CENTER ON TECHNOLOGY AND DISABILITY

TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS FOR eARLY cHILDHOOD ....THE FUTURE IS NOW!

NOVEMBER 29, 2016 8:30 AM - 2:00 PM

FHI360 CONFERENCE CENTER WASHINGTON, DC ONSITE & VIRTUAL PARTICIPATION

ASSISTIVE AND INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY SUPPORTING LEARNERS WITH DISABILITIES

Join thought leaders in early childhood development and assistive tech-

nology at this CTD symposium for Federal policy makers, national associa-

tion staff, researchers, family advocates, and others. Funded by the U.S.

Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP),

participants will learn about evidence-based practices, interesting research

being conducted, and ways in which families are successfully using tech-

nology to support the developmental and learning needs of their children.

You can join us at the site-based symposium in Washington, DC or via the

event’s live streaming.

Join Bill Klein of TLC’s show “Little Couple” and our panel of experts on technology for

young children with disabilities.

Bridget Gilormini, Director of the PACER Center’s Simon Technology Center, will lead participants in a series of hands-on AT activities.

Dr. Suzanne Milbourne, Director, Dela-ware Early Childhood Assistive Technol-ogy Demonstration project, will provide information on both research and practice based on decades of experience in both arenas.

Beth Poss, Coordinator of Mont-gomery County Public Schools’ Preschool Education Program, will bring both assistive technology expertise and a research-to-practice perspective to the event.

Dr. Amelia Moody, Professor, Wat-son College of Education, University of North Carolina - Wilmington, will address the use of AT to enhance language and literacy skills in young children, among other interesting research in which she is involved.

Susan Mistrett, a nationally-recog-nized expert and much-published author on the use of assistive tech-nology with children from birth to eight years old, will share key lessons learned from decades of research and practice.

Tamara Kaldor, Assistant Director of the Technology in Early Childhood (TEC) Center at Erikson Institute, will share evidence-based strategies for integrating technology tools at home and in school to support the social-emotional and learning needs of children.

Christopher Swanson Ed.D., Senior Program Director for Quality Early Learning and Education, Center for Technology in Education (CTE), Johns Hopkins University School of Education, will identify current and future research needs in the field.

Sharon Judge, Professor of Special Education at Old Dominion University will share past and current research from her many studies and publica-tions, including Assistive technology for young children with disabilities: A guide to family-centered services and Using mobile media devices and apps to promote young children’s learning.

Ron Benham, Director of the Mas-sachusetts Dept. of Public Health’s Bureau of Family Health and Nu-trition, as well as the Division for Perinatal, Early Childhood and Special Health Needs; and Early Intervention Services will provide valuable insights from his State-level perspective.

THE DETAILS...

Funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), there is no registration fee!

November 29, 20168:30am - 2:00pm

FHI 360 CONFERENCE CENTER

1825 CONNECTICUT AVENUE, NW

WASHINGTON, DC 20009

HOW TO REGISTER....Visit the CTD website for further details on how to register to either attend the event on-site in Washington, DC at the FHI360 Conference Center, or to reserve a seat in the virtual live-streaming room.http://ctdinstitute.org/content/technology-solutions-early-childhood

The symposium will be keynoted by Bill Klein of the TLC television program, The Little Couple. Three panels - Research, Research-to-Practice, and Family Perspectives - will address issues that are key to successful use of technology with young children with disabilities or at risk of developing disabilities. Throughout the day on-site participants will have hands-on activities, while remote participants will receive instructions on how they might create their own activities. Following an informal lunch, partici-pants will have the opportunity to network with each other and with panelists and to look at assistive technology devices more closely.

and Nutrition; Division Director for Perinatal, Early Childhood and Special Health Needs; and Direc-tor of Early Intervention Services. He has overseen the implementation of IDEA Part B, Section 619, and IDEA Part C in his state since 1986. In 2001-2003, he was selected as a mid-career Fellow with Zero to Three, a national organization focused on the needs of infants and toddlers. It was because of Ron’s commitment to bring AT devices and services to a greatly expanded population of young children in Massachusetts and to enhance professional development that FHI 360’s AT model demonstration project, Let’s Participate!, has been implemented in early intervention and preschool sites in Massachusetts.

Bridget Gilormini is Director of the PACER Center’s Simon Technology Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is a speech language pa-thologist by training and worked for nine years in public schools, providing speech and language therapy for students at all grade levels with a wide range of disabilities. Before com-ing to PACER, Bridget helped coordinate assistive technology services and trainings in the MN public school system. She has extensive experience as an AT specialist, serving as a member of the Minne-sota State Assistive Technology Leadership Team since 2005. Bridget presents on a wide range of AT topics as they relate to early childhood, literacy, communication, universal design, visual strategies, and mobile technology. She provides leadership for all of the projects in the Simon Technology Center and directs the Technology Improves Kids’

PANELIST BIOSBill Klein grew up in the town of Port Jefferson on Long Island, NY and earned a degree in biology from NYU. Bill has a rare varia-tion of a skeletal dysplasia called Spondyloepiphyseal Dysplasia (or SED) and has had more than 20 surgeries. He is an entrepreneur who plays an active role in his businesses, including Candu Enterprises, where he and his wife, Dr. Jennifer Arnold, provide a variety of media-related services, public speaking, and philanthropic appearances at schools and other institutions to aid in the campaign to stop bully-ing in the US. He and Jennifer are featured on The Learning Channel television program, The Little Couple, which follows their personal and profes-sional lives and which currently airs in more than 40 countries around the world. The accomplishment Bill holds most dear is his latest: creating a fam-ily. Bill and Jennifer flew around the world twice to adopt their wonderful children–William, a very talented five year-old from China and Zoey, a very precocious three year-old hailing from Mumbai, In-dia. The family uses a range of assistive technology devices and services to enhance their children’s development and learning.

Ron Benham has held leadership positions in the State of Massa-chusetts for more than thirty years, overseeing State-wide programs that serve children and youth with special health and education needs. Currently, he serves as Director of the Massachusetts Depart-ment of Public Health’s Bureau of Family Health

Educational Success (TIKES) early childhood and assistive technology project.

Sharon Judge iis Professor of Spe-cial Education at Old Dominion University. Her expertise in early childhood is across disability areas and she has conducted numerous investigations of assistive technology use by young children. She has authored and co-authored books, book chapters and numerous articles on assistive technology use and on AT professional development. Among these are: Assistive Tech-nology for Young Children with Disabilities: A guide to providing family-centered services; Using mo-bile media devices and apps to promote young children’s learning; Creating a technology-rich learning environment for infants and toddlers with disabilities; Integrating content area literacy and assistive technology: A teacher development in-stitute; Assistive technology training at the pre-ser-vice level: A national snapshot of teacher prepa-ration programs; and Using an assistive technology toolkit to promote inclusion.

Tamara Kaldor is Assistant Director of the Technology in Early Child-hood (TEC) Center at Erikson Insti-tute in Illinois. Tamara is a child de-velopment specialist who teaches parents, educators, and administrators how to integrate technology to support the social-emo-tional and learning needs of all children. Her goal is to help educators and professionals thoughtfully integrate technology into their classrooms and

children’s programs so that all children are active participants and learners. Tamara has collabo-rated with such organizations as UNICEF, UNESCO, International Society for Technology and Educa-tion (ISTE), NAEYC, the Interdisciplinary Council on Development and Learning (ICDL), Association for Children’s Museums, Association of Library Services for Children, and Common Sense Media. In 2016, her work at the TEC Center was recognized by the White House for making outstanding contributions to STEM in early childhood.

Suzanne Milbourne is a trained pediatric occupational thera-pist and currently Director of the Delaware Early Childhood Assistive Technology Demonstration, an OSEP-funded project operated by the University of Delaware, Center for Disabilities Studies. She is the founding member of a DYI maker-initiative called fabricATe. Suzanne previously served as Project Coordinator of the Tots N’ Tech Research Institute, the Philadelphia Inclusion Network, the ALL Kids Together project and as Director of Project FIND: Families In Need of Daycare. She is the co-author of the highly regarded CARA’s Kit for Preschoolers and its companion version for toddlers. Suzanne is also co-author of the TAM Technology Fan for Young Children (Technology and Media Division of the Council for Exceptional Children) and of numerous articles and presentations on assistive technology in early childhood, including work with the Division for Early Childhood (DEC).

Susan Mistrett is a national au-thority on assistive technology for children with disabilities, ages birth through eight. She currently serves as a Senior Advisor to the OSEP-funded Let’s Participate! project, which provides AT lending libraries, train-ing, and coaching to early intervention providers, preschool teachers and service providers at four Boston-area sites. Sue has written extensively on the selection and use of assistive technology to support the participation of young children and their families in everyday routines and activities. She has developed several comprehensive train-ing curricula that marry concepts of universal design with individual assistive technology supports for children in early intervention and early child-hood education to ensure the inclusion of all chil-dren in natural settings. For fifteen years, Sue was principal investigator of the Let’s Play! project and a researcher at the Center for Assistive Technology at State University of New York.

Amelia Moody is Assistant Profes-sor of Early Childhood and Special Education at Watson College of Education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her research interests include the use of assistive tech-nology to enhance language and literacy skills in young learners. Before joining Watson College in 2008, Amelia taught early childhood and special education courses at the University of Virginia (UVA) and served as a research assistant at UVA’s

PANELIST BIOSPreschool Language and Literacy Lab. Amelia started her teaching career as an Applied Behav-ior Analysis therapist at a school for students with autism and then became a public school teacher for children with disabilities in pre-school and elementary schools in Virginia. Currently, Amelia leads a team of researchers exploring the use of NAO robots with young children with autism to enhance engagement and communication during social interactions with their peers.

Beth Poss serves as Coordinator of the Preschool Education Program within the Montgomery Coun-ty Public School (MCPS) system in Maryland. As such, she supervises and supports special educa-tion staff, including teachers, speech language pathologists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, social workers and assistive technology specialists. Beth is an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins University and presents nationally on a wide range of AT-related topics, including instructional technology and universal design for learning (UDL). Her areas of special interest in-clude inclusive learning environments and the use of tablet apps in early childhood education. As a former member of the MCPS curriculum writ-ing team, Beth helped design and implement a curriculum aligned with Common Core State Standards and the principles of UDL. As a certified speech language pathologist, Beth served, for ten years, as a member of the MCPS assistive technol-ogy team.

The Center on Technology and Disability is funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) under award #H327F130003 – 13A.

The Center on Technology and Disability provides a wealth of free resources – personal and professional

development (PPD) webinars, articles, guides, training materials and more.

Whether you’re brand new to assistive technology or an experienced user wanting to remain on the

leading edge, CTD has high-quality, research-based materials and events for you!

www.ctdinstitute.org

Christopher Swanson is Senior Program Director for Quality Early Learning and Education at the Center for Technology in Educa-tion (CTE) at Johns Hopkins Uni-versity School of Education. There he leads a team focused on improving outcomes for young children with diverse development and learning needs. He and his team support the Maryland EXCELS Quality Rating and Improve-ment System; the Maryland Learning Links com-prehensive website, the Maryland Assistive Tech-nology Network’s Making Access Happen initiative promoting inclusive preschool education; the Online IFSP; and early learning and special educa-tion competency-based workforce transforma-tion badging models. Chris previously served as Principal of the National Connections Academy School, a public-private sector program operated by Connections Academy, a provider of online charter schools. Prior to that, he was Director of Professional Development and Instructional Sup-ports for the company. Chris has been an autism and cognitive delay specialist with Baltimore County Public Schools and a classroom special educator and inclusion resource.