Classroom Visits

Have you ever heard of "region" (or "landmark") when navigating a website with a screen reader? If so, what are they, what do they do, and why are they important? These were some of the questions asked and answered when PRCVI did a group outreach visit near the end of the 2021-22 school year. Several TSVIs and visually impaired students came together to tackle some web navigat ...

The PRCVI outreach team has had a few requests this school year for assistance with students that are having a difficult time seeing what teachers are presenting to the class when projecting their screens from computers or tablets. Finding an in-class solution resulted in an online solution.   We were invited to help find a screen casting solution whereby students could have a ...

It’s no secret that we love braille at PRCVI! And we always look forward to bringing some of that enthusiasm into classrooms. Recently, a teacher of students with visual impairments invited us into one of their student’s middle school classrooms for an introduction to braille lesson. The students learned about the braille cell, dot numbers, alphabet, and capital indicator. T ...

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 ...

We're very excited to introduce a new title now available in print/braille from the PRCVI Library. "What a Wonderful World!" is written and illustrated by Kelsey, a grade two student who reads and writes in braille (and a great competitor at the Braille Challenge each year!).   Kelsey and her family self-published a book of Kelsey's writing and drawings to raise funds for Blin ...

The PRCVI outreach team is celebrating White Cane Week out in the Kootenays! White Cane Week is a national awareness campaign held in the first full week of February each year intended to raise awareness around the issues facing adults with vision loss in Canada. Promoted each year by the Canadian Council of the Blind with events across the country, White Cane Week is an oppo ...

Last week Jen and I partnered with one of our colleagues to deliver a new presentation in a middle school classroom on Unified English Braille. In order to draw connections to the Applied Design, Skills, and Technologies curriculum the features of UEB as a code are examined in relation to other codes, namely HTML. The students in the class were familiar with braille at an intro ...

Recently I had the good fortune to travel to a school to collaborate with a colleague and her student on using stovetop adaptations for cooking. Late last year Jen and I had visited and we worked together with the student and his TSVI on preparing simple snacks (chocolate pudding and fruit salad) that he could prepare at home. On this visit, we practiced using the tactile marki ...

Over the past month, PRCVI has been exploring ways to extend our coding project. This past week Colton and I had the opportunity to explore some of our ideas with a high school student and her teacher of students with visual impairments.  Apple developed the Swift Playgrounds app for the iPad to teach programming concepts and the Swift programming language through interactive ...