Discuss a “Glow” (something you got excited about) and a “Grow” (something that has room for improvement) you have encountered with the Monarch:
Software,
Hardware,
Instruction…
As a totally blind consumer, assistive technology professional, and parent of a blind child, there have been two occasions on which a technology product moved me to tears because of the kind of access to the world which it afforded me and the people with whom I consistently work. One such occasion happened on Tuesday January 223, 2024. It happened out of the blue. I was walking out of the Vinoy room at the Orlando World Center Marriott, desperately seeking some cool air and a large reservoir of water. As I made my way to the water station, thoughts of my son, Gavin, began to fill my head. Gavin is a precotious 8-year-old who has been strongly influenced by my work as an assistive technology specialist and who would rather check out any new piece of technology than eat his next three meals. But it struck me, as I filled one of those tiny cups with deliciously frigid water, that the Monarch really isn’t about technology. I mean, it is, in the sense that we have to learn it and teach it as a new, ground-breaking device. But it is far, far more about equality. And not only equality. It’s about inclusion.
When I think back to my days in school as a low-vision student whose primary learning medium was always Braille, I think about all of the activities from which I was excluded. I never saw the slides which my teachers displayed on one of those old, hot, boxy projectors. I never got to be the person in my lab groups keeping track of data tables. I usually had to try to learn geography by trying to picture what maps might look like, based on other people’s descriptions. Sometimes, parts of my books weren’t ready when I needed them. Sometimes, my overworked, underpaid TVI would make dozens of mistakes in transcribing materials by hand, making reading difficult. I can remember the feel of my hands bumping along that old thermoform paper in the humid air of my East-Coast school. To say that reading on that medium was cumbersome is like saying that the surface of the sun is slightly warm.
Anyway, I thought about all of that, just standing there. And, much to my chagrin, the tears came. They came because Gavin is experiencing most of those problems right now. He’s so, so, so smart, but he is struggling in math. Why? Because he just doesn’t have a great way of doing it. He’s struggling along with the antiquated tools and techniques which I used when I was a child of his age almost 35 years ago. He is, as I was, largely a passive learner, because that is what his current tools and skills allow.
But my tears weren’t those of sadness and regret. They were tears of hope and joy. Because Gavin is going to grow up, from here on out, with a Monarch. He’s going to have the tools which he now lacks and which I lacked. He is going to become an active learner, and he’s going to become a leader in those lab groups. He’s going to feel the pictures that everyone sees. He’s going to see math problems arranged vertically. He’s going to have instant access to tactile graphs and to all of the other resources used by his sighted peers.
Gavin is super fortunate that I was chosen as an early adopter and tester of this remarkable technology. We absolutely have to do everything we possibly can to make Gavin’s upcoming experience the rule, rather than the exception. Let’s go out there and make a whole bunch of other parents know the happy feeling of crying those joyful tears.
8 Likes
As a Braille Instructor of blind adults, I can see that the Monarch is going to grow with them especially for learning to track while reading on a multi-line braille display. THE Monarch is also going to help blind adults who are going to college as they will be able to access all of their class materials at the same time as their sighted peers. As a Deafblind individual, I would like for the Monarch to have bluetooth, so that a deaf blind individual could hook up their bluetooth hearing aids to this device to be able to access information at the same time as they are reading it on the braille display.
5 Likes
Hi all, what are your thoughts about having the cover not only have a handle but also have a way to make it a slanted surface?
1 Like
Yes! We kept trying to instinctively prop it during training.
My first “Glow” is the excitement I felt this week as I was able to provide tactile graphics in “real time” for one of my students. His class was doing a unit on dinosaurs. I didn’t know that they had moved to a new unit, so I wasn’t prepared with dinosaur supports. I was able to quickly pull up several dinosaur TG’s from the TGIL already installed on our Monarch. As a dinosaur song played, we were able to keep up with the video with our graphics for each of the dinosaurs. The TGIL already pre-loaded saved the day! It was just so cool to have that at our fingertips in an instant!
7 Likes
Yes–a handle. Since it does not fit easily in my backpack, a handle or strap would be great. And a slant surface–yes. I kept looking next to me at my neighbor’s Monarch because I could “read” the braille visually better looking at hers than at the one in front of me. I think a slant would help.
Good morning, Monarch Masters!
A ‘glow’ I have encountered while using this device is being able to push into a math classroom and being able to provide graphics in the moment which the teacher create on the board visually. We have worked together with the pre-calculus teacher to create graphs for sine, cosine, and tangent in which were almost impossible to do before. The student is now able to input the equation with support, activate the graphing function, and be able to feel the graphic in the moment to explain it to myself and his educator. The teacher also commented on how useful the device is and how they had difficulty before trying to get graphics in the moment to the student before I took over for another TVI.
A ‘grow’ moment or some piece of advice is that when I did complete the sine cosine and tangent function, it completely disabled the shortcut command for graphing and deleting expressions. We have to go into the context menu to be able to activate the graphing or delete expression function. This may be a glitch, but I have been unable to resolve this. Also, possibly having the graph round up to the nearest whole number or be able to provide insight to using Pi and other mathematical functions - as a choice you can select beforehand - so the graph knows how to display itself - like radians or whole numbers - and displaying those numbers on the graph as well.
1 Like
I agree wholeheartedly. The access this provided is unparalleled - though there are some bugs which need to be worked out and possible improvements to the software - but it is definitely a start to the process of complete access for blind and visually impaired individuals.
This device will allow the individual, as you said it yourself, to be fully included in the educational setting. This device can provided text and graphics in the moment, instead of waiting for the braille to be produced by the TVI or braille specialist, or producing braille themselves and having to wait longer than usual for turn-around based on the need to transcribe and then submit to the teacher for grading.
We can continue to grow this device, and share our hope and joy for the future of blind and visually impaired individuals to continue to receive access through means of new technology and new techniques to promote active learning within the educaitonal setting.
I agree wholeheartedly. The access this provided is unparalleled - though there are some bugs which need to be worked out and possible improvements to the software - but it is definitely a start to the process of complete access for blind and visually impaired individuals.
This device will allow the individual, as you said it yourself, to be fully included in the educational setting. This device can provided text and graphics in the moment, instead of waiting for the braille to be produced by the TVI or braille specialist, or producing braille themselves and having to wait longer than usual for turn-around based on the need to transcribe and then submit to the teacher for grading.
We can continue to grow this device, and share our hope and joy for the future of blind and visually impaired individuals to continue to receive access through means of new technology and new techniques to promote active learning within the educational setting.
Same here! I could also see the joy in the students face to finally be able to participate fully in his learning and be an active learner using this device. This was in regard to using it in a math setting for creating graphs to explain various trigonometric equations like sine and cosine in pre-calculus. But I am so happy to see that it is being utilized in other settings to make learning more purposeful and having the student be more active in their learning. We all know we don’t get the required materials in a timely manner as much as we would like to, and this device has provided us access - just like you - in the moment! So glad to see this!!
Thank you for sharing your experience. This is EXACTLY the type of impact we are hoping to hear about. How wonderful to hear about the Monarch “saving the day” for a hardworking TVI.
I experienced a big “Glow-up” today! I have a student that is VERY averse to typing on traditional braillers (we tried several models). This student becomes extremely agitated and often angry when he is asked to type on the brailler. Today we practiced writing his name on the Monarch. I gave him some headphones so he could hear the “voice” give him immediate feedback. He LOVED it! (We tried the Perkins SmartBrailler without success in the past). We got through all of our alphabetic wordsigns that he’s learned so far and then HE REQUESTED that we keep writing more words so we did some assisted free-writing…HOLY MOLY, WOW!!! I was holding back the tears. It’s taken us 18 months to get to this point. This was a big break-thru moment made possible thanks to the Monarch!
2 Likes
My glow was the excitement one of my students had when she started to navigate through the Monarch, go into Bookshare, and read a downloaded book. This student I am referring to is a middle school student, so school and reading are super “mehh” to her right now. When I told her I had a new device for her to read and write on, she was instantly excited. Then when she realized that the screen allowed her to have more lines of text on it, she was absolutely thrilled. After reading her book for 20 minutes, we had to go back to class but she was begging for extra time and asking when she would be able to use the Monarch to read next. I love how the introduction to a new, beneficial device got my student excited to learn again! So excited to introduce the Monarch to more of my students. So thankful I got my hands on one so that I can get my students’ hands on it, too!
3 Likes
My Glow would probably be how excited I was to get my Monarch at the end of May. I had seen the prototype, at ATIA 2022, but this was amazing! Another glow would be the first time I had the opportunity I had to share it with teachers and students. My Grow would be how far it has come since those early days, especially in adding math, text to speech, using Bookshare and more and more keyboard shortcuts working as expected. Being able to train on and present about the Monarch will be an amazon Glow as well once it is released! The ulitmate Grow is the growth that the Monarch will allow our students to achieve by the increased access it provides to books, tactile graphics, and many other materials!
That is awesome Gina! My kiddo was amazed at being able to manipulate the size and rotation of graphics. I loved that the device seemed to instill some incentive to make independent steps towards using their technology devices that are already available.
Glow: Every time I show Keymath to a student and have them enter a simple graphable equation such as x=y, it blows their mind when it appears in real time on the display. I have been introducing a few students to the Monarch, but I have to do Keymath last because they want to spend the rest of the time putting in equations and feeling them. Students have also been blown away by the point and click function–using it to open apps, move the cursor and zoom in on a graphic. Once they figure out how to do it–they try it everywhere.
Grow: using Space with 1, 3, 4 or 6 takes to corners of a graphic. One student wondered if there could be a command to go back to the center of the graphic without having to leave back out to the far zoomed out view.
Grow #2: In KeyMath, students can continually zoom in and out in increments. Can a similar function be implemented in tactile graphics. For instance, on the butterfly life cycle, a student wanted to see the whole butterfly. Zoomed in, only pieces of the butterfly are visible at a time. Zooming back out–the super shrunk version which is not discernable.
A “Glow” with the Monarch has definitely got to be the math features. I did a lesson with the hyperbola and my tenth grade student’s face lit up to feel the graph! It was so neat to see his excitement and making math come to life for the student was priceless.
A “Grow” for me with the Monarch is the limitations it has (right now) with not being able to download additional apps on it, as we can with the BrailleNote Touch Plus. Being able to add Google Apps for education applications, such as the Google Classroom and LMS apps, such as Canva, would be valuable.
Same here! I could also see the joy in the students face to finally be able to participate fully in his learning and be an active learner using this device. This was in regard to using it in a math setting for creating graphs to explain various trigonometric equations like sine and cosine in pre-calculus. But I am so happy to see that it is being utilized in other settings to make learning more purposeful and having the student be more active in their learning. We all know we don’t get the required materials in a timely manner as much as we would like to, and this device has provided us access - just like you - in the moment! So glad to see this!!
2 Likes
My students love the graphing function as well! We have been completing trigonometric equations with sine and cosine - and it shows them in real time instead of me taking 10 minutes to complete a graphic - it makes my life easier and I can focus on providing instruction and not making the graphic as the instruction has already passed! I did find my Monarch would stop doing the key command for graphing after inputting the sine and cosine functions, and I had to use context menu to activate the shortcut commands, and even the erase equation shortcut command did not work. Hoping for a fix here soon!