through Improved Literacy

We had the privilege of welcoming Michael Kinsey to the show to talk about how the work Learning Ally is doing in Audiobooks is changing the way kids are learning in school and how teacher and parents are finding new ways to help kids with "learning disabilities" succeed!  If you or someone you know has ever struggled in school or work, whether from dyslexia, ADD, visually impairment, there are some amazing tools and methods you can use to adjust how you process information and organize your lives. You don't want to miss this amazing conversation!    PS: Cam has a recording session and missed this episode until the very end. Jason is also in the process of redoing his office so you are going to be stuck looking at the white wall behind his head. 

In episode of the Mom Owned and Operated podcast, Rita Suzanne and Melissa Del Toro Schaffner discuss raising a family, running a business and remembering yourself.Melissa Del Toro Schaffner is an American Voice Actor and co-creator/producer/narrator of the short story sci-fi audio drama podcast, Untold Tales. Her educational background as an Electrical Engineer and Project Manager, as well as her newest role as a Mother, helps her emote for a very broad range of roles and characters in various genres. In addition to being in the Mom after 40 club, she wears multiple hats including international best selling author, accomplished Accountability Coach, and creator/ illustrator of the Minority Girl Empowerment Coloring Book “Careers for Little Sisters” (available in English and Spanish). Melissa was also a contestant on the nationally televised game show “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire” and has volunteered her voice for numerous educational materials the Learning Ally in NYC - recording audiobooks for Blind and Dyslexic students. Her current mission to inspire one million women to live the life of their dreams.You can connect with Melissa through her website. Listen to more interviews by visiting momownedandoperated.com and apply to work with Rita at ritasuzanne.com/apply/

Assistive technology has come a long way in the last thirty years. In the past, there was a stigma surrounding assistive technology that fortunately isn't seen often today. With technology more accessible and a multitude of tools at our fingertips, students with all kinds of different needs are able to get the assistance they need to succeed.   But what is assistive technology? Today's guest is Avlyn Kotton and in this episode, she not only describes what assistive technology is, but also gives many examples and links to great resources. As an educational therapist during the COVID-19 pandemic, Avlyn transitioned her clients to online learning with strategies and offers academic and emotional support to families trying to navigate the process of educating their children from home, while many parents need to continue to work.    These strategies could be a game-changer for a lot of students and just the key they need to succeed.   Show Notes: [4:09] - Assistive technology is any kind of tool to help a child to compensate for any type of learning deficit a child might have. Avlyn explains that it could be as simple as a pencil grip or as advanced as a software program. [5:06] - As technology has progressed and has become more accessible to students, it has become easier to teach students to use assistive technology. There is less of a stigma of using them because it is common practice. [6:21] - During the COVID-19 pandemic, Avlyn was already familiar with many programs and online platforms. [7:41] - Avlyn describes how listening to an audiobook alongside the physical book with colored highlighters has helped many students with reading comprehension. [9:18] - Audiobooks are also great for students who want a different modality to read. [10:17] - Assistive technology is an equalizer. It gives students an opportunity to learn with the help that they need. Avlyn describes what this means and gives real-life examples. [11:29] - It is also important that parents and teachers are shown how to use assistive technology to best implement them in the classroom. [11:51] - Avlyn highly recommends Notability and Quizlet. She shares what these programs are great for. [13:34] - Avlyn often suggests that some students are given the accommodation to use a calculator. This also relieves anxiety. [15:28] - For writing, there are dictation programs. Microsoft Word also has this feature now. [16:01] - When children talk, they tend to have better vocabulary and details than when they write. Dictation tools are great, but students will also need assistance with editing. [17:11] - Avlyn describes how she uses 4 devices at a time to work with students and what this looks like during the time of remote learning. [18:19] - There are many online learning platforms that offer a lot of different ways to interact through technology, including SeeSaw and Google Classroom. [19:33] - Even for kids who are gifted and really competent learners, it is very difficult to navigate through online learning due to the need for executive functioning skills that are developed enough for their age. [21:29] - Without the structure of school, it is a challenge for many students to transition between activities and lessons. [22:26] - The biggest problem Avlyn is seeing is the higher levels of anxiety in students she works with. She shares her thoughts on why this is. [23:31] - Avlyn describes another helpful site called Learning Ally which gives students with learning disabilities access to digital and audio textbooks. [24:49] - In addition to assistive technology, students need to develop learning strategies. This is what Avlyn does as an educational therapist.  [26:44] - The role of an educational therapist is to help with learning, but also as a support for parents. [27:36] - Avlyn shares an inspiring story from a student applying for college. [29:36] - Often there are times where parents of children with learning difficulties find that they had the same learning problems as children but didn't have the tools to help. [32:27] - The tools and professionals we have now are gifts for students to be able to reach their full potential. [33:51] - One of the most important things is to work together as a team for the child - the parent, the educational therapist, the teacher, the school, etc. About Our Guest: Avlyn has thirty years' experience working with both public and private school students from Kindergarten to High School who have learning differences including Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, Dyscalculia, ADHD, Executive Functioning Deficits, and other learning differences. Avlyn has been an active member of the Association of Educational Therapists and has presented at national conferences on the identification of learning disabilities and assistive technology skills. Areas of focus also include Test Preparation and Study Skills as well as School Placement. Collaborating as part of a multi-disciplinary team with classroom teachers, learning specialists, support professionals and parents helps to ensure that the needs of a student are being addressed and necessary accommodations can be implemented.    Connect with Avlyn Kotton: Kotton Educational Therapy ChildNEXUS Profile: Avlyn Kotton Kotton Educational Therapy on Facebook Kotton Educational Therapy Center on Twitter Email: akotton@gmail.com  Links and Resources: ChildNEXUS Home Page ChildNEXUS Instagram Assistive Technology for Students with Learning Disabilities Dragon Dictate - Dictation Software Learning Ally Notability App Quizlet