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 Perspecitives - will address issues that are key to successful use of technology with young children with disabilities or at risk of developing disablities. 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.

PANELIST BIOSBill Klein grew up in the town of Port Jefferson on Long Island, NY. After earning a degree in Biology from NYU. He stands at 4 feet and has a rare variation of a skeletal dysplasia called Spondyloepiphy-seal Dysplasia (or SED) and has had more than 20 surgeries. He is a serial entrepreneur who plays an active role in every business he owns, including Candu Enterprises, where he and his wife Jen-nifer provide a variety of media-related services, public speaking and philanthropic appearances at schools and other institutions to aid in the cam-paign to stop bullying in the US. He and his wife, Jennifer, are featured on TLC’s docu-drama, The Little Couple, which follows their personal and professional lives and have chronicled more than 120 episodes, which are currently airing in more than 40 countries around the world! Future plans include product development and franchising. The accomplishment Bill holds most dear is his latest… creating a family. Together with his wife, Bill flew around the world twice to adopt their wonder-ful kids, William, a very talented 3 year old from China & Zoey, a very precocious 2 year old hailing from Mumbai, India.

Ron Benham, has held state lead-ership positions in the Massachu-setts early intervention and chil-dren and youth with special health needs system for the past thirty year. Currently, he serves as Director of the Mas-sachusetts Department of Public Health’s Bureau of Family Health and Nutrition, as well as Division

Director for Perinatal, Early Childhood and Special Health Needs, and Director of Early Interven-tion Services. 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.

Bridget Gilormini, Director of the PACER Center’s Simon Tech-nology Center, is a speech lan-guage pathologist by training and practiced for 9 years in the public schools providing speech and language therapy for students at all grade levels with a wide range of disabilities. Before coming to PACER she helped coordinate assistive technology services and trainings in the public schools. She has a master’s degree in communication disorders and extensive experience as an assistive technology specialist. She has been a member of the Minnesota State Assistive Technology Leadership Team since 2005. She presents on a wide range of topics at a state and national level. She provides leadership for all of the projects in the Simon Technology Center and directs the Technology Improves Kids’ Educa-tional Success (TIKES) early childhood and assis-tive technology project. Bridget’s specialty areas include: early childhood, literacy, communication, universal design, mobile technology, mac technol-ogy and visual strategies.

Sharon Judge is a Professor of Special Education at Old Dominion University. She has expertise in Early Childhood Special Education

(birth-8 years) focusing across disability areas and has conducted numerous investigations of assis-tive technology including a framework for an assis-tive technology toolkit for young children. She has published numerous articles, chapters, and a book in the areas of assistive technology, professional development, and young children with disabilities and their families.

Tamara Kaldor, M.S., is the Assistant Director of the Tech-nology in Early Childhood (TEC) Center at Erikson Institute. Tamara is a child development specialist with over a decade of experience teaching parents, educa-tors, and administrators how to integrate technol-ogy to support the social-emotional and learning needs of ALL children. She has seen how technol-ogy helps kids of all abilities share their voice and what they know in order to advance in their devel-opment. Her goal is to help educators and pro-fessionals thoughtfully integrate technology into their classrooms and children’s programs so that all children are active participants and learners. She does this by finding creative ways to include technology meaningfully to help children play, relate and learn. This has made Tamara a sought-after speaker in the area of tech integration. She has been invited to deliver workshops on technol-ogy, inclusion and disability, integrating technol-ogy into the classroom and lesson plans, and navi-gating the digital world responsibly throughout Chicago, the U.S. and internationally. Tamara has collaborated with such organizations as UNICEF, UNESCO, International Society for Technology

and Education (ISTE), NAEYC, the Interdisciplinary Council on Development and Learning (ICDL), As-sociation 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 out-standing contributions to STEM in early childhood. Tamara holds an MS in Child Development from Erikson Institute and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Susan Milbourne, is the Director for the Delaware Early Childhood Assistive Technology Demonstra-tion (DECATD) five-year, federally funded project awarded in Janu-ary 2013 to the University of Delaware, Center for Disabilities Studies. She previously served as the project coordinator for the federally funded Tots N’ Tech Research Institute an inter-university collaboration with a mission to provide up-to-date information and resources about adaptations, including assistive technology, to use with infants and toddlers for states, early intervention provid-ers of all disciplines, and families across the coun-try. Dr. Milbourne is the co-author of the highly regarded CARA’s Kit for Preschoolers (2007), its companion 2012 Toddler version and the TAM Technology Fan for Young Children (2006).

Susan Mistrett, a national author-ity on children birth to eight with disabilities, is currently a senior consultant to the federal “Let’s Participate! Project” which assists

young children with disabilities to engage more independently in everyday activities in order to develop and learn. She 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 and developed several comprehensive training curricula that weave concepts of universal design with individual assistive technology supports for children in Early Intervention and Early Childhood Special Education to ensure the inclusion of all children in natural settings. Ms. Mistrett was prin-cipal investigator of the “Let’s Play! Projects” and a member of the Center for Assistive Technology at State University of New York, for fifteen years.

Dr. Amelia Moody is an assistant professor of early childhood and special education at Watson Col-lege of Education at UNCW where she teaches courses in both early childhood and special education departments. Her research interests include the use of assis-tive technology to enhance language and literacy skills in young learners. Before joining Watson College in 2008. Dr. Moody taught early childhood and special education courses at the University of Virginia and served as a research assistant on two federally funded grants in the Preschool Language and Literacy Lab. Dr. Moody started her teaching career as an Applied Behavior Analysis therapist at a school for autism and as a public school teacher for children with disabilities in preschool and el-ementary schools in Virginia. Dr. Moody received her Ph.D. in Special Education from The University

of Virginia, a M.Ed. in Early Childhood Special Ed-ucation from the University of Virginia and a M.S. in Counseling Psychology from Loyola College.

Beth Poss is currently a Special Education Administrator for Mont-gomery County Public Schools in Maryland, supervising and sup-porting special education staff, including Teachers, Speech Language Pathologists, Occupational Therapists, Physical Therapists, Social Workers and Assistive Technology Special-ists. She is an adjunct faculty member for Johns Hopkins University, and presents nationally on best practices in Professional Development, Early Childhood Special Education, Learning and other Educational Disabilities, Assistive Technology, Instructional Technology and Universal Design for Learning. Areas of special interest include Inclu-sive Learning Environments, Using iPads in Early Childhood, Use of Google Apps for Education, Implementing the Common Core State Standards, and Free Resources to Support Universal Design for Learning in the 21st Century. As a former member of the MCPS curriculum writing team, she helped design and implement a curriculum aligned with the Common Core State Standards and the principles of Universal Design for Learn-ing. As a certified Speech Language Pathologist, she served as a member of the MCPS assistive technology team for 10 years.

Christopher Swanson Ed.D., Chris Swanson leads a team focused on improving outcomes for young

PANELIST BIOS

children and any child with diverse development and learning. This includes the Maryland EXCELS Quality Rating and Improvement System; the Maryland Learn-ing Links comprehensive website, the MATN – Mary-land Assistive Technology Network, Making Access Happen initiative promoting inclusive preschool educa-tion; the Online IFSP; and early learning and special education competency-based workforce transforma-tion badging models. Dr. Swanson previously served as the Principal for the National Connections Academy School, a flagship virtual public and private hybrid program operated by Connections Academy, a provider of online charter schools. Prior to that role, he was the Director of Professional Development and Instruc-tional Supports overseeing all teacher training and RTI initiatives across the company’s 6,000 teachers and 100,000 students nationwide. Before that, Swanson was a central office autism and cognitive delay special-ist with Baltimore County Public Schools after being a classroom special educator and inclusion resource. Swanson received his B.A. in English and Education from University of Maryland, Baltimore County with a concentration in journalism. He completed his M.A. from The Johns Hopkins University in special educa-tion, and his doctorate from the same institution.

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

The symposium is endorsed by ECTA, a national center to improve state early intervention and

early childhood special education service systems, increase the implementation of effective practic-es, and enhance the outcomes of these programs

for young children and their families.

http://ectacenter.org/