Now Come Learn with Us!

ROUGH EDITED COPY

EHDI

SEGELL ROOM

"Family Signs:

You've Heard of Us?

Now Come Learn with Us!"

MARCH 10, 2015

11:00 A.M.

CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY:

ALTERNATIVE COMMUNICATION SERVICES, LLC

P.O. BOX 278

LOMBARD, IL 60148

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This is being provided in a roughdraft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.

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>MODERATOR: Good morning. I would like to welcome you to "Family Signs: You've Heard of Us? Now come Learn with Us!" Just want to welcome you and Lynn Reichert did I say it right? I've messed up everyone else. We'll let you have that. Here you go.

> LYNN REICHERT: Good morning. My name is Lynn Reichert. I'm the coordinator of Family Signs. I'm also a mother. I, a couple of days ago, I was trying on my outfit for the presentation. I had a gray sweater, gray pants, and I asked my children, hey, what do you think? My daughter looked up from the book she was reading, she said, you look great! My son looked at me and said, you look like a boy. And we all laughed. And I thought of that conversation yesterday when I was listening to Rachel Kolb talk about her experience growing up deaf with hearing parents, and how her parents had the challenges of figuring out how to communicate with their deaf child.

I don't personally have that experience firsthand. I'm hearing. My husband is hearing. My children are hearing. So I was glad when Rachel also talked about the parenting challenges in general. Now, those challenges, I get it. So the bottom line, you can thank my son for the pink cardigan instead of gray.

So I came to this with the assumption that you know what Family Signs is, but I'm going to give you a little brief background. We're under the educational Course Center on Deafness, which is connected with the Texas school for the deaf in Austin, Texas. What are we? We offer sign language classes that are free for families of deaf and hardofhearing children. The children are age birth to 21 years old. And the families must live in Texas.

When I say online, it's really through video conferencing. They connect with a live instructor for class. Student requests and how we serve, about 65% of our families request American sign language. About 15% request signing exact English, and about 20% of our population is Spanishspeaking families.

Who we are. Currently we have seven ASL instructors. Some are men, some are women, some are deaf, some are hearing. All of our instructors are paid professionals.

We have two instructors who work with our SEE families. Since we at the Outreach Center serve the entire State of Texas, some of our regional day school programs use SEE as their sign modality, so that's why we offer that as an option for families who sign up for our program.

We have two instructors who work with our Spanishspeaking families.

Now, who do we serve? We serve family members who have deaf and hardofhearing children. A majority of these students are parents, but we also have grandparents. We have aunts, we have caregivers who work with the deaf children. We have some pilot classes that allow the parent and the child to take class together. That child might be the deaf child or it might be one of the hearing siblings, or two of the hearing siblings. The parent has to be in the class because that's how our grant is written. So as long as the parent's in the class, we can serve children as well.

I could tell you how happy the parents are with the program, but I want to show you a clip from one of the moms about our program.

[From video].

> He wasn't getting fund support at school but we really wanted him to have that. My signing ability has definitely improved. All of our signing ability has improved. So at the dinner table now, we can sign a lot more. We built this relationship with our teacher, and we're able to ask her all types of questions, and the kids are learning, and we're just all learning as a family. Family Signs has been such a great experience for our family. It's opened up new doors for our son, and it's also helped us all to learn how to communicate differently and better.

> LYNN REICHERT: Jeanette, do you know how to adjust the volume? Could you hear that okay? We'll try to get okay.

So we serve the parents and family members. By serving the family members, we obviously have a direct impact on the children who are deaf and hard of hearing. About 37% of our children that we work with are birth to age four. The largest group is elementary age. It would be hard for me to get a baby like this to tell you her experience with Family Signs, so what I did instead is I found another student, another child of parents who are in our program. I just want to give you a little background about this student.

About three months ago, she contacted me through Email. She said, my parents signed up for class, but they haven't started. When will the class start?

So my first thought was wow! Here's a high school student contacting a coordinator of a program to get her parents started in the class. It didn't come from the parents, so right away, I thought wow, here's a gogetter. So the parents had started the registration process but hadn't completed it, so they went ahead, got signed up, started classes, and now they're in the program. This student, their daughter, wanted to tell I want her to tell her story about the program.

[From video].

> Hi. My name is Debra. And I'm 17 years old. I'm in high school. Oh, yeah, I'm my dad and mom are I voice. I voice and I sign. My dad and mom voice. So lip reading can be hard, but I try my best.

One day, my dad and mom sat down and said can we try sign language? They said okay. That's fine. You want us to learn? And now, Family Signs is helping my family. The best! My dad can sign "Dad" in sign language. My mom can ask me if I'm hungry. So for now, that's cool. Every day they learn more. They learn more. I'm very proud. So Family Signs is the best where my family, and yours, too. Thank you. Bye.

> LYNN REICHERT: I love her enthusiasm. And I love how she introduced herself. I'm 17, I'm a high school student. Oh, oh, yeah. I'm also deaf.

So I thought she would give the message. And you probably noticed she might be a somewhat newer signer. She might be in a program that uses signed English, or SEE, but they requested to learn ASL. So our parents that we serve have all different backgrounds. We just require that the child has a hearing loss. We don't ask for the audiogram, we don't ask they just have a hearing loss. So this is who we serve.

Now, the bulk of today is how we serve. In the past, I've done presentations on the nuts and bolts of the program, the statistics, the information, but today, and I got feedback saying, I wanted to see an actual class.

So what I'm going to attempt today is to connect with an instructor. She's in Texas. And I now am a Family Signs student, and I'm at home, and I'm it's class time, so I'm going to sign in to my Email account. And what we use right now, we use Zoom. We've used Google+. We've used Skype in the background, and as I'm joining, depending on how long it takes, I'll tell you why we've moved to Zoom. So this is my Email. This is my instructor. She's asked me to join her meeting. And at this point, I'll have to sit down to be right in front of the camera, but you'll see me on screen. That's the goal. Type my name.

So see the student, I don't have to sign in to any program. I just go to my Email. Let me join audio. Let me move this. So I'm in. Hi. How are you?

> I'm doing good. And how are y'all?

> LYNN REICHERT: We're good. I would show you the audience. There are about 20 people. But you get to look at me only.

> Always a pleasure.

> LYNN REICHERT: Oh, thank you. So you're going to teach us a few signs?

> I was thinking about it.

> LYNN REICHERT: Oh, good.

> So have you kind of already explained a little bit beforehand?

> LYNN REICHERT: I explained how the student joins the meeting, simply by entering their Email and clicking on the link.

> And it's very user friendly. It's not really all that complicated, and each device, technical device that they use, whether it be the iPhones, or their tablets or their laptops, everything is going to be just a little bit different, and those were all kind of learning which device works best than others, so

> LYNN REICHERT: Which brings in to play, if they're using a phone, they really would need to have there's not the text option. So if they have a deaf instructor, if they're doing it through their computer, we can text back and forth. But if you're using the phone, most likely they would be matched with a hearing instructor, since they can't text back and forth. So that's one of the challenges that we solved that way.

> Yep. Technology. A blessing and a curse.

> LYNN REICHERT: Yes. Definitely.

> Okay. So one of the opportunities that we're able to do is we're able to screen share, which is really kind of fun and exciting. So let's take a look. And what I have for y'all, is it coming clear and through?

> LYNN REICHERT: It is clear. Chapter 1 vocabulary.

> Perfect. So what we've done for minimal English language families is we've created pictures to also assist us with the sign and the correlation of the onetoone picture and sign to match. So we have mother, or mom. Okay. You'll typically see the five hand, thumb touch on the chin, but you'll also see mother. It kind of goes like a little wave. So there will be multiple ways to be able to sign this.

> LYNN REICHERT: Now, as you can see, she can still can you still see me?

> Uhhuh.

> LYNN REICHERT: So the instructors can give feedback to the student, and I can get feedback from the instructor. Our classes are set up that we can have up to three students with one instructor. So we might have one student in Austin, one in Dallas, one in Houston connecting with our instructor. Today's demonstration, I'm the only student.

> We're very easily invite others into our conversation. You can also play with the picture because I know sometimes, again, depending on the device itself, I will shrink us down to a little wallet size, a little 2 X 3, but if you click on the icons at the top of the picture, you can blow us up to about a 4 X 6.

> LYNN REICHERT: Yes. So I think this shows you how the class would operate. Zoom is free, so the students don't need an account. When we were using Skype, Google+ hangouts, the students needed an account, and sometimes students forget their passwords, and also the biggest challenge is when Skype or Google+ changes their interface, so the student has gotten used to here's how I join a chat, but then they open it one day, that was about seven months ago, I think, Angela, they open the interface, and they go, oh, it's all completely different. I'm lost. How do I get into the class? So we bypassed that by using zoom. They just go directly into the class without having to sign into their Skype or Google+ account.

Any other benefits, Angela, that you've

> The other benefits is we get to do so many different things with this screen share. I've been able to play with some videos as well, like, I've recorded some signed stories here at school, and then I've been able to link them up and be able to share those, and it's still simultaneous time, which is another wonderful thing about Zoom is that I can do that. I have up to that 45minute opportunity of window to kind of play with the different medias, if you will. I can do PowerPoint. I can do just plain worksheets and homework that way, but I can also do videos, which is really kind of fun, because I can video other people and they can kind of look and see the differences. I like to do the comparisons between my adult big girl hands, versus having someone younger and smaller, smaller hands, so that they can see what their children are going to actually be producing as opposed to seeing this big, clear picture with my hands.

> LYNN REICHERT: Right. Right. Nice. Well, thank you for your time. I think I'm going to leave the meeting.

> Sounds good. See y'all. Good luck!

> LYNN REICHERT: Thank you, Angela! Bye. Yes?

> AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Inaudible].

> LYNN REICHERT: They do. Let and interestingly, I have a clip. I probably won't have time to show it, but I have a clip of two students and one instructor, and they're doing ASL. So they can all see each other at the same time. Now, if that instructor says, hey, we're going to screen share, it makes their pictures get smaller, so it's not as easy access for them to see each other. So screen share does limit it a little bit for the size. Yes, ma'am?

> AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Inaudible].

> LYNN REICHERT: We did a test. Zoom one of the groups, the professional learning communities, uses Zoom for their meetings from around the country, and I can't remember exactly but I think it's like 20. But for sign language, we found in order for the picture to be big enough, we limit it to three students, one instructor.

Another benefit of having the group class is the parents can decide to network with each other, gives them another opportunity to meet another adult who has deaf kids, if they are living in the rural areas and don't have access to other families.

One thing I wanted to talk to you about are the challenges that we have faced, and this is true for any teleintervention program, and people ask me this every year when I present. What about the family that doesn't have a computer? I feel strongly that our program is fabulous because the family can learn from their home. Obviously if they don't have a computer, we still want to serve them, but I put the ball in their court. I say because our program requires that you have high speed internet at home. But I say, please go to your library, go to your child's school and ask if you can have class. Rarely do parents do it. They're already struggling with all they have going on, so I did have one parent this year, that I'm excited about, happened to be a Spanishspeaking mother. She followed through. She went to her library, and this is in the Houston area. Harris County Public Library serves thousands of people in Houston. She went to the library. They said yes, we can do it. Well, as a coordinator, I said, let me get I have to go through my Spanishspeaking liaison. Please give me the contact at the library. So I contacted her, and she said, I don't know how we're going to do it. So she took me to the IT manager. He said, oh, we can't do it. Our security issues. I said oh, gosh, these families really want to learn sign language with their kids, you know they don't have a computer. He said well, we could probably do a pilot. I said we would a love to do a pilot. So he had to go through figuring out their security issues, and they figured out using their iPad, using Zoom because remember, Zoom doesn't require that they download Skype or Google+. There's just a plugin. So from their perspective, the library was secure and could offer a conference room every week for our parent. So the IT manager was so excited, he said, oh, we need to do this for all the deaf kids in Houston, and their parents! I said, okay, that's great. When they come forward. I can't go out and seek them out, but he's also offered if there are other libraries in the state who say oh, it can't be done, he's offered to be my resource to coach them through. It's not a difficult process. They just get worried about people video conferencing from their library. So that's been a success story.

Another, the family might have a computer at home, but they have low bandwidth. Oh, wait. Back to the no computer. Well, it addresses both of these. They might have low bandwidth. Again, first I try with their computer. This might be too technical, but internet service providers provide download and upload bandwidths. Download is always higher because people download movies and stream movies. Upload is usually lower. They want to get away with as little as possible. For video conferencing, we need both because those families are going to be signing, and we need to upload it to the instructor. If it's too low, it won't support it. I suggest contact your internet service provider, ask them for more bandwidth. My technology specialist said, you're crazy. They're not going to give. I said, guess what? One to two families, the internet service provider said sure, we'll give you more bandwidth, and it solved the problem. Most service providers will say, sure, you can have more bandwidth, but you need to pay more every month. Some families do it. Some families don't. So for those families I go back to number one, library, child's school.