Hello all,
I received my Monarch on Tuesday of this week and came back to work and promptly showed everyone! I just wanted to share some of the reactions I got because they were absolutely priceless!
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When I got home, my own sighted children asked if I brought the new baby home? haha…aka the Monarch! When I showed them the basics of it, my 15 y/o said “Bro, you gotta get these for your students, they are going to love it!”
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One of my 1st grade students was smiling and ooooing when she was in the braille editor and it gave auditory feedback! She said, “it’s like typing but with braille!”
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Another 1st grade student who loves math was impressed by the Math Type and promptly worked on putting in her newly learned Nemeth numbers and when the answer popped up on the screen, she read it and said “ha, this Monarch knows its math!” She also asked, “is it called the Monarch because it’s the same colors as a Monarch butterfly?” I was impressed she noticed that detail!
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I presented it to the principal and vice principal of a school and their faces lit up with excitement and then promptly asked, “how do we get this for our students?”
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My favorite was our IT guy! He has learned so much from connecting our embossers, to our Chameleons and Focus40’s, but he totally geeked out about the Monarch! He said, “so basically this is an iPad for the visually impaired, yeah we need these!”
There were several others that were so impressed, but these have been my favorite reactions so far! I wanted to share and see if anyone else had some great quotes from the students/educators/people not in the field upon first impressions.
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I can’t wait until Monday to show this to my two braille kiddos and others. I have been at TAER, so wasn’t able to do much with my Monarch until now! I think it will be a game changer for my kindergartener. I have done all kinds of fun activities with braille and he loses interest pretty quickly, but I am very positive the Monarch will keep him engaged better!
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These comments make me so excited! I can’t wait to get my mine!!
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Hi, I’m new here. I just saw the monarch for the first time a few weeks ago at the CSUN conference and can’t wait for the training later this week. i’m so looking forward to bringing it back and showing it off.
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I have know had my Monarch for two weeks and the student I am teaching it to LOVES it. He is now motivated to read braille and learn how to scan pictures.
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My older student also has loved the Monarch!!! He really enjoyed that there were 10 lines instead of just one, and he REALLY thought it was awesome that the Monarch talked to him as he typed because he has been using the Mantis, which doesn’t talk. He said it was like using JAWS. Our main obstacle is now learning the braille commands, so that will be our first lesson! He also really enjoyed the math and the tactile graphics on the Monarch. I am going to introduce it to my kindergartener next week! I think it will really motivate him to want to read and type braille more!
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I received my Monarch last week and have now had the opportunity to show it to a few people.
My sighted wife said “wow, that looks so cool! It’s like an old school atari with the different controlls.”
My boss had seen one but is so excited to have one in the building now.
One of my colleagues had seen it but was so excited to lern the point and click feature to zoom in on the graphics.
Another colleague was excited to be able to point and click to zoom in on specific states on the US map that was included. He was also so excited by the graphic of the solar eclipse I downloaded during training. (A huge thank you to whoever created that graphic after receiving their Monarhc.)
This is an absolutely awesome device and will be such a game changer in so many ways and for so many people.
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I brought the Monarch to my high school for a few days after bringing it home. Generally, the response was positive from both of my high school students, one who is a BNT+ user and the other who has been learning braille as a tertiary medium for instability in his visual status. Both were impressed by its ability to zoom in on images, provide braille labels on images, create graphs, link to Bookshare and other resources, and to be able to produce a print graph to send to teachers. It was a bit of a learning curve for my seasoned braille student to not advance the text after every line, as he does with the BNT+. Once oriented to the line indicator at the beginning of the highlighted text line, he was able to locate this fairly easily. He did mention that the presentation of this marker, which is typically a full cell, would sometimes lag and appear as a possible random letter. He also noticed this as he was panning with images, and there would be stray dots raised that he thought were necessary but weren’t. The other concern was that once zoomed in, there was no option to zoom in farther or to zoom out in steps rather than zooming out entirely. Overall though, he was excited for the possibilities in newer updates!
I’m so glad you had such positive experiences, especially with the principal and IT. When I brought my Monarch home, I was eager to share it with anyone who would listen. My 5th grade student was so excited that she wanted to ditch all of her other technology and solely use the Monarch. She has a new found obsession with Monarch butterflies and even wrote an acrostic poem about Monarch butterflies. You can imagine how excited she was when the tactile graphic of the Monarch popped up when she turned on the Monarch for the first time.
However, I have not had such great reactions from administration and IT. Administration was not too interested, which I think is because they do not realize what the Monarch is truly capable of and why it is so revolutionary. IT, on the other hand, was actually kind of scared of the Monarch… When I had asked for help getting the Monarch connected to the internet, he asked me for the device handbook and general information about the device in order to have it approved for the WiFi network. At the end, he deemed that the device was “unsafe” to add to our WiFi network and I had to opt for the guest network. He questioned why I would go with a device that has not yet been widely used and is not yet available on the market… then I had to explain how revolutionary this device is and that it is the only one of its kind. I still don’t think he truly understands.
My biggest concern is that administration and IT are not on my side and are not understanding the true benefits of this device. As we all know very well, advocacy is the most crucial part of our job.
Your experience is unfortunate to read, but not entirely unexpected from my work with districts and government agencies. I’ve always handled these situations by overly educating this staff on the benefits of the device and by offering published resources that they can browse or contact. The plethora of materials on the Monarch Teacher Training program, and the materials listed on the “Meet the Monarch,” product page should be suffice with most administrations. During launch in September, more official materials will be distributed along with some of the information they seem to be skeptical about. If you need to offer my email: jmartin@aph.org as a contact, please do. Unfortunately this is a stigma our students often face with IT and it can be difficult to advocate when you are receiving “security” jargon from the team as a response for your students access, which is seldom applied to non-disabled students in the same fashion. Keep advocating, educating, and if you need assistance from me or our team, I’d happily send correspondence to possibly ease the process.
All the best,
Jason M.
Jason, would it be a good idea to create a help document specifically for IT representatives that anticipates potential problems and security issues, guides them through the process of connecting the Monarch to a district wi-fi system, and provides contact information for them to ask questions and troubleshoot concerns? In addition to the very valuable information now available about the Monarch and its features and benefits, it would be so helpful if everyone had a document like this that they could provide to their representatives when they ask for a connection.