Event ID: 3055414 Event Started: 9/27/2016 8:00:00 PM ---------- Please stand by for realtime captions. >> For those of you just joining us, we are going to begin in about seven minutes. We are going to give everybody a chance to get into the room and settled in. >> Hello, everyone, this is Megan Cote speaking. We will start the webinar in about five minutes. >> Hi. To those of you who just joined us, this is Megan Cote again. I wanted to let you know we will start in about two minutes. >> Okay, hello, everybody, this is Megan Cote. And I am going to hit the record button four hour webinar, and then we will get started. So, you will hear an automated voice saying, "the meeting is now being recorded." And then we will get going. >> This meeting is now being recorded. >> Okay, well,, everybody. I would like to welcome you to the webinar today and thank you for joining us on this tour of the National Center on Deaf-Blindness website. My name is Megan Cote and I am the lead for both early identification and referral as well as early engagement. I have been serving in this role at NCBD since January 2015. Joining me today is my colleague, Elizabeth Bell, who is an informational specialist for NCBD. I am going to provide you guys a quick orientation to the screen and let you know a little bit about how the webinar will unfold, and then we will get started. So, on the upper portion of the screen, you will see myself and Elizabeth on our WebCams. And then, on the left side is where you will see the captioning pod. In the center is a share screen, where Elizabeth will be sharing her computer screen with you to to are you through our website. Then on the upper left is a list of attendees, so if you are curious about who is joining us today, you can use that long narrow bar on the side and scroll up and down, to see who also is joining the webinar today. And in the lower right corner, you will find the chat pod. This is where you can type a question at any time during the webinar if you have one. Today's webinar as you heard the automated voice say, is being recorded. And, we are doing this to minimize background noise. So, if you would like to ask a question, once we all take a minute to introduce ourselves, we are going to be muting everybody's phone. But if you have a question in the middle of the webinar, please feel free to hit star six to unmute your phone. Elizabeth will be periodically stopping throughout the tour to ask if anyone has questions. But we want you to ask as your questions arise. You can do that again by hitting star six to unmute your phone or by putting your question down in the chat pod. And you type it in that little box. And then, once you type it in, you just hit your enter button on your keyboard and the message will appear. So, since this is being recorded, we will also be sharing this recording link as well as a text transcript of this webinar today on our website, in case you all would like to rewatch it or share it with others that you think would like to access it as well. And, Elizabeth is going to cover a large amount of information today. So we have created a link that you will see in the chat pod that says, material/page 262. That is a cheat sheet, it will be a link, that will take you to a cheat sheet, for how to create a profile and join this initiative group. And then there is also a second document which is a list of websites that Elizabeth put together, that we think would be helpful for you in growing your knowledge and supporting a child. >> So, now, before Elizabeth gets going on providing the tour, we would love it if each of you would introduce yourselves by saying your name and the state in which you reside and the age of your child. So what I am going to do is just go down the list of names in the chat pod. And once we take care of those names, if there is anybody who has joined us via phone, we will ask you to introduce yourself at that point. So, I am seeing Angie, and Angie 2, and Angie 3. I'm not sure if that is three or just one, but let's start with plain old Angie first. Can you tell us what state you are from and if you happen to have a child that is deaf-blind, how old they are? You may need to hit star six period, I see that you are typing. >> [ Pause ] >> Oh, yes, we do have a dial in. >> The dial in information -- this is Robbin Bull. It's at the top of the chat pod. There is information on how to dial in. We do not use VoIP for this webinar, so we do need you to dial into the phone. That number is 888-757-2790. And, we do have a passcode, if it asks you, it is 781518#. And, if you need that, it is at the very top of the chat pod. You can scroll up to see that. >> Okay, thank you for putting that information in the chat pod. So, while Angie is getting connected, we will move on with Carolyn. Do you want to tell us what state you are from and if you have a child who has experienced combined vision and hearing loss? >> Sure. I am from Virginia. Originally North Carolina. So I give credit to Mary Espinola for inviting me to this chat. I was unaware of it. My daughter has CHARGE syndrome and is vision and hearing impaired. She is 22 years old. >> Great, thank you for joining us today. And I don't think that the closed captioner is to introduce themselves today, so moving past the closed captioner, Heather, do you want to introduce yourself? >> Hi, can you hear me? >> Yes, ma'am. >> This is Heather Joy, I have two kids, 9 and 7 and they are both deaf-blind. They both have Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome. >> Welcome, Heather. Okay, Jana. Jana, you may need to hit star six. >> Oh, can you hear me? >> We got you. >> Oh, great. Something is wrong with my phone. This is Jana Villemez, I'm the consultant for the Arkansas deaf-blind project. >> We are glad to have you. Next up is Nancy Steele. >> My name is Nancy Steele and I work for NCBD and I'm glad to be here. >> Thank you for joining. Nancy is the initiative lead for our literacy initiative that Elizabeth will be telling us about here in a little bit. Okay, Patti McGowan. >> This is Patti McGowan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I am a parent to a son, 20 years old with the etiology of Usher syndrome type II. I am one of the two family consultants on our state of Pennsylvania deaf-blind project. As well as in the role of the secretary for the national family Association for deaf-blind. >> Welcome. Is there anyone else that is on the phone who I don't see on the list of names that would like to introduce themselves today? >> This is Angie. And, I finally dialed in. >> Hi, Angie. >> Hi. I am from Tennessee and I have a daughter who has Trisomy 13 syndrome. She is 14, and I'm also a new family specialist. >> Welcome. We are happy to have you. Okay, so, thank you, all of you, for introducing yourselves. I really appreciate it. And now, Robbin is going to mute everyone's line, just so that we can minimize the background noise. So, you're going to hear a recorded voice again. >> All guests have been muted. You can unmute your line by pressing star six. >> Okay, so, this is Megan again. Thanks to all of you again for introducing yourselves. We are thrilled to have all of you joining us today. And now I'm going to pass it over to my esteemed colleague, Elizabeth Bell, to provide you with all of the great information that she has put together today. So Elizabeth, take it over. >> Okay, thanks, Megan. Welcome in to everyone. For those of you who are not familiar with National Center on Deaf-Blindness, we are a technical assistance center funded by the U.S. Department of Education, and we work with the state deaf-blind projects to create a national system of support for children who are deaf-blind. I am an information specialist for NCBD, and I am based here at the Perkins school for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts. I'm the only one who is here. We have staff in Oregon, New York, Nancy is in Tennessee, and Megan is in Kansas. >> What I want to do today is orient you to the NCBD website. Our site has two main functions. One is to provide information and resources about deaf-blindness and the other is to give people the opportunity to interact and contribute to our work. The URL for our site is nationaldb.org. I'm going to put that into the chat pod right now. There is a link to that in the chat pod. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. Okay, so there we go. Here's my homepage. If you are having any trouble seeing it, you can make it full-screen by looking in the gray bar at the top of the screen sharing pod and clicking on the button that looks like four arrows pointing away from each other. If you want to make it small again, just click that same button again. >> Okay, so this is our home page. As you can see, our most recent publications and news are highlighted here. I am going to try to explain what I am doing in as much detail as possible, in case any of you are just on the phone and can't actually watch what I'm doing. But if anyone gets lost or has questions, please feel free to interrupt me at any time. I would be very happy to answer them. Put your question in the chat pod, or you can unmute your phone and ask out loud. >> Okay, as you can see, we have a main navigation bar along the top of the website. This has buttons on it. Home, NCBD focus, library, etc. So, first of all, I want to draw your attention to the fourth button on that part that says, national initiatives. If you mouse over that button, this drop-down menu appears. And, that is a list of our six national initiatives. These are the areas that NCBD is currently focusing the majority of our work on. If you click on any of these, that will take you to a page where you can learn more about the initiative. And, each of those pages is actually a group that members of the site can join. And if you join those groups, you can contribute to the work of the initiative and keep up with what's happening. So I'm going to talk a lot more about how to do that later. But first, I just want to give you a quick summary on what each of the initiatives is doing and what their focus is. >> First off on this list, we have early identification and referral. I clicked on that to go to the initiative homepage. Megan is also the lead on this one. As some of you have probably had experience with, children who are deaf-blind are often not identified as being deaf-blind as early as we would like. And, their parents may not be referred to the most appropriate services for their child. This initiative is trying to change that, and to make sure that every child is identified early and can start receiving intervention services as soon as possible. >> So, going back up to the national initiatives button. The next initiative on the list is family engagement. This is the one I'm going to be talking a lot more about later. But for now, I will just say, the focus of this initiative is to make sure families have the supports that they need, and also to create a network of family leaders across the country. So, back up to the list. Our next on the list is interveners and qualified personnel. The focus of this is to make sure each child with deaf-blindness is taught by educators who have received sufficient training in deaf-blindness. This initiative has recently produced a series of 27 online modules, they are called the Open Hands, Open Access: Deaf-Blind Intervener Modules. Some of you are probably already familiar with them. These are designed to train interveners, and they are also have -- they also have a lot of great information for families as well. They cover a wide range of topics and instructional strategies. You can actually sign up for them for free and just work through them at your own pace. They have been very successful and are being used throughout the country and also internationally. So we are excited about that. 18 of them are currently online and actually, the additional ones are going to be released in the next week or two. So we are all looking forward to that. >> They actually have a separate URL that is separate from the rest of the NCBD site. I'm going to put it in the chat pod right now. It is moodle.nationaldb.org. I'm going to type that. Just one moment. Okay, so there is that address. It will take you to a page where you can sign up for the modules. Okay, so, that is interveners and qualified personnel. Moving onto the next initiative. This is literacy. Nancy who is here today is the lead for this one. The focus of this initiative is to provide information to educators about literacy development in children who are deaf-blind. Literacy may not look the same for kids who are deaf-blind as it does for their typically developing peers. But, even children with the most significant disabilities can and should be taught literacy skills. This initiative has created a website that tells you all about how to do that. So, if we scroll down, I am here on the literacy homepage. And, we will scroll down to the tools section. That website is the very first to a listed. The literacy -- Literacy for Children with Combined Vision and Hearing Loss Website . I'm going to click on that. That will take us to the literacy site. As you can see it has a design different from the rest of the NCBD site. But this has a lot of great information about all of the different stages of literacy. It also has a checklist you can fill out to determine where literacy instructions should start for your child or student. So, if you're interested in literacy, I would definitely encourage you to check this out. >> Okay, going back to national initiatives. Our next one is the National Child Count. This conducts an actual count of all of the children in the United States who are deaf-blind. They have published reports with detailed demographic information every year. And last but not least, we have Transition. When children who are deaf-blind finish school and move into their adult lives, there can often be challenges for them and their families. So, this initiative focuses on improving services and supports for them. One of the activities of this initiative is to support states in hosting transition institutes. These are weekend long camps where teenagers who are deaf-blind, they can learn new skills, socialize, and start planning for their futures. So, the initiative recently created a video about these Transition institutes. Here on the Transition homepage. I'm going to again scroll down to the tools section. And, that video is the first to a listed. It is called jik13: preparing self driven youth for a determined life. If you have the videos, it is an hour long and has some great interviews with deaf-blind teens themselves as well as family service providers. So, it is a fun video to watch. So, that is an overview of our six initiatives. Now we are going to do something a little more interactive. I'm going to stop sharing my screen for a moment here and put up a poll question for you guys. Just one moment while I put that up. This question is, which of the initiatives seamount interesting to you? But for as many as you want to. The choices are early identification and referral, family engagement, interveners and qualified personnel, literacy, National Child Count, and Transition. Go ahead and vote. I will give everyone a minute to do that. And, you can click on as many of them as you want to and it should check the box. >> [ Poll taking place ] >> Just one more second. Okay, I'm going to show everyone the results. Four people say early identification and referral. Seven say family engagement, six say interveners and qualified personnel, six for literacy, one for National Child Count, and six for Transition. Family engagement got the most, we are always happy to hear that. I'm going to go ahead and hide the pole. Okay, and I'm going to go back to sharing my screen. So, thank you for that feedback. >> Okay, so, now that I have talked about the six initiatives, I'm going to move on to how to create a profile on the site. One thing I want to emphasize before I talk about this is that you don't need a profile to access any of the content on the site. You can use it the same way whether or not you have a profile. But if you do have one, it allows you to join groups, participate in discussions, get notifications about what's happening, and use some other tools on this site. I am creating a profile which is completely free as is everything else on our site. It is also easy to do. I will show you how to do that now. One moment. Also, as Megan mentioned, one of the handouts that we gave you a link to is a one-page overview of how to do this. If you would rather see it in writing. All you need to do is go up to the upper right-hand corner of any page on this site and click the make a profile link. That is going to take you to this short form that you fill out. So, Megan had suggested that her dog, Polly, would love to be a member of the site. I'm going to use her as a demo. So, first name is Polly. Last name is Cote. Then your email address. The next question is, who are you? In the drop-down menu, you can just select the first option, family member. Then, there is a drop-down menu to select your state. We will pick Kansas. In the next box, you can enter a password. So just make one up. And in the next box, type it again to confirm it. The next box, the question is, let us know that you are a human. What does the "N" stand for in NCBD? We are going to type in national. That is just to prevent bots from trying to join our site. Last, check the box indicating that you have read the NCBD terms of use and privacy policy. After you have done all of that, you can click, create my profile. Peggy is pointing out that technically, Polly is not a human, which is true. But I'm sure that the Cote family thinks of her as one. >> Okay, so now that we have created a profile, as you can see in the upper right-hand corner, it is greeting us and saying, hi, and then our name. So if you click right there on your name, or on Polly's name in this case, a drop-down menu will appear. In that menu, just click on, my profile. That is going to take you to your main profile page. Kathy is asking, what is the benefit to a profile versus just browsing? That's a good question. Like I said earlier, you can get all of the information on this site just by browsing through it. You don't need a profile to access any of the information on this site. But, if you want to post discussion questions or post documents, or get notifications by email, about what's happening on this site which I'm going to talk a little bit about later. Or, if you want to contribute to a wiki, things like that, then you do need to have a profile. Also, if you get into situations where you want to join private groups, we do have a few of those on this site. I think some of you are in the family specialist mastermind group which of course is a private group on the site. You would also need a profile to join those as well. But if you are just browsing around the site, there is no need to have a profile. >> Okay, so here is our profile page. And we don't have too much on it, yet. But, if you want to add more information to it, just click the edit button right here. That allows you to change your contact information, or add more. You might add an address, or a phone number. You could change your email address, things like that. You can also add a short bio. Another thing you can do is add a picture to your profile, kind of like Facebook. I'm going to quickly demonstrate how to do that. You can see on the left-hand side of the page, there is this update photo button. We will just click there. That brings us this dialog box. And there, we are going to click add style. And then, it gives you the option to choose a file from your computer. So, I will click on one. Then, just click open. And, the file should automatically upload to your profile. So, here, we have an adorable picture of Megan's dog, Polly, who is in a boat. >> Okay, Patti is asking, are profiles public to all that view the website? Yes, they are. That is a very good question. Anyone who comes to the site can go into the -- let's see, it would be the connections section of the site. And, search them, or you can select a state and just look for all of the people on the site who are from that state and then click on them. That is a good point. If someone is coming to the site who is not a member, they could find your profile if they wanted to. It's best not to put anything in there that you don't want to be made public. Thank you for bringing that up, that is an important point. Okay, so I am going back to our main profile page here. >> Okay, so now that we have our profile, I am going to go ahead and show you how to join a group. So, in order to do that, we will go back up to that main navigation bar along the top of the site. I'm going to mouse over national initiatives, just like we did before. And then, we will click on family engagement to go to the family engagement page. So, here we are. And, all you have to do to join this group is click on the join group button. So, I will do that now. And now, we are a group member. So, you can also join any of the other initiative groups that you are interested in, or even all six of them. Okay, so now that we are a member of the group, I'm going to give you a quick tour of the group and some of the things that you can do in it. If you look on the left-hand side of the page, you can see where it says contribute. We have a menu for navigating the group. The first item on that menu is group home, which is where we are right now. The next item down is group news and events. So, I'm going to go ahead and click on that. Okay. And, this takes us to a page that lists upcoming events that have been posted to this group. So, I'm going to go ahead and click on the bottom one where it says online parent family training. And, that is going to take me to the full posting for that event. What this is is actually a five week online training for families on the role of interveners in educational settings. So, this being cosponsored by NCBD and NFADB, the national family Association for deaf-blind. This is an outstanding opportunity for families and I encourage you to sign up for it if you're interested. It is completely free and is just a want to do our commitment each week. You can work from your home computer. It actually uses one of the modules that I mentioned earlier. And, there will be two hosts, one from NFADB and one from NCBD who can guide you along and answer any questions that you have. So, there is a link to the online registration form in this posting. So, that is the kind of thing that you might find in the news and events section. I am going to go back to that group menu on the left side of the page and I will go ahead and click on the next item which is group members. This is a list of all of the members of the group, along with their contact information. You can see their profile pictures are here. This is another place you are going to show up if you join the group. Again, someone who is coming to the site who does not have a profile, to be just a member of the public or whatever, would be able to see you on here. That is something to keep in mind as I mentioned earlier. >> If you're interested in contacting someone else in the group, you can find their contact information here. Going back to the menu on the left side of the page, we will move onto the next item which is group materials. This is an area where you can post documents, such as word documents and PDFs that you want to share with the rest of the group. You can also look for things that other people have posted. This is actually the area where we posted the two handouts that we gave you the link to earlier. I'm not going to get into too much detail about how to post in this area, but this is a good time to mention that if you have questions on how to do things in the site, or if you want more information, you can always click on the help button which is in the extreme right-hand margin of any page on the site. Click there, and that is going to pull up this help pane, which gives you a list of help guides that were written by me. Please give a lot of detail on how to use the site. So they are good if you want to know more. If you just click anywhere on the page, the help pane will disappear. >> We will move back over to the group menu on the left. I'm going to go ahead and go down to the next item which is group form. Here is that. This is an area where you can start discussions with other people in the group. You can also respond to posts that other people have added. In order to post a new message, you just click the new discussions button here on the right. And you would put in a title for your message and put the main body of your message in the big box. And then click, save thread. Again, like I said before, anyone coming to this site can see these forum posts. So, you don't want to post anything here that is personal or sensitive. If you do have a question that you don't want to put in the public area, you can always feel free to email it to us. Our email address is info@nationaldb.org. And I'm going to put that in the chat pod right now. Just one moment. >> So again, that's info@nationaldb.org. Okay, so, moving back over to the group menu. I'm going to click on the last item which is group wiki. Similar to Wikipedia, this is basically just a collection of webpages that anyone in the group can edit. So, this is a way for members of the group to create content together. By adding text to these wiki pages. So, that is an overview of the family engagement group. All of the groups are structured in the exact same way. So you will see these options in this menu on the left. >> At this point I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Megan for a minute so that she can tell you a little bit about what the family engagement initiative is doing at the moment and what you can expect in the future. >> Hi, everybody. This is Megan again. I wanted to tell you all that we I NCBD have two major family engagement initiative goals. And, the first one is to provide training and resources for the state deaf-blind project. To help ensure that families have what they need. And the second is to work with national family organizations to create a network of family leaders across the country. And, right now, we are working primarily with the national family Association for deaf blindness, or NFADB, and the CHARGE syndrome , helping them with their liaison and parent centers. So, let me tell you a little bit about this. We provide training and resources to the state. We do this by supporting the family specialists, working on state deaf-blind projects through monthly calls, where they get in and they can ask questions, share the group, and learn as a community. And, we have also created a recommended knowledge and skills document, or the role of a family specialist. And, we plan to use that as a basis this year for creating training to support people who serve in this role. And, we also want to increase family voice in our work. And so, we have done this in takeaways since I started. The first is by creating something called family matter stories which Elizabeth will show you in just a little bit. As well as, collecting facts from families across the country that we call Friday family fun facts. And again, Elizabeth will tell you more about this in just a little bit. But we started them in September 2015. And they have reached approximately 50,000 people since we have started them. So, it is pretty remarkable. Again, Elizabeth will show you these and describe them in more detail in a little bit. But, through our initiatives space, we hope that you guys will be able to keep up to date about training opportunities and events that are happening in the network, as well as new products that are coming out. And also soon, we plan to disseminate a national needs assessment. And we would love to be able to get your feedback for next steps in our work through those needs. Okay, Elizabeth, back to you again. >> Oh, are we having a problem with the captions? >> This is Robbin. I just lost connectivity but will get it restarted. >> Okay, shall I go ahead? >> Yes. >> I'm going to go back to sharing my screen. Thanks, Megan, for the update. What I want to briefly talk about next is another benefit to having a profile on this site. Which is that you can receive notifications about things that have happened in the groups that you have joined. So, what I am going to do is go back to our profile page. Again, you click on your name in the upper right-hand corner, and then click on my profile. That takes you to the main profile page. If you look on the left side of the page, you can see we have a profile menu, that looks kind of similar to that group menu that we were looking at a minute ago. But this one has different options. So, the options here are profile home, my bookmarks, my connections, and my notifications. Bookmarks and connections are both useful features that I am not going to go into too much detail about now. But, they can also be helpful tools. But, I'm going to click on my notifications. And, that takes me to a page that lists all of the things that have recently happened. This might be forum posts, comments on posts, new materials, new events, things like that. And, all of my groups. So, this is just basically a way to keep up on what people have been doing without actually having to visit every individual section of every group that you are a member of. You can also get an email every day that lists your notifications for that day. And when you create a profile, that is set to on. But, I want to show you how to turn it off in case you don't actually want to get an email from us each day. So, in order to do that, we are going to go back to our profile home page. I'm going to go to the profile menu on the left side of the page and click profile home. So, here we are. On your profile page, click the edit button. And, here is the editing page. We will scroll past the main, title, agency, and email and phone number boxes. After that you have, receive notifications daily by email. As you can see, that is currently set to on. If you just click on that, it will change to offer. And, you go back to the bottom and click on save profile. And, your profile has been updated. And if you change your mind, you can always go back and click it again and it will go back to on. >> Okay, so that is an overview of how notifications work. I'm going to stop sharing for a minute and put another poll question up. Just one moment while I pull it up. Okay, so, we want to find out now, do you feel confident about how to create a profile and join a group? The options are yes, no, somewhat, so if you could vote we would appreciate it. I'm going to give everyone a minute to do that. >> [ Poll taking place ] >> Okay. Looks like 100% is saying yes. We are very glad to hear that. Okay, I'm going to pause at this point and see if anyone has any questions about anything I have covered or anything I have not covered, or anything else. So if you do, you can go ahead and type it in the chat pod, or press star six to unmute your phone. >> Okay. I don't see any questions at the moment so I'm going to move on. I will share my screen again. And, the next thing I want to show you is how to find your estate deaf-blind project contact information on our site. Most of you are probably already in contact with your estate project, but if not, I would definitely encourage you to get in touch with them ASAP. They are an amazing resource and they can provide you with information, advice, and support during your child's entire education. In order to find their information, on our side, go back to this main navigation bar along the top. We are going to go over to the connections button, which is the next one after national initiatives. If we mouse over that, you can see a drop-down menu appears again. And I'm going to click on the third option down, which is, state project. And, that takes us to a page that lists all of the state projects with our contact information. Another thing you can do is mouse over the connections button, and click on the fourth option down. State family specialists. And, that takes you to a page that lists just the family specialists for each state. >> Okay. Another extremely useful section of our site is the library. In order to get to it, go back to the main navigation bar, and just click on the library button, which is the third one over. That takes you to the NCBD homepage. -- NCBD library homepage. Basically what this is is a large collection of resources relating to deaf-blindness, which we have selected and organized into categories. So if you look on the left side of the page, you can see that it says, selected topics. And under that, we have a menu of 11 different categories. So, we have about deaf-blindness, munication, learning and instruction, education, etc. So if you click on any of those categories, it's actually going to give you a list of subcategories. So, I'm going to go ahead and click on communication. And, you can see that opens a list of subcategories. We have communication overview, early communication, prelinguistic communication, object communication, etc. So if you click on any of those subcategories, it's going to take you to a list of actual resources. So I'm going to go ahead and click on object communication. And as you can see, it is taking me to a list of links. And, if you click on any of these links, it will take you to the actual resource itself. So, I'm going to click on the third one down.'s tangible symbols webcast. And this is actually a video on the Perkins school for the blind site. So, it is taking me away from NCBD to the Perkins site. And I can click here to watch the video if I wanted to. So, some of the items in our library are actual NCBD publications. But a lot of them are resources from outside sites. We have a lot of great resources here. And if you have time at some point, it might be helpful to just browse through our various categories and get an idea of the things that we have. Another thing that you can do is to search the library. If you want to do that, I would recommend that you use the advanced search feature. There is a link to advanced search at the top of each library page. So I'm going to go up here to the top of the page and click on advanced search. That brings me to our advanced search form. Then, you can type the topic that you are interested in, into the first box on that page, that is labeled, keyword. So I'm going to go ahead and do a search for braille. I am typing that into the keyword box. And then when you are done typing, you can just hit enter. And, you can see it is giving me a long list of results. And you can click on any of these results to go directly to the resource. You can also get into more depth, you can search for authors, titles, or even limit the date here in the advanced search but I'm not going to get into too much detail about that now. So, that's the library. One other thing I want to mention is that we have a lot of resources in Spanish. In order to access those, go back to that main navigation bar, along the top. Mouse over the library, and click on the fourth option down, where it says, resources in Spanish. That's going to take you to a lot of resources in Spanish. And we have that here. Okay, so that is the library. >> I'm going to pause again here and see if anyone has any questions about anything I have covered, or anything else. >> Okay, doesn't look like there are any questions right now so we will move on. Okay, so, as Megan mentioned, one of the activities of the family engagement initiative is to create stories about families who have children who are deaf-blind. We have done two so far and are currently working on our third. These are created especially for families. So, we definitely hope that you will check them out. And, in order to find those, we are going to go back to the main navigation bar and click on the for families button, which is the very last one on the right. So, I will click there. That takes us to the for families page. And you can see that our most recent family story is right here about the top. This is meet Soliz and Camila Magdelano. You can click on that to go to the story, or you can click on the link that says, see previous family stories. That will take you to a page with all of the stories. So far we only have two but we will be adding more to this page in the future. So I'm going to click on our most recent one. To show you what the page looks like. Here is the video player down here. You can see all of the topics listed on the right-hand side. We have Soliz and Camila , communications, literacy, movement, transition empowerment, and teaming. Click on any of those to watch the video. This is an amazing family. Actually live in Arizona and went on a camping trip to Malibu. So they took a video camera along and we have a lot of amazing footage from their camping trip. In these videos. So I definitely encourage you to check it out. I was hoping to play one of the videos for you, but I think my Internet connection is not quite good enough to make it come through on good quality. So I definitely encourage you to look at that. We also have audio described versions of all of the videos. You can see that there is a link to those on the story page as well. I'm actually going to go ahead and put this link into the chat pod so that you can get to it quickly. That would be easier than searching around for it. >> Okay. So, I'm going to move on. Another thing I wanted to mention was that NCDB is on both Facebook and Twitter. We would love it if you followed us. We post very frequently, so it is a great way to keep up with what we are doing. We will post resources, news, we also do a literacy tip on Tuesday. A personal highlight on Wednesdays, and, a family fun fact on Fridays. So, in order to find our social media pages, just scroll down to the very bottom of any page on the site. And look for the Facebook and Twitter icons. I'm going to click here on the Facebook icon. And just give you a quick look at our Facebook page. It looks like I need to sign on, just one moment. Let's see if it will let me. Okay, here we go. Here is our Facebook page. I can't show you this. Oh, actually, I guess I can. In order to have our post show up in your Facebook newsfeed, you actually have to like our page. So after you come to the page, click on the like button. I have already done that so you see that it says liked. But if you come to the page for the first time there will be a button that says, like. If you click on that, you will start getting our post in your newsfeed. I'm going to scroll down here. This is our most recent family fun fact. As I said, we post these every Friday. As you can see, it is a picture accompanied by a short bit of text that highlights a family of a child who is deaf-blind. So, we are always looking for these and if you have any that you would like to contribute, we would love to get them. So, you can always email them to Megan. I'm going to put her email address in the chat pod. It's megan.cote@hknc.org. Again, that is megan.cote@hknc.org. >> So, please share these with us if you have any that you would like to contribute. Okay, so that is our Facebook page. Twitter is about the same. And, that pretty much concludes my presentation. I do want to mention again that if you have any trouble with the side, or, need help doing it, or finding anything, you can always email us. Again, the address is info@nationaldb.org. I put that in the chat pod earlier. I would always be happy to hear from you. Also as Megan mentioned, we are recording this webinar and will be posting the recording on our site in case you want to review it again. We will post a link to it in the forum section of the family engagement group that I showed you earlier and if you are a member of the group, it should also show up in your notifications. Now I'm going to stop sharing my screen here. And what I want to do now is turn it over to questions. So, if anyone has questions about anything on the site or anything else, I would be more than happy to answer them right now. You can type them into the chat pod or just unmute your phone and say them out loud. Okay, we have some people typing. >> Okay, Kathy is asking, do you accept suggestions for things you would like included on the site? Yes, absolutely. We are always looking for things we can add to the site. Probably the easiest thing is to send them to the info address. I'm also going to put my email address into the chat pod. It might be most simple to send them to me. Then I will know that they are coming from someone who attended the webinar. Okay, so, my email address is elizabeth.bell@perkins.org. So, I will see what your recommendations are, and it might even be something you could post yourself in the family engagement website. We can talk about that over email. I look forward to hearing from you on that. Patti is asking, is the NCDB Facebook a group or a page, and can non- NCDB folks post or share to your Facebook page? Let's see. That is a good question. I believe it is a page. But, I don't think that non- NCDB folks can post anything on the page, they can post comments on things that we post but they cannot actually post links or resources to the page. There is a way to, like, message us on Facebook privately. But if there is something that you want us to share or post, email that to me and I would be happy to put that up if it is something that falls into our scope. Carolyn is saying, thank you for sharing how to navigate the website and access all of the valuable information available to our deaf-blind families. So grateful. Thank you very much for that feedback, I appreciate it. And yes, for example, if NFADB wants to share something, we can always repost their item there as well, so we can show it was something that they posted on their page and we are really posting to our page. That is something that we do with related organizations. We have somebody else typing in. Angie says, this is very helpful. Thanks. I'm very glad it was helpful and appreciate the feedback. Okay, are there any more questions? We have a couple more polling questions I'm going to put up in a moment but I want to see if we have any more questions from you guys first. Okay. So, I have two polling questions. We have four minutes left. I think that we can get those in. Heather is saying, thank you, and she is hoping to get some families on the 5 to 6 p.m. call. That would be great. I'm glad it was helpful. Okay, just one moment. I'm going to pull up the poll here. So, we also have a site that we produced a few years ago, is called families lead. It is intended to be a tool to promote family leadership and has a lot of great resources. I'm going to put the URL into the chat pod. And I'm wondering if people would be interested in a future webinar that gives a tour of that site. So, if you think that would be something you're interested in, you can answer yes, maybe, or no. But the question is, would you be interested in an additional webinar focusing on the families lead website? I will give people a moment to vote. >> [ Poll taking place ] >> Kathy is saying, having a captioned option is very valuable. That is good feedback. I'm glad that it was useful. We try to have captioning at most of our webinars and if anybody wants captioning, you can always request it anytime and we will make sure to have one for you. Okay, so we have eight people saying that they would be interested in a webinar on families lead and one person saying maybe. That is something we will definitely consider for the future. And I have one more question. >> This is more of a short answer question. If we were to offer more optional webinars, what would be the topic you would be that you would most like to learn about? If you could type a word or phrase into the box, that would be fantastic. This will just help us plan for future webinars for families. So I will just give everyone a minute to type a word or phrase into the box. >> [ Poll taking place ] >> Still getting responses here. I'm going to give it one more minute. Okay, we just got two more responses. Oh, here is a third one. If anyone has any others, please feel free to add them. So far our responses are, life after high school, activities for family get-togethers, oh, that would be a fun one. Possibly a communication 101 webinar using your resources from NCDB. That's a great idea. Various ideologies that cause deaf-blindness. And, advanced literacy. Those are all great ideas. And things that I had not thought of before. So, thank you for that feedback. And I'm going to leave this up for a moment in case anyone else has anything they want to add. >> Okay, it is 5:00. I just heard the Perkins belltower time. So, I think we will go ahead and wrap things up. Megan and I will stay in the room for another few minutes so if you have additional questions, feel free to stay and ask them and we will do our best to answer them. But, thank you very much, everyone, for coming. Megan, did you have anything else you wanted to add? >> No. I'd would just like to thank everyone for joining us today. This is Megan. And please, if for any reason you have questions, you can reach out to Elizabeth or myself. We really are here to help you all and make sure you get the resources you need to support you as well as your child in their development. Thank you for being with us today and thank you, Elizabeth, for doing such a beautiful tour. >> Okay, I'm going to stop the recording. And we will stay in here for a few more minutes.