Professional Development

Here at PRCVI we love braille, and we love LEGO! We've blogged about accessible LEGO kits and using LEGO to support ECC instruction before. So we were excited about the opportunity to learn about the possibilities of LEGO Braille Bricks recently! On October 3, Monica from CNIB Frontier Accessibility and Marie and Marc from LEGO Braille Bricks came to PRCVI to deliver a worksho ...

Are you and your students baffled by what to do when a braille device asks for computer braille input? (Or maybe you've wondered what the gibberish displayed when a braille device is not connected to anything means!) The PRCVI outreach team has created a guide for teachers on how to enter braille ASCII, otherwise known as "computer braille", into a braille device. We hope you ...

Due to our regular work with alternate format materials, it is important for teachers of students with visual impairments to understand the use of copyrighted material under the federal Copyright Act. At this time, we know that teachers may be looking for information on how to responsibly share learning content online, and so we wanted to create a blog post that summarizes the ...

The PRCVI outreach team attended the Getting in Touch with Literacy Conference in Seattle, WA from November 14-16, 2019. We've prepared an overview of the sessions we attended along with links to presentation notes and resources. Turning on Touch Thinking: From Tactile Discrimination to Braille Letter Identification This presentation by Donna McNear focused on teaching tactil ...

Building a Curriculum Bridge: The Challenge of Itinerant Teaching Dr. Kevin Stewart was the keynote speaker at the Charting Our Ways Vision Teacher Conference in Sidney, BC (October 2008). He is well recognized for his research and publications focusing on the learning styles of children with visual impairments, with and without additional disabilities, and on early orientatio ...

Welcome to the 2019-2020 school year! With many new TSVIs starting work in itinerant roles, this article from Paths to Literacy could not be more timely. Written by our friend Charlotte Cushman, it is filled with incredibly useful tips for those colleagues just starting their itinerant voyage.  20 Tips for New Itinerant TSVIs and COMS I thought it might be helpful to add some ...

Classroom teachers may have many questions about having a student with a visual impairment in their classrooms. If you're looking for a resource to help guide teachers who have a student with a visual impairment in their class, a new resource has noe become availbale. The online course was developed by Dr. Tina Herzberg and Dr. Penny Rosenblum is available for classroom teache ...

On Wednesday, January 16th the team from the Provincial Outreach Program for Students with Deafblindness (POPDB) came for a morning of meetings and a tour of the PRCVI collection. Since PRCVI and POPDB follow the same Ministry of Education qualification criteria for visual impairment, all students registered with POPDB are eligible for registration with PRCVI. The PRCVI outreac ...

On Thursday, December 5 and Friday, December 6 Jen and I attended the Provincial Outreach Program for Students with Deafblindness (POPDB) District Partner Conference in Richmond. Robbie Blaha from the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired presented on Exploring Appropriate Programming for Students with Deafblindness. Robbie took us through some of the fundamental str ...

On Friday afternoon Steve Barclay from Canadian Assistive Technology presented to our O&M Sharing Session on the new Victor Reader Trek from HumanWare. We've created a page on the PRCVI site with all of the resources, links, and handouts from that day. This page not only includes Steve's presentation about the Trek, but also all the fantastic resources shared by O&M spe ...

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