Visions of the Blind

Snowman Scavenger Hunt (Photo credit: Alfa image. Description: snowman made of 3 paper plates with 3 black circular buttons, carrot nose, black circular eyes, and arms that look like sticks with mittens made of construction paper. Snowman also has a red hat made of construction paper). For this post, I'd like to highlight one of our Orientation and Mobility service providers, April Gasper. April has been working as a TVI since 1988 and in the O&M field since 2013. She is a Certified Orientation and Mobility Specialist through ACVREP and has been a service provider for Allied Instructional Services (AIS) for 5 years. As a landmark reinforcement activity during the winter months, a snowman can be dissembled into his three parts: each a paper plate with appropriate accessories. One paper plate with top hat and face, another with buttons and arms, and the last with boots. These can be made with features that are tactual in nature or have bold, contrasting colors for the ...

                                    Picture description: Picture of 4 cut out paper turkeys with bright feathers and numbers 1-4  on their bellies lined up in a row from left to right. We all know visual efficiency skills play a role in our students with low vision. Sometimes, as TVI’s, we need to help our students learn to use the vision they have more efficiently. Visual efficiency is how an individual uses their current vision. Vision efficiency skills are a set of skills that help a student with learning tasks and understanding their environments.  Visual efficiency skills include visual discrimination, visual memory, eye-hand coordination, visual imitation, visual attention and fixation, visual closure, and visual tracking, scanning, and tracing. One of the visual efficiency skills tha...

The Expanded Core Curriculum (ECC) is toolkit that extends the academic curriculum for every person who is blind or visually impaired. Often, we find that teachers or administrators outside of our field have no idea what it is or what it does! It is important to help educate teachers, administrators and the students on all the benefits of the ECC. Another important piece of the Expanded Core Curriculum is the freedom it grants our students! By mastering these skills, students who are blind or visually impaired will have the ability to compete in academics and everyday life without feeling held back or disadvantaged.  To being, let's look at the areas of the Expanded Core Curriculum. You will notice that ECC areas are not the same as academic areas. These skills are learned through direct and repeated instruction to assist in development of skills not acquired through incidental learning. Below you will find the Expanded Core Curriculum areas with a brief description of the skills...

(Photo credit: Encyclopedia Britannica; Photo Description: A person's hands are reading the right-hand side of a braille book.) I wanted to be a veterinarian. But here I stand, a teacher of students with visual impairment and blindness and Certified Orientation and Mobility Specialist. A job I never knew existed until I was 23 years old. And 18 years later, I look back and think about the twists and turns in my life that led to my discovery of this unique profession. A love for science. A dream to be an optometrist. A classmate who told me about the graduate studies program in the same building at Pennsylvania College of Optometry (now Salus University). Shadowing an orientation and mobility specialist at the Cleveland Sight Center. And the rest, as they say, is history. In the field of blindness and visual impairment, I can venture to say we are in a crisis. Although I do not have any hard-core statistics, I believe the ratio of TVI’s (teachers of students with visual i...