After the success of the five-part career education series -Road to Success- which was built in collaboration with American Printing House for the Blind (based on Dr. Karen Wolffe's work and book: Skills for Success), I was invited to cover APH's Health education for students with visual impairments book in a three-part series. I am very passionate about comprehensive sexuality education for blind and visually impaired students (and students with disabilities in general), therefore I was delighted to have 90-minutes to address this very important topic on a national stage.
Sidebar: if you are interested in the career ed series, the first episode is already migrated into APH Hive, the free professional development site, where you can earn CEUs for completing the module. Some recordings can still be viewed on APH-YouTube channel, while they undergo production. You can also see my previous blog posts for more information.
Let's talk about the series!
For the Health is Meaningful Living series I invited my friend and colleague Rev. Manda Nordes. Manda and I completed most of our TVI training together and continued to collaborate. We created a presentation on consent which was shared at CTEBVI conference in 2019, and also recorded it in a webinar format for AERBVI for their professional learning website, since we could not present at the international conference in 2020 due to COVID19 cancellation.
We both owned this book: Heath Education for students with visual impairments, A guidebook for teachers since it was first published in 2019. We used it in our teaching, and were very surprised to find out, that an overwhelming majority of our webinar attendees have never heard about its existence.
This series proved to be an excellent way to let vision professionals know about a resource, that is affordable, useful, and is chuck full of simple, easily adoptable lessons on necessary topics to be covered using the Expanded Core Curriculum (ECC).
Both of the series had a once a month date to share on a specific topic. In the career ed series, we decided to share based on age ranges (B-6, elementary, middle, high school, and multiple impairments), whereas for the Health Book we decided to combine topics. There are five content areas in the book. Nutrition was apt to be paired with disease prevention, and personal safety with personal health, while sexual health/ed got its own webinar, to both Manda's and my delight.
We highlighted and shared how to collaborate on our teams with related service providers, parents, and general education teachers, how to embed the ECC into general educational classes/topics/instruction, how to write comprehensive SMART Goals, and shared some everyday instructional opportunities we use in our teaching.
We also introduced our attendees to the tactile graphics instructional guidebook, which is an amazing collection of 2d tactile tools for your health education topics. If you ever tried to create raised-line drawings or used PIAF to create a raised line tactile representation to teach male or female anatomy- Look no further! You will never have to draw lungs or a uterus again.
The pages are sturdy, and a major step-up from the old tactile graphics which you might find in the backs of your vision storage rooms.
Webinar Recordings
If you would like to take a peek at what we produced -regardless of writing out our talking points and practicing for time, -often flying unscripted, check out the recordings.
Videos are on APH's YouTube Channel (until they go to live on the Hive)
We hope you will enjoy the webinars or the courses that will be on APH Hive very soon for continued education units.
Disclaimer: I share many links in my posts, but I am not affiliated with APH. I do not earn any commission no matter how many times you clink a link or whether or not you buy/attend/watch any of the suggestions. I simply want professionals to know tools exist to make your lives easier.