Health Matters Integrating Technology to Increase Student Interns' Health, Fitness, and Personal Responsibilities
Host: JasminaSisirak
Thursday, October 26, 2017
JASMINA SISIRAK: Hello everyone, this is JasminaSisirak, the host of this Webinar, we will begin in about five minutes we are waiting for other attendees to join us. In case you have any questions, use the chat question and answer box. Thank you.
[ Event will begin shortly ]
[The transcript you are about to view is a real-time display of today's session. If you are receiving this transcript after the session, it is only a rough draft of this session and should not be considered a certified transcript. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.]
JASMINA SISIRAK: Welcome everyone to integrating technology to increase students interim health fitness and personal responsibilities Webinar. My name is JasminaSisirak, and I am your host of today's Webinar. We are very excited to offer you this third Webinar in our series that are hosted by the HealthMatters Program in partnership with Project SEARCH and funded by the rehabilitation research and training center on developmental disabilities and health. Today we are here together for an hour, 45minutes of presentation and 15minutes of question and answer. Due to the high number of attendees we are taking all the questions through the question and answer box. These Webinars are recorded and captioned and we will make the recording and a transcript available after this Webinar. So and also we will make the handouts available as well. A little bit about this presentation, in this Webinar presenters will utilize success to improve students health, stamina and independence, they will demonstrate how they created Google accounts for each intern so they have access to G Suites, and Google Drive where they create letters, upload presentations and share documents, they will always demonstrate how they utilize Google Drive to create a shared steering commitees fold had so all student’s can collaborate and use resources at all times. Also they will share how they incorporate fitness, the exercise, and nutrition, health and education curriculum for people with developmental disabilities. Today's presenters are Mason Messinger, he is a Project SEARCH instructor at the of Kalahari Resort and Dawn Diagnault, she is with human resources, Inc. I will pass the presentation to them, and they will take it away.
MASON MESSINGER: Good morning.
JASMINA SISIRAK: Mason?
MASON MESSINGER: Yes.
JASMINA SISIRAK: Go for it. You're on.
MASON MESSINGER: All right.
Thank you Jasmina.
Good afternoon have been. Over here on the east coast, Central time zone. If you're on the west coast, it's good morning I guess. This is my second year as a Project SEARCH instructor here at Kalahari in the Pocono mountains. It's my 15th year altogether in education, 13 years in the classroom. All 15years have been in high school transition. I have a little bit of experience. With that I would like to add some youth to that as well. I'm not that old.
BETH MARKS: Hi everybody, I'm Dawn, I am the director of career opportunities development at HRC, and I am responsibility for supervising the agency staff member at Kalahari for Project SEARCH. I'm usually up here, minimally, once a month, usually more often than that just checking in, maintaining the program. So I have had the opportunity to work with Mason the last few years and I have been in my role about 14years at HRC.
MASON MESSINGER: A disclaimer, too. We are far from pros with the technology aspect of it. Towards the end of the presentation I am going to have some of our interns come in, as well, and explain how they're using the technology. And I'm learning stuff from them, day in and day out, with the technology that we use so they're teaching me valuable aspects every day. I am sure some of you experience that yourselves at your site.
Jasmina, we will go to the first slide.
Why do we incorporate technology? There is a lot of different reasons. There is the technology over the last 10, 15years has really taken off. Looking back 17 or 18years ago when I was in high school, we were just getting the Internet back then. It's come a long way. With the transition team members, as Dawn has pointed out, she is here maybe once a week, so to keep her in the loop we utilize technology every day, email, and we have our interns utilize that as well. Organization of materials. We go through stuff once a month but we have a shared drive through Google that will we all have access to and when there are important events put on there, we share it with everybody in the steering committee so it helps keep everyone on the same page. As we noted earlier, we track the interns with the use of health and fitness. Some of the interning are already like I have got to make better decisions so at lunch they're making changes and having water. So we see that as progresses, we have interns 18 to 20years of age and sometimes it's hard to break those bad habits but going over it day in and day out, we are able to see progress in that area. It doesn't happen with every intern but we are on our way hopefully to getting to that level. We use it for time management strategies as well. Especially with our Fitbits, we will go over that a little bit later. With our time management strategies with some of our interns, how they are able to use there are fit bit for time management effectively. We also help monitor intern accountability, progresses throughout the year, as I just pointed out with time management skills, we track our interns, like many of you do every day and we monitor them every day for how they're doing. The 25 subdivisions there is one that marks about completing work on time and checking out at the same time. So we're able to monitor that through the technology we use.
We will also touch base on the use of an iPad which we use for time management strategies. We have employment opportunities. The goal with Project SEARCH is hopefully getting every intern employed.
We have six Chromebooks, we did get two more added to us. And we share them with our interns each morning, usually during instruction, especially with the HealthMatters curriculum that we go over. Here at Kalahari we also have a Gazette, it's a newspaper for groups that are coming in, the daily promise is the daily statement for associates here at Kalahari to go over as well. We use technology, rather than make eight copies for our interns each morning we share the gazette. I just Google searched the Chromebook, they're about 450 bucks. We receive grant money through the school entity I'm associated with so that's how we got our Chromebooks. Just sharing that with you. There is grant money out there hopefully for a lot of you in various states but that's how we were able to pay for our Chromebooks. We also have an iPad that we use, as I said earlier, for time management strategy. We will go over the app that we use, there are pros and cons but mostly pros.
We bought nine Fitbits that we use, we will go over the pricing as far as that goes but they are invaluable method that we use for our interns as well as staff members too. Kalahari was nice enough to purchase the last four. So everybody was able to have them.
Next part is our intern Gmail accounts. We set them up first thing whether interns arrive here in August, of the last week of August, we had our interns set up Gmail accounts a couple of them had them but the majority did not. Some have hot mail accounts, which is outdated I don't want to o fend anybody. I have one myself. I set up a Gmail account last year I have learned a lot in that time. We far from experts but we're learning each day. One thing we're trying to utilize, we're trying to get our interns to the highest level of independency prior to graduation here in June. So we have the interns, as much as they can, communicate independently with staff members. That could be their case managers, their parents, community agencies like dawns which is HRC, who we work together with. And the school district representatives as well. We have them, six planning meetings throughout the year but we have our interns send out the invitations by email, it teaches our interns how to communicate with technology. We also, at the beginning of the year we have the interns, once we create accounts for our interns, we have them let us know their password and their user name and we have it on record in case they forget it so we have that stored away in case they do come in and forget it. Knock on wood, all our interns do remember their name and password. We do have folders for our interns and right on the inside of the folder we have an index card with user name and password on their folders they are locked up in the closet after instruction but are there each morning if they need it but this year after the second week they were able to utilize their emails without that.
We store interns information, in case we forget it as I said. But we also share log in information with the parents. We also try to encourage parents to try to get some Gmail accounts as well. Some of the document that we share, sometimes might only be compatible with Gmail accounts throughout the year.
These are the interns Gmail account benefits. It really helps interns with their self-adequacy skills, one intern sometimes gets anxious, his teacher works with him and let us know how he's doing. So rather than Dawn or me explain it we have the interns themselves reach out to their case managers and stuff like that. That teaches them self-adequacy skills because when June comes around we won't be there every day so we're trying to display that stuff for the intern so they're able to communicate that. What we do is we help the interns create resumes, share documents as I said earlier, write letters and we do that throughout the school year if the interns are working on anything, during instruction time, all that stuff is going to be saved right in the Gmail account so once they log in, you go down to documents and whatever device they're using and that stuff will save automatically. Because sometimes interns lose their work. There is no save button which is weird, it saves it so that's a nice thing about using Gmail. Next slide.
Okay. Here is an example of what we use as a template, some of our interns might be lower functioning so we always have the templates. This is an example of the first IEP meeting, we always have the meetings the first or second week of October so they were just done last week but we have the interns take that and hopefully to become more independent, but we have them email the people listed, we have an email and everything and this is the template that we use. Some interns by the end of the year are independent doing that and say I can do it by myself. That's great. Some interns with functioning levels they might need a template throughout the year which is okay too. It cuts down on phone time so we're spending it out, what's really important with the interns at their job sites and not on the phone every day to see if they can make the meetings. It saves time. Can you pull up the template for the IEP meeting? For the pads?
This is what we usually use at our employment planning meetings. I think it's three or four pages of fun. But we have the interns complete this themselves and rather than having me talk for 40 minutes this is where we put the ball in the interns court. This was a copy they got actually from the other site that we all utilize, so I use it pretty often throughout the year, with each internship, the interns talk about strengths and weaknesses, we go over it and the two trainers they work with. I noticed at the beginning of the year some interns give themselves all five. But by the end of the year they evaluate them pretty close to the way my skills trailers and myself evaluate them which is great because they can see what they can work on a whole lot clearer after a couple of weeks or months on the job.
DAWN DIAGNAULT: The interns will be leading their own meeting, generally Mason leads the first one to get the ball rolling and show the process. And sometimes the interns are hesitant to leave the meeting but they have this template and they can go down stepbystep and review how they're doing in the rotation.
MASON MESSINGER: By May they say, I don't know if I need the template. I still have them write everything down and record it just so we have the hard copy and we can go over it, but a lot of times they're independent and they're able to explain everything, they're able to work on if it's an issue or not an issue. So it's good to have and I do have my interns complete it by the end of the year they're able to talking about their placement, and what they're doing to move forward. And that shows a greater level of becoming independent.
DAWN DIAGNAULT: It also reports keep the emphasis on employment, we ran into that issue of parents not being on the same page, so talking about employment and having the intern every time talking about what their goal is and what type of job they're looking for. It's been really helpful.
MASON MESSINGER: Next slide please.
Our interns created in Google Drive, a résumé. Throughout the year they are able to update all year you don't have to go through Microsoft Word and try to find it there. They go through Google Drive, type up résumé and there is comes. So they create the résumé throughout the year. We just had our interns do it yesterday morning. It's the fifth week, and it reflects what the jobs require, and they go through the period ending and also the end of year graduations. They create a presentation throughout their internships that they're able to share it during the graduation ceremony here at Kalahari. We also upload photos throughout the year as well of the interns' work and throughout the year, and they're able to see the progress and display the progress to their friends, family, school district, whoever attends the graduation ceremony. Jasmina, can you pull up the résumé?
DAWN DIAGNAULT: Some of the other things of the presentation that they give at the graduation and some of you who attend the conference here at Kalahari you noticed that some of the presentations were in the lobby area, they were showing out the presentations they gave out at graduation to conference attendees.
MASON MESSINGER: Here is an example of a résumé. We did start the first or second week, as I said. We have been here seven or eight weeks altogether now. But here is an example of one of the intern's résumé, it started out basic, not a whole lot of job experience but as you scroll down a bit you see what the interns are doing, job duties, and he also put down his second internship, that's what he's wishing to go into. He said, "I would like to work in the laundry." And I said that's great that you have that goal. And I said do you know your job duties? And he said, "No, not exactly." So he did put that in there and as can you see his résumé just from five weeks in, it's quite extensive of his job duties. There wasn't a whole lot of experience, but that's what it's all about. He's getting a lot of experience here at Kalahari.
Thank you, Jasmina.
Okay. We also talked about the shared drive. This helps everyone.
You can go to the next slide please, Jasmina. Thank you.
The shared drive. This is what we talked about. It keeps everybody on the same page. It's invaluable because we work with a lot of different agencies, a lot of different school districts here, also some of the Kalahari workers as well, managers, and stuff like that. They like this page too because it's our host business but it helps keep everyone on the same page. Like I said, we have 16 different folders or subdivision. I am going to talk about the agendas calendar, timeline, our classes and curriculum. Our curriculum from the HealthMatters unit is basically listed in here, the IE that I work for, my supervisor his a secretary and they uploaded all the, basically all the activities from the book and I actually have that right in the folder so I'm able to go into the individual lesson, click on the lesson they want to do and I'm able to print it out. So this's invaluable too. Rather than make copies in the book of the activity I'm able to go into the shared drive, pull up the activity they want print it out and disburse it among the interns for instruction. So that's invaluable. Also for curriculum soft skills we focus on that a whole lot. The probably everyone can attest there are some intern that have some social or communication, so there is a curriculum there that I followed, the 101 social skills I don't think have the link available for that but it's socialskillscentral.com and it's backslash three, backslash 101 ways to teach children social skills. It's a PDF file and I am able to print whatever I want to work on, with soft skills.