Describe a lesson you have taught on the Monarch with a student or client.
Describe goal of the lesson.
Steps of the lesson
What went well?
What did not go well?
Describe a lesson you have taught on the Monarch with a student or client.
Describe goal of the lesson:
Given a Monarch Braille/Tactile Device, the student will identify the various parts and basic functions of the device, with verbal guidance, with 100% accuracy, as measure by teacher collected data.
Describe a lesson you have taught on the Monarch with a student or client.
Basically the student will identify the various features such as the braille keyboard, action button, zoom in/out buttons, d-pad, power button, and page up and down, while also orienting to the device application using the learn keys. The student has previous knowledge of the BrailleNote, so the orientation to the device should only take one lesson.
Steps of the lesson:
- Orient to the top face of the device including that of the braille keyboard, action button, d-pad, zoom in and out, and page up and down buttons.
- Describe the action of each button.
- Orient to the front face of the device to the triangle, circle, and square buttons.
- Describe the actions of each button.
- Orient to the left side of the device.
- Describe the power button and how to activate it.
- Orient to the right side of the device.
- Describe the location and action of the volume up and down buttons.
- Review the concepts learned.
- Have student turn on device.
- Have student use d-pad to scroll through various applications.
- Have student open All Applicaitons.
- Have student go back.
- Have student open KeyMath.
- Have student enter equation in preferred math type.
- Graph equation using context menu or enter+g.
- Use zoom-in and out and d-pad to explore graph created.
- If student has hands while graphing, have them use the action button to refresh. the page.
- Use triangle button to go out.
- Use square button to view all applications by long press and close out applications.
- Use circle button (home button) to go to the main menu.
- Open KeyWord.
- Student will write what they have learned based on the device and our lesson (which will provide a chance for the student to reflect on their learning, solidify content, and allow myself to reflect on my teaching to view how much the student has learned in the process of this lesson.
- Student will use shortcut command to save file to device.
- Student will use backspace+e to escape.
- Student will power off device by holding down power button and selecting the correct item for âpower offâ
What went well?
Student was able to follow all commands and complete the required tasks. Since the student was familiar with the BrailleNote and Chameleon, the device instruction came almost second nature. The student was excited about the Math portion, and I enjoyed it as weel, along with looking at the feedback provided by the student to help me become a more effective educator.
What did not go well:
Some of the shortcut commands did not work for me such as the graphing function and the delete expression in KeyMath. We had to use the context menu to activate the commands.
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Matthew,
This is a wonderful lesson. Thank you for sharing your experiences with students. The math functions are really new, and I know that they will improve with future updates. Your feedback is crucial in identifying things that could work better on the Monarch. Thank you again for being an activity participant on the discussion boards. I look forward to hearing more from you!
While I will keep this simple for now and add a true lesson that I planned out with some of my students later, I still wanted to share something that I worked on with 1 of my students this past week. For the most part, the 2 students that I worked with use their braille writers, but on occasion will use a Focus 40. I have noticed that a lot of my braille students are weak in the area of going back to review their writing and edit it, which I can understand why when they are using a braille writer and paper. With that being said, editing a paper is key to improving their writing so I wanted to work on that with them and get them excited about finding mistakes and fixing them.
To start I had them read some sentences that I brailled correctly just to get them used to the machine. Next, I would braille a simple sentence with 1 error; the students were told to find the error and write it down on a separate piece of paper, which they excitedly did! After both looked at the sentence on the Monarch and identified the error we would talk about it. Then using the âpoint and clickâ function, the student would move the cursor to hover over the error (or at least close by and use the arrows to put the cursor in the exact location), delete the error, and then correct it. After the sentence was fixed, both students would reread the sentence to double check that the mistake was fixed. While this is super basic, it was nice to watch the students get excited for something they usually try their hardest to skip over.
The only trouble that we had was something I had assumed would happen. Because of those lasers that essentially allow the device to see fingers on the screen, one of my students kept having trouble correctly using the point and touch feature because he had too many fingers lingering on the screen. We would talk through it and he had to become very intentional with his fingers, but he was able to successfully use the feature many times!
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I have been using the Monarch with a 5th grade student who has progressive vision loss. She began learning braille this year and is working to improve fluency with reading and writing, and with feeling comfortable utilizing braille for functional tasks in the classroom. She has exposure to the Chameleon, Mantis, Monarch, and I have brought in a few other displays for our lessons.
Initially I thought she would really enjoy the Monarch given how much she loves the Chameleon and Mantis⌠however, she was extremely overwhelmed by the large screen. We have been using the braille editor on the Chameleon to write back and forth (like a chat on a virtual meeting platform) and she loved that. However, having access to that much more braille at one time was too much for her.
Goal of lesson: Read and respond to text in braille using a refreshable braille display (in braille editor).
Steps of lesson: Use braille display to open braille editor, write a sentence or two, TVI reads text and responds, student reads the TVIâs response and responds back.
The student was able to open braille editor without support (has access to and used the Chameleon). She was able to read text on the display and respond to the text. However, the overall size of the Monarch was intimidating. When given a choice between Chameleon and Monarch since this lesson, she has continued to choose Chameleon. I have planned to start doing Monarch Mondays after spring break, where we will use the Monarch to open and read her weekly story and answer the comprehension questions using the multi-line display. I think going forward I will âzoom outâ to show less text on the page with more spaces between lines.
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I think the commands not working for you are actually a positive because you got to model problem-solving and using the context menu in a relevant, functional way. Glad your lesson went well!
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I really like this idea and plan to steal it from you. I have a student that weâve been working intensely this year on editing skills. Weâve finally developed a decent system for the teacher to leave comments and mark errors for him to correct, but Iâd love for him to be able to spot the errors himself. My student sounds older than yours. I think I can find appropriate sentences from various End of Course and ACT prep resources.
My student needs cues as well to keep those extra fingers out of the way while using the point and click. He has noted that it is much easier to point and click now than during field testing.
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One lesson that I am working on with my student is getting to tactile images. My student needs concrete instructions and repetition. In science, the class is learning about solar eclipses. The part of Vermont where I work is in the path of totality. I created 5 images showing different stages of the eclipse: First Contact, Partial Phase One, Totality, Partial Phase Two, and Final Contact.
- Student will locate the button and turn on Monarch
- Once the main menu appears, student will type âtâ to navigate to âTactile Viewerâ and press âenterâ
- Student will hit âenterâ again to open the list of images
- Student will navigate to the desired image using the directional arrows to locate the name
- Student will press enter to open the image
- Student will explore the image
- Student will use the Zoom in button to enlarge the image
- Student will locate and read the braille tags and describe the image
Note: I used this both as practice for my student navigating to tactile images and learning about the solar eclipse. My student was able to navigate to the image without prompts.
Also, I sent pdfs of the images (with print added) to our state meteorologist at the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium. I wanted to make sure I was accurate with the diagrams. He approved and requested tactile images for their event. I will be making tactile/braille/print images using PIAF for the Museum and Planetarium as well as a few places around Vermont. We will be using the images on the Monarch at our eclipse viewing at our organizationâs largest office building.
One problem that I have is that I am using a simbraille font that wonât allow any capitalization or contractions. If anyone knows a way to do this, let me know.
Also, I tried uploading the files, but apparently pdf files are not allowed.
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What a great lesson! We are in the totality as well â as long as our typical spring clouds donât ruin it. I love that you are engaging other entities as well.
As to the capitalization and contractions, you can get them in simbraille using ascii equivalents. For example the ] is the er contraction. The comma is a dot 6 to capitalize. Here are a couple of links for ascii for braille: North American ASCII Braille and https://bit.ly/3x3yCKD Note that there are some quirks, for example your computer will not like the dot 5, but if you hit Ctrl + Z if it wonât stay in simbraille, it will convert back. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
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Thank you sooooo much! I can now fix the braille so that it is how I want it.
We are hoping for clear skies, but we also tend to have spring clouds. With our luck, we will have a massive snowstorm!!
Good luck with your eclipse watchingâŚget those eclipse glasses out!
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Today I used the Monarch to prepare for Mondayâs solar eclipse, as we live in an area of totality, albeit I fear clouds will get in the way. Hereâs a summary of what we did, what skills the student demonstrated, and, most importantly, two problems we faced. Our school has still not connected us to wifi, so files were accessed on a thumb drive.
âPrepared for topic by using two circles with different textures to demonstrate eclipse in motion.
âStudent accessed two previously downloaded TGIL solar eclipse graphics in the Tactile Viewer: accessed proper drive, opened files, explored graphics and text by scanning and point & click.
âStudent accessed teacher-made pdf using previous step skills.
âStudent ejected thumb drive. (We thought correctly, but still got a message that it was not safely ejected.)
2 problems we faced:
âThe first TGIL graphic had a paragraph of text above the graphic. Since the lines of text were wider than those of the Monarch, the student had to keep scrolling left and right to read the beginning and ends of each line. A very slow and tedious process. (sidebar: This must have been an old graphic. The text of the paragraph was apparently in EBAE as we noticed (of)(the) or something like that unspaced.) Lesson learned: keep explanatory text with graphics within the side boundaries of the Monarch margins to make life easier.
âWhile I have successfully created graphics in Word for the Monarch, for this activity I found an image online, inserted it into a Word doc, and added braille labels. While it looked ok by sight, the image was not crisp enough. The Monarch couldnât read the image and hardly anything came out. Lessons learned: create the images yourself and test them out before giving them to a student.
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Hi. If you would like, I can send you the Solar Eclipse images I created for the Monarch. (I submitted them for an activity, but canât share the images here.) They are a series of 5 images showing the different stages of the solar eclipse. I checked my images with the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium, and they liked them. I am actually sending PIAF images of them up to the Planetarium for use at their event. I canât share them here, but if you email me at jneu@vabvi.org, I can send you the pdfs.
2 Likes
Love this lesson, although we are not in the totality my student also needs a lot of concrete examples, instruction and repetition. I have been trying to help him understand concepts through in depth graphics and then doing different assignments which either include reading or writing or searching the internet and finding answers. I love that you were able to create some great images for this. I will be emailing you as requested if you could send them to me. Although the event will have already happened I just went to the training last week and canât wait to use it to its full potential and more.
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Lesson on Typing a Draft Word Document on the Monarch
GOAL: I introduced my high school braille student to the Monarch last week and the goal of our lesson was to learn some of the braille commands on the Monarch so that he can navigate it more quickly and efficiently.
STEPS OF THE LESSON: He has a study sheet I embossed for him with the main document navigation commands and the delete commands. This has been very helpful to both of us! I am going to have him take this home and study and we will continue practicing at school. He has the History STAAR test this Thursday, so we will concentrate more on it after this.
So far, he is able to navigate enough to type a rough draft. The study sheet that was embossed definitely has been useful, and I know after more practice, practice, practice (as Helen Keller said), he will have these commands memorized and will be able to navigate more quickly. He has been very motivated to type letters to friends using the Word Document and he has written 2 so far. I have had him use commands to read part of his letter to me or to help fix typos in his letters. Tomorrow we are going to practice the commands to type to some history notes to help him study and we will implement some of the commands while doing this.
WHAT DID NOT GO WELL: So far, all has gone well. He has been just slightly frustrated at having to learn new commands after spending so much time lately learning JAWS commands.
WHAT WENT WELL: The letter writing was very motivating and the fact that the Monarch talks is a huge plus over the Mantis. I will give him a little quiz on 4/26/24 to see how well he has learned the commands and then we will go on to being able to add a math problem and save this. That is also very motivating to him because we have already practiced with math, and he absolutely loved the idea that he could read the math in braille, hear it, and also be able to feel the graph! Thank you for this wonderful opportunity. One other motivator is the fact that one day he may have his own Monarch and that he is helping âbreak groundâ for this new device! That fact has made him feel very important!!
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I taught a lesson focusing on accessing tactile graphics in the tactile viewer application. Prior to this lesson, the student has been exposed to the tactile viewer application and has explored a tactile graphic. The student has also learned how to turn on the Monarch and navigate the menu. Through this lesson, the student learned how to use the scroll bar to explore the entire tactile graphic, and double click the round button to zoom in on part of the tactile graphic.
Goal: Given an embossed tactile graphic and a Monarch braille display, the student will be able to âzoom inâ on specific parts of a tactile graphic in tactile viewer to identify key details with 80% accuracy as measured by teacher collected data.
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Before turning on the Monarch, the student explored an embossed copy of the tactile graphic so that she understood all of the parts of it before exploring it on the Monarch. The specific tactile graphic used as a part of this lesson was the Solar Eclipse stages.
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Next, the student turned on the Monarch (a skill that was previously taught) and navigated to the files application (a skill that was previously taught). With teacher prompting, the student located the USB drive in the files application and opened a requested file within the USB (solar eclipse stages).
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The student has experience with the tactile graphic after exploring the embossed copy, so she was asked âis the entire graphic showing?â This prompted the student to recognize the problem, which is the basis for this lesson. The graphic displayed on the screen was small and unrecognizable when zoomed out.
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The teacher prompted the student to use the âplus and minusâ oval shaped buttons to zoom in/out. Once the student zoomed in, she explored the graphic to notice that now the image is large and takes up more cells than are available, thus, the entire graphic was not able to be presented at one time.
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The teacher showed the student the scroll bar on the right hand side and let her know that this scroll bar will show how much space she has to move up/down. Using the arrow keys, the student moved to the top of the graphic. Then, she moved down to the bottom of the graphic, exploring each phase of the Solar Eclipse as she moved down.
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The student was then prompted to zoom out to view the small size of the tactile graphic. The teacher pulled from prior knowledge to remind the student of using the round key in between the braille keys. The instructor asked the student to identify what this button was used for in the past. After activating prior knowledge, the student was instructed to place her finger on the first phase of the Solar Eclipse, then double click the round button to quickly zoom into that part of the tactile graphic.
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The student practiced zooming in/out and quickly jumping to requested stages in the tactile graphic.
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The student closed the tactile graphic and powered down the device.
The student met the goal of this lesson by independently âzooming inâ on a requested part of a tactile graphic with 80% accuracy.
What went well: The student was able to use the round button to double click and quickly zoom in on a requested part of the tactile graphic. Although on a few tries, the Monarch would vibrate and did not zoom in on the part of the tactile graphic where she had her finger, the student was mostly successful. I also used this as a teachable moment to explain that when the Monarch does a quick vibration, it is telling her that something did not go right.
What did not go well: At times, the student had a difficult time identifying the stages of the Solar Eclipse in comparison to the embossed version that she had explored prior. The student noted that the tactile graphic was not âperfectâ because it could not make perfect circles with the braille dots. However, it was most challenging when âghost dotsâ would remain on the screen as she moved around the tactile graphic. There were 2 instances where we needed to âresetâ by closing out of the tactile graphic and reopen it because the âghost dotsâ made it impossible to interpret the tactile graphic.
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I also taught a lesson about the solar eclipse using the Monarch! I thought it was a perfect opportunity to teach tactile graphic exploration! 
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Thank you SOOOO much for the tip of Ctrl + Z. I have been struggling with that one!
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Describe a lesson you have taught on the Monarch with a student or client.
In preparation for the Solar Eclipse I used the tactile graphic that is preloaded on the Monarch to help my student be able to feel what would be going on visually.
Describe goal of the lesson.
To create an opportunity for my student to be able to participate in an otherwise very visual experience.
To understand the phases and the process step by step.
Steps of the lesson
- Step one we read an article about what a solar eclipse is.
- Discussed vocabulary (totality, eclipse, phases)
- pulled up graphic on Monarch and used it to be able to feel step by step what was going on.
- Went with peers to the track discussed light perception and what he was experiencing.
- Listened to verbal description of event on podcast.
- We included O&M in this experience.
What went well?
The graphic went well. This was his first experience with this type of graphic and he really enjoyed the opportunity. He requested to feel the sun and moon and reported having always wanting to know what they look like.
What did not go well?
The podcast did not go well. He did not like the auditory noise and did not was to listen to it.
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I am currently using the Monarch with a 1st grade student who is a proficient SMART Brailler and Perkins manual brailler user in the classroom and has in the past 6 months been becoming more familiar with the Chameleon braille notetaker for reading books and taking notes, but not yet doing classwork on). Her excitement when she was first introduced to the Monarch was unlike any other I have seen. The tactile image of the butterfly and connecting how the Monarch butterfly has wings and can take it to any where possible and how the Monarch device does the same for her allowing the possibilities to be exponential and limitless in her flight in braille.
One of the studentâs goals in her IEP was âGiven a topic or assessment, student will improve braille writing skills by writing 10 grade-level appropriate sentences using the correct capitalization, punctuation and spelling.â
The student previously used the either SMART or Perkins brailler to braille sentences using her weekly spelling words and in doing so, did not use the back space and eraser on the SMART brailler and found it too difficult and time consuming to go back and edit her work with the handheld braille eraser for the manual brailler. Often times, she would just continue writing the sentence with the error included. Example: I bought a goldfish at the store. This was the correct sentence. The student would braille i I bought a goodfish goldfish at the store. Instead of deleting the lowercase i and erasing the second o in âgoodfishâ and writing an l, she would instead make the correction next to the error and continue the sentence. Other times she would line space down and start all over again. Not only was this time consuming, but very frustrating for the student.
Steps:
- Student turned Monarch device on.
- Once prompted, student navigated to Braille editor (I chose to use Braille editor to let her locate and fix her own mistakes, as she progresses, we will explore Word Processor KeyWord with spell check features.)
- Using Backspace + N, student opened a new file.
- Student wrote her name and titled her work.
- Student began writing one sentence at a time using her spelling words from the classroom teacher.
- Following writing the sentence, the student would reread the written sentence and locate errors and fix them. Student used point and click function as well as the directional arrows to move up and down through sentences.
- After each sentence, student advanced to a new line and wrote the next.
- Once all sentences were completed, student saved work using Space+S and named file âSentencesâ.
The sentence exercise on the Monarch went extremely. She had instant feedback to correct her work on the Monarch versus the brailler where she would have to move the paper feed out to check her work and then back in to continue her work. He was able to go back and read all of the sentences and check her work in a timely and efficient manner. Her familiarity with the Chameleon made the transition to the Monarch for this exercise excellent. Both share many commands, so there wasnât much to relearn in Braille editor. The student enjoyed and successfully used the arrows to move through the document.
As with all technology, there is an adjustment period. The Monarch is a much larger device than the Chameleon she is used to and takes up more desk space. In doing the sentences and correcting the errors with the point and click mode, it seemed challenging for the student displayed by some frustration. Perhaps it is because her fingers are less exact in their movement and the one finger isolation is a little difficult due to her age. This can be worked on over time and I expect improves with repeated use.
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I also used the solar eclipse as a perfect example for teaching the stages of the solar eclipse, along with providing a grade level appropriate book to accompany information about the eclipse. The student really enjoyed being able to tactually feel the different stages. My student also made note how the circles were not complete due to dots not going all the way around. This was a wonderful example of how our visually impaired students can have the same experience as their sighted peers in their format and access to it in real time.