ATU694 – Objective Ed with Marty Schultz

Hi, this is Marty Schultz, president and co-founder of ObjectiveEd. This is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello, and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update. A weekly dose of information that keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson, with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 694 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on September 13th, 2024.

On this Friday the 13th, we’re super excited to welcome Marty Schultz to the show. He is the president and co-founder of ObjectiveEd. We’re also excited to be joined by Amy Barry from BridgingApps with An App Worth Mentioning. As always, listeners, we thank you for listening. Now let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Listeners, we are super excited to partner with our employment program here at Easterseals Crossroads, to offer assistive technology and employment full day training coming up on Thursday, October 3rd from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM Eastern Time. This marks our final full day training of the year here, for us here at INDATA. As I said, we’re very excited to partner with our employment program here at Easterseals Crossroads, in honor of National Disability Employment Awareness Month.

During this training, we are super excited to welcome folks from JAN to present on inclusive strategies for welcoming applicants and including employees with disabilities. I’ll also present on assistive technology job placement, job accommodation, and all that fun stuff. Then we will welcome the folks from our employment program here at Easterseals Crossroads for a whole seminar on the job search, as well as an employer panel featuring representatives from some employers here in Indiana, and how they work to employee individuals with disabilities. We’re very, very excited for this training. As I said, it will happen on October 3rd, to kick off National Disability Employment Awareness Month.

If you are interested in attending any of our trainings, but especially this one coming up on October 3rd, you can go over to eastersealstech.com. Check out our full day trainings, and sign up right there. It is free to attend, but you do have to register, especially if you need any of those continuing education units or CEUs. This training is available both online and in-person. If you’re not able to make it here to Indianapolis, you can always join us online. Or if you happen to be in the neighborhood, please do stop by. We always love having folks in-person, now that that is again a possibility.

If you’re interested in learning more about assistive technology and employment, please do join us for our full day training on Thursday, October 3rd from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM Eastern, here at Easterseals Crossroads and online. You can check that out at eastersealstech.com. I will also put a link down in the show notes where you can go and secure your tickets. Don’t forget, it is free to attend but you do have to register in order to be able to attend that day, both in-person and online. We look forward to seeing you there!

Listeners, up next we are very excited to welcome back Amy Barry from BridgingApps to the show, with An App Worth Mentioning. Take it away, Amy.

This is Amy Barry with BridgingApps, and this is An App Worth Mentioning. This week’s featured app is called RightHear Blind Assist. RightHear is a free navigation tool for users with visual impairments. It helps users easily orient themselves in all environments by providing information about their environment when indoors and outdoors where Bluetooth beacons are installed.

RightHear has a very simple interface. After downloading the app, users just have to open it to hear their current location. If they are not in a RightHear enabled location, then the app will start naming what is near them. If users are within range of a RightHear enabled location, they will hear their current location and what is around them indoors when they turn their phone in different directions. If available, users can also call a local representative for the location that they are in through the app. Open the business’ web page, use the lens feature to access third party object recognition apps, such as Be My Eyes, Seeing AI, Cash Reader, and also Envision AI. As well, as know the direction that they’re walking towards.

RightHear was trialed by a BridgingApps staff member and her blind client in the Easterseals building. The client liked that the app was easy to use and did not require much instruction. She liked that she did not need to use her camera to navigate indoors, and that all she had to do was point her phone in different directions to receive information about her environment.

As of Fall 2024, the RightHear website states that there are 2381 RightHear enabled locations worldwide. The app is currently available for both Android and iOS devices, and it’s free to download. For more information on this app and others like it, visit bridgingapps.org.

Listeners, today we are super excited to welcome Marty Schultz from ObjectiveEd to Assistive Technology Update, to tell us all about the tools that they have available to assist individuals with disabilities to maximize their education.

Marty, welcome to the show.

Thanks for inviting us.

Yeah. I am super excited to learn about ObjectiveEd, all the great things that you all are doing. But before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Sure. As I mentioned, I’m co-founder of ObjectiveEd, and president. We started this company about six years or so ago, to use education technology to help kids with disabilities improve both their employment and education outcomes.

My background is as a serial social entrepreneur. This is about the fifth or sixth company that I’ve kicked off. This is our give back company, to really make a difference with children.

Awesome, awesome. Well, we’re very glad that you’re giving back, and that they’ve got someone with the experience of starting a company on board as well.

I guess to start with, with the big picture. What is ObjectiveEd?

Well, we provide education technology tools using really cutting edge technologies to make a difference. We started off originally doing orientation and mobility skill-building games, assistive technology skill-building games, and braille literacy skill-building games for kids and adults with vision impairments. We did that for the first couple of years. Then COVID kicked in, and then a lot of schools took advantage of the fact that they could get access to all these skill-building games at no cost during the beginning of COVID. A lot of them came back and decided this was an important curriculum, and dealt with a lot of the issues of the expanded core curriculum.

Along the way, one of the ideas we had was to help improve braille literacy using speech recognition. Some AI natural language processing. It was called Braille AI Tutor. The way this system worked is a teacher would write a short two or three paragraph story, and then Braille AI Tutor would send down to an iPad and a braille display, one sentence at a time. Then the student would read that sentence on their braille display, reading out loud, orally. If they got it right, they would move ahead in the treasure hunting game. That project was actually funded through a grant that we won from Microsoft AI for Accessibility Group.

We then took that technology and applied to the National Science Foundation to say, “Hey, I wonder if there’s a way we can use this same type of speech recognition to help kids with dyslexia.” The idea that we had would be the kid and the computer would alternate reading one sentence at a time from the screen using any book that’s out there. Then the computer would analyze how well the kid has read that sentence, help the kid where they struggled, and show the teacher in a dashboard where they need additional assistance.

Well, as I mentioned, we won a grant from the National Science Foundation, both a phase one and phase two grant, to build out this product called Buddy Books. To get content for Buddy Books, we did a partnership with Benetech Bookshare, who provides over a million books for anybody with a reading or print disability. Buddy Books comes with access to all the books in the Bookshare library. We’ve been providing this for both school districts and a lot of parents who have kids with dyslexia, through different voucher programs in states like Texas, Arizona, and South Carolina, and others. We’ve been doing that for about the past two years or so.

More recently, we’ve been looking into see whether or not Buddy Books can be very effective in the after school market, open some to small after school. Because in addition to kids moving ahead in their literacy in regular school, a lot of kids in underserved areas and other kids who are struggling readers because of dyslexia, or autism, or ADHD, or speech and language impairments, need some extra time. We worked with Benetech Bookshare to run a pilot program in the Detroit area, an underserved community, working closely with a Black United Fund school there. Then down in West Palm Beach area, we worked with two or three different schools. One of which was the Edna Runner Tutorial Center.

In the latter one, the Edna Runner School, we worked with kids that were anywhere from, say about second or third grade, up through about fifth or sixth grade. Most of these kids were at least one to two years behind in their reading as compared to their peers. They used Buddy Books for about five weeks. They were using it about three to four times a week, around about 30 minutes each day. The cool thing about Buddy Books is, as I mentioned, the kid and the computer will alternate reading one sentence at a time out of any book. Now since it’s every other sentence, it’s a lower cognitive load, which means kids can be enjoying books at their interest level, as opposed to their reading skill level, which they might think are more kiddie books.

The kids were really engaged in using Buddy Books. We found out that, just after five weeks of using it, the worst performing readers, these were kids that were at least two years behind their peers in their reading, they improved their accuracy by about 10%. It went up from about 70% accuracy to 80% accuracy in these books. But their reading fluency, measured in correct words per minute, went up from about 70 words per minute to 80 words per minute. That was just five weeks of using Buddy Books.

We’ve seen, in general with Buddy Books, close to two grade levels of improvement for every year that a student uses it. Given the crisis of reading and what’s happening in the United States, and all around the world, to help kids really improve their reading. Whether they’re simply a struggling reader, whether it’s something related to COVID pandemic learning loss, whether they have ADHD or autism, or whether they have dyslexia, in all those categories, in low vision, Buddy Books seems to be a very effective intervention to help the kids really improve their reading skills.

That’s one half of what we do. The blind and low vision, and then the Buddy Books. I’ll be quiet now and let you ask some questions.

Well, wow. That is so much to unpack. But I have to start with just a question about … I’ve worked with so many folks, I’ve never done ONM, but I’ve worked with a lot of folks that do or have went through it. I have to ask how ONM training can be done electronically with an app? Can you tell me about either the games, the process, or how that all works?

Sure. At the very simplest level, for ONM, we have one game where the child is learning either clock directions or compass directions. Let’s say there’s a cow in the middle of the field. It can work for a low vision or a blind student. They move their thing around on the screen until they get to the cow, and then they’re told to drag the cow to, say the north fence. They drag the cow there. If they pick the right fence, meaning dragging up, then they get points. Then it says, “Okay, now drag the duck to the west fence.” Or, as it moves more and more, “Drag the dog to 6:00,” or something like that. Then the game has multiple levels, so it gets harder and harder. You can set the timing and do a lot of other customization with this game called Barnyard, to really help them improve their skills.

For students who have really mastered those type of directions, then we move into something called Temple Explorer, where you’re going through an old, ancient temple. You have to discover different rooms. In this case, you’re given instructions, “Head three rooms to the north, or to 3:00, open the door, and then make a left turn. Then walk to the end of the room. There you’ll get something that’ll help you pursue your treasure hunting in this temple.”

Nice. I love how you make it fun and interesting. Any time I feel like you can trick kids into think they’re having fun and not realize they’re learning, it always seems to get a little bit more out of them.

Also, just to stick with the blind and low vision part. You might have mentioned this. You mentioned so much, my head is spinning a little bit. There’s also some games to help folks learn how to use some assistive technology, is that correct? Like Voiceover, and things like that? Can you tell us about those?

Sure. That actually is a two phase project. The one thing we did, we have several games that work to teach, for one thing, iOS gestures for the iPhone and the iPad. We have one game where the game adds a new gesture, each time you do another round, it gets a little faster.

First it might say, “Swipe up with one finger.” Then they do it correctly. It’ll say, “Swipe left with two fingers,” and they do it correctly. Then it’ll say, “Tap with three fingers,” and they do that. Then they move onto the next level, and they repeat the first things. Then they add another one to it. Each time they move up a level in the game, there’s another gesture that they have to do, and it gets faster, and faster, and faster. They score points and move ahead in the game. That’s a cool way to do it. That’s the new gesture thing.

Using that concept, we did a project with CNIB, which used to be the Canadian National Institute of the Blind, now it’s just known as CNIB, called Voiceover Playground. What they want to do is help kids that are becoming, say three years old and six or seven years old, just before they’re starting kindergarten. They want to make sure they had all the assistive technology skills that they needed to enter school so they’d be on par with their peers. It took us about 18 months, the project. We came out with six or seven different apps, and a training guide for all the teachers and parents, that they could sit down with their low vision or blind child, and go through all the concepts of assistive technology on the iPad. Things like split tap, and doing all the gestures, and getting into some early use of a braille display. All these different features are in there to really help the child understand how to use an iPad and be ready for kindergarten when they start. That was, again, called Voiceover Playground.

That is awesome. Going onto Buddy Books, you did a great job describing. I know there’s a version for educators and one for parents. Can you tell us the difference between those versions?

Only based on the number of students that we’re working with. Parents can get it directly off of our website through some voucher programs, and we also work with school districts. Where instead of one or two children using it, they’ll bring them to multiple classrooms, all using it-

Okay, nice.

It might be out of the special ed dept, because the kids have an IEP, or they have 504s. Now we’re seeing a lot of demand out of general ed as well, where they want to help their struggling readers significantly improve their fluency, and accuracy, and comprehension.

Oh, excellent. But the user experience is the same on both sides? Perfect, perfect.

It’s the same product on both sides, because we know what is working and we make sure the product has all those features in it.

Excellent. I think there’s even some kind of tools for teachers and parents. We talked a little bit about how it helps the students. Can you tell us about the dashboard and how it can give really good information to the parents, the teachers, and others?

Sure. When the child does a reading, we’re actually recording everything and analyzing it all the way down to the word and phoneme level. Then we show, in the dashboard, different charts like what their fluency is, what their accuracy, are they dropping certain words. Are they skipping endings? Are they skipping over certain sentences? What words do they seem to be really mispronouncing? All that’s shown in the dashboard. Then if the parent or the teacher wants to dive down more to understand what’s going on, we even let them listen to the child’s recording. Not only do we rate it numerically. The accuracy, let’s say 93%. But the parent or the teacher can listen to exactly how the child read each sentence.

Then from that, we let the parent or the teacher decide what they want to focus on. If the child’s dropping the ING ending, or they’re having trouble with a certain phoneme, the parent or the teacher can focus on one or two of those at first, to make sure the child is [inaudible 00:18:26] before they move onto other things.

In addition, we have, prior to each day’s reading for the child, we have an intervention that’s called Review Mode that helps the child when the struggle. When the child’s actually reading, we don’t correct them and tell them they made a mistake. We want it to be a completely positive experience. But what we do do is at the beginning of each day, we look back at the prior day’s reading and we look for a passage that they really had trouble with. Then we implement several features that are part of the science of reading and have been recommended to us by the research committee that helped designed Buddy Books.

The first is we will model read that passage to the child, so they know what it should sound like. Words that they might have guessed at, they’ll actually hear them properly pronounced. For example, if they saw the word arrangement and they guessed it was argument, they’ll actually hear that was properly read as arrangement. Then they get to listen to how they read it, and that’s called self-monitoring. They can see the difference between the modeling of how it should have been read, and what they actually did in self-monitoring. Then we give the kids an extra chance to reread that passage that we struggled with. We see an improvement of about 25% in their fluency just from that type of review mode alone, above and beyond anything the teacher does with the child.

That’s excellent. I love how you keep it positive, and really involve the student in their learning as well. And in making those improvements, and everything. That’s great.

I know you also had some resources for folks in pre-ETS, and a little bit of job assistance and job readiness. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Sure. I’ve described two of our different product lines. One being the Buddy Books reading system, and the gamified educational tools for kids with blind or low vision.

We also have another product line that we’ve been building out under both the National Institutes of Health, and National Institutes of Disability and Independent Learning Rehabilitation Research, NIDILR. Who helped kids in the pre-ETS range, which is about 14 to 22, improve different skills.

The first one we started with was for kids with vision impairment learning how to get a summer job. They played this, what I’ll call a virtual event story. It could all be called a choose your own adventure. Where kids get to experience the natural consequences of the decisions they make the in story, and the first story we did was getting a summer job. They would have to find what jobs were available by interacting with this story. Apply to the job, do the interview, go through the first day of training. The better they do, the better the job they get. The best job is, say working at the front desk. The worst job might be collecting towels at a country club from the pool.

Once we did that one and found how well it worked, and how it taught skills for the young high school kids, we did the same thing for kids on the autism spectrum and that worked really well. It dealt with some issues that kids with low vision or the blind didn’t deal with, but relate to more dealing with different types of body language and expectations of certain types of social behavior for kids on the autism spectrum.

From there, we did another one that was helping both kids with ADHD and kids on the autism spectrum build up a set of skills so that they wouldn’t drop out of college in the first year. There’s a real problem with a lot of kids with disabilities, they drop out of college in the first year because of not receiving enough independent skillsets. And being college capability, but not college ready. That ends up in a lot of frustrations in the first six months of the college experience, and they end up dropping out, and not continuing onto years two and three. We thought, “Well, let’s create a bunch of these virtual adventures so kids get to experience what it’ll be like, so that when they encounter these situations in the real world, they’ll be better able to handle it.”

For the last thing, an example might be a kid has all this paperwork. Let’s say the kid has ADHD, and have all their paperwork. They turn it into the Office of Disability Services that says they get extra test taking time. Then they go to class. Two weeks into the semester, the professor announces that there’s a quiz today. The kid raises their hand and says, “You do know that I’m allowed to have extra test taking time?” The professor says, “Well, not in my class you don’t.” They have to deal with this difficult situation.

Do they argue with the professor right then and there? Do they storm out of the classroom? Do they take the test and hope for the best? Do they head back over to the Office of Disability Services? Do they drop the class? A lot of different option they can take. The story evolves based on the decisions they make. That way, when this does happen, again, they’re prepared.

Then finally, we did one, we’re actually starting on our phase two of this, teaching social skills to students who are blind or low vision in middle school. We did a pilot initially about a year or two ago, working with some key researchers and practitioners. Dr. Penny Rosenblum, who’s done a lot of work there. Dr. Sharon Sachs, who is the board chair at San Francisco Lighthouse For the Blind. And a number of other key researchers. We did the pilot, it worked really well on the disability side. That’s one story. Now we’re working on about five or six more stories as part of our phase two effort.

Awesome. I love that. You’re helping them from early readers and early adopters, all the way up to getting that first job, that summer job, and even getting into college. That’s really great that you can help them along that whole part of the lifecycle.

Marty, could you tell me a story, maybe about someone’s success, using really any of these tools, and how they really changed their learning and their life?

I think the coolest thing is, during COVID, there was a little girl. She was about in third, or fourth, or fifth grade. I would get videos from her and her TBI ONM from time to time. She just went on and on about how much she loves the games. What she said is, “These games are so educational,” because she gets to really practice skills that her teacher was teaching her, but in a fun way. She also likes to see the results in the charts, to actually see that she’s getting better and better.

We’ve noticed, across all the different tools, not only do kids like using the tools, but they like to see that they’re making progress. We make all that available so the teacher can share it with the student.

Nice. Excellent, excellent. Marty, if our listeners want to find out more about these tools, how they can help, how to get their hands on them, and all that stuff, what’s a good way for them to do that?

Sure. They can reach out to us at info@objectiveed.com. Or they can visit us at the website at www.objectiveed.com. That’s O-B-J-E-C-T-I-V-E-E-D.com.

Excellent. We will put all that in the show notes. I feel like we could talk all day and dig into everything, Marty, but I don’t want to run too much over on time. Thank you so much for coming on, for telling us about all the great tools available through ObjectiveEd. Definitely, folks, go check it out because it’s some very cool tools. I’m pretty sure, if you’ve worked with any students with disabilities, you’re probably going to find at least one that’s going to be able to help someone out there.

Marty, thank you so much for coming on and telling us all about it.

Sure thing. Thank you.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our Listener Line at 317-721-7124, send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Or shoot us a note on Twitter, @indataproject.

Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation, or INTRAC. You can find out more about INTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nikol Prieto, for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own, and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners, or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update. I’m josh Anderson, with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.