Providing Alternative Communication for All Students.

Funded Oct 13, 2017

Thank you so much for helping me to go to the PATINS 2017 conference in Indianapolis, IN. The PATINS conference is a state wide conference on assistive technology offered to educators and clinicians to learn all the latest in technology to assist their students in their learning experience. Attending this conference brought me renewed energy and enthusiasm to working with children with special needs.

The conference started each day with a motivational speaker demonstrating how utilizing assistive technology has changed their lives. The first speaker was a comedian with cerebral palsy with limited use of his hands who has written a book as well as is currently writing sketches for HBO. He encouraged us to think outside the box and not to set limits or boundaries for our students. The second speaker was a mother of a child with down syndrome. She started a company on video presentations employing students with and without disabilities. She strongly believed that if you continue to follow your dreams that their is no limit to what you can accomplish.

My colleague and I have brought back a wealth of information to help develop an assistive technology team to address a myriad of needs of our students. We learned techniques to use Chromebooks both on and offline. We also learned an extensive number of Google apps and extensions to benefit children with reading, writing, spelling, and mathematic challenges. These apps and extensions allow children even the playing field in the educational setting. Children who are limited by physical and cognitive disabilities are no longer limited by their disabilities. I also have had the unexpected benefit of learning about some new apps to help my own son with his reading and writing challenges. Again, thank you so much for the opportunity to attend this conference to help me provide new technology information to students and teachers. We are so fortunate to have a program like donors choose with generous donors like you.”

With gratitude,

Mrs. Wassilak