Inclusive Design: BenQ Board Tools for the Neurodiverse Classroom

Narrator: This is Teach Your Way with BenQ, where educators find ideas that work. Let's get started. Katy Chen: Welcome to another episode of Teach Your Way with BenQ. I'm Katy Chen from your beloved Marcom team.

And joining us today is our amazing customer success specialist, Crystal Yao. Crystal Yao: Hi Katy, thanks for having me today. Katy Chen: Yay, awesome. I'm Crystal Yao: excited to be here.

Katy Chen: Our goal today is to share the brilliant tools that you already have that befit a neurodiverse classroom. For this episode, you might want to get in front of your board and follow along or take mental notes and come back later. Before we dive into today's episode, I just want to say a quick thank you to Krystal. I'm so glad you brought up this topic because even though I love the ideas of inclusivity and accessibility, I'm still so foreign to the concepts and the needs of inclusion.

So Crystal, drawing from your experience in the teaching field, can you explain why inclusive design is so important and how have they affected teaching and learning? Crystal Yao: That's a really great question, Katy. I'm really glad you brought that up. So through my years of teaching, I've really noticed that All teachers know this, not all of our students think the same.

And so like in the past, we used to just like read things out of a book and then write, but we know through lots of research now that our students that are neurodiverse or even just neurodivergent, they need something more. And so, Our boards have a lot of features now that support students that are neurodivergent or just like they support a whole classroom full of students that have different ways of thinking. And so I'm really excited to show you some of those features today that can help some of those students and really all of our students.

Katy Chen: That sounds great. Let's get started. Crystal Yao: All right. So the first thing I really wanted to go over was, you know, nowadays our students, a lot of them really struggle to focus.

You know, we have, we're kind of living in the world of TikTok right now. And so our, those attention spans are getting smaller and smaller. So starting with some ways to just kind of keep your kids focused is using the remote can be really helpful. So if I have something open, let's say in Google Chrome, and I want my kids to focus on one thing, I can use the laser pointer on the remote, which is on the top, right?

And I can point at things. And of course you can also use the laser pointer as an air mouse, which is really helpful. But one of my favorite features is changing the mode on the. Um, on the remote and using it as a spotlight.

So now I can make sure my kids are focused on this one little cat instead of the whole page. And so that's one way to keep your kids focused there. All right. So beyond the remote, we also have the option to keep our kids focused using timers.

So a lot of times when I used to teach, I would use the timer to help kids. Keep track of their time so they knew when to finish or how much time they had left. But our timer doesn't necessarily have a visual aspect to it, but we partner with Ginzi teaching tools. So this app is available in the BenQ app store and it has a visual timer that teachers can actually use in their classrooms.

So when you open up Ginzi, it has a lot of different options at the bottom, but one of them is this icon right here. This is a lot of tools. So you've got. Um, a lot of categories here.

I'm going to just focus on the classroom management ones first, but this one right here, this timer is actually a visual timer. So this is really easy for you to expand and make large, larger or smaller if you need to. And then your students can see that timer tick down really easily. There's also an option to use the hourglass.

So the hourglass is another way for your students to visualize how much time they have left. Um, as the time drops. Within Ginsey, there is an option to actually utilize ruled, um, papers. It'll help them organize things visually, but we also have that with an EasyWrite.

So in EasyWrite, if you use this tool a lot, you of course have the options in the backgrounds to use the ruled paper. And then you can also use graph paper as well. You can even, uh, for your students that have some visual sensitivities, you can adjust the background color if you need. So let's say that I want to use like a really soft yellow, I can adjust this and make that a yellow if needed.

Um, but really just do what's best for your students, whatever they need. Katy Chen: I really like the Ginzi app with the timer just because when you're counting down the time with the actual dial, it's really great for students to visualize how a clock moves and now you can also tell them which way is clockwise, counterclockwise, instead of just a digital timer. Crystal Yao: Yeah. That's a really good way to think about it.

Yeah. Um, so one thing I actually forgot to mention on the remote is we have students that have a lot of sensory, like sometimes they can get sensory overload and like if you have a video playing. YouTube, and you're noticing that one of your students, or maybe several of your students, are kind of just, um, experiencing a lot, so what you could do, let's say you have this video playing, is on your remote, you can blank out the screen, just by tapping blank at the bottom right, And so that will turn off the screen and it will turn off the sound.

Now, if I hit that again on the remote, it'll bring it back up. So if your students just need a break from the, from the display, just tap on blank and I'll turn off the sound and the display. Now it won't turn off your board. It'll just blank it out.

Now, one thing I also want to mention is if you want to blank out your board, but you want to keep the sound going. So maybe the visual aspect is. So if you're just overstimulating your students, but they, you still want them to hear the sound, you can actually keep that on when you blink out the board. So if you tap on connections or your connections menu, then go to a display and then you scroll down to advanced settings.

And then right here where it says remote control, blank button, you have the option to just have the blank screen or the blank button, blank the screen and not turn off the sound. So if I tap on that. Then I go back to YouTube and I play this. You can hear the sound, but if I blank it, the sound will continue to play.

So just different options based on what your students might need. We've just taken some time to go over some ways to help your students focus and then also to help with some sensory sensitivity issues. So now we're going to go into some communication and accessibility tools. We know that like all of our students, they learn and process and engage differently.

We have students that come in and they're not comfortable with, uh, social interaction. And so like having them come up to the board is difficult for them, but we also have students that whenever they just try to learn from their seats and they look at the board, sometimes it's really hard for them to process those things. So let's talk about some tools that you can use to help those students. So let's start in EasyWrite.

So in EasyWrite, we've got some of those basic tools where you can, you know, write something on the board. And, um, if your students struggle with reading your handwriting, or they just. Process better whenever they're reading actual, like, font and, uh, text, you can take that and circle it and then you can turn it into, um, a font, but then you can also have it read aloud, so if you have students, like, if you turn this into a center and have your students working at the board, if you have a passage or if you have anything in EasyWrite that you want read aloud, the student can easily just tap on that button and hear that.

be read to them. And just so you know, if you tap and hold on it, you're able to actually change the settings. So you can change the pitch of the voice. You can also change the speech rate.

So that could be really helpful for your students, depending on where they are. And then you can also, if you have any ESL students or second language learners in your classroom, you can translate things. And so I can take, select a word, hit translate, or then I can also tap and hold on that, and I can choose different languages that I want it to be translated into. You can just download different packages, if you'd like.

But that's just one way that you can make reading a little more accessible for your students. Okay, so another way that you can make things accessible for your students is by using your DotCam and using our OCR. Uh, or Optical Character Recognition feature within EasyWrite. So right now I have a dot cam that's plugged into the board and I'm actually going to pull in the feed for the dot cam right here.

So I'm going to use my import tool here and then I'm going to go ahead and tap on webcam, um, which is going to pull that in and so we're going to use part of our podcast notes for this. I'm going to tap on this little, uh, icon right here, which is going to take a picture and bring it in to EasyWrite. And so now I can tap on the little T that appears. And so it's going to pull all of my text that was in that image.

And now I can manipulate this. My students can easily listen to that text read aloud. They can also translate it if we need to. So if I want that in Spanish, I can have that there.

I can even manipulate what I want the font to be. If it's easier for my students to read this, it's going to really make things accessible for your students much more easily. Uh, and you don't have to have things digitally in order for you to do this. You can easily just pull in things using a dot cam.

Yeah. Katy Chen: Thank you. That's a really cool feature. Crystal Yao: All right.

So we're going to go to move on to our next topic, which is something that's so important in every single classroom, and that's creating a welcoming environment for your student or for your students. So we know that our students come from all these different backgrounds and we, uh, we want to make sure that they feel welcome and loved in the classroom. So. One way to do that is for your students that are just, they have a lot of social anxiety, um, and you know, presenting things is really difficult for them.

You can use the cloud whiteboarding tool in EasyWrite to make things easier for them. So in cloud whiteboarding, if you, in EasyWrite, if you tap on this, you can, um, click like start cloud whiteboard. If you have a Google Classroom, you can click on start Google Classroom and post that directly to Google Classroom. Um, but then, When you do this, your students are actually able to join your whiteboard session from their seat.

And so they just have to go to the link or they can scan the QR code to make it really easy. And so whatever I do up here, They'll see on their screen, but then I can also, when I come here, their names will populate over here and I can actually toggle on the little pencil symbol for them. And so they can actually show the rest of the class what they're thinking from the safety of their seat. They don't have to get up in front of the class and present anything.

It's going to be right there in front of them, which is going to alleviate a lot of that social anxiety. Um, and so. Cloud whiteboarding again can be really helpful for those students, but another way that you can help alleviate some of that stress for your students is by using InstaShare 2. So if your students have the ability to, I highly recommend you do this whenever they need to share something out, you can open up InstaShare and you can actually have them join from their computers and you'll be able to see all their devices here and you can manage who gets to share and who doesn't um just all within the host control and so Um, this makes it really easy for your students to, um, show everything that they know, but with, again, without having to get in front of the classroom, they can just do that from their seat.

Also with InstaShare 2, something that I wanted to mention is that you can have up to 32 devices connected at a time, um, and you can have up to nine devices showing at a time as well. So that could be really great for having multiple students share. Um, what they're thinking and what they're learning at the same time. Now, something else that's really helpful for the learning environment, especially when you have a lot of very curious minds and a lot of different, um, brains or a lot of different ways of thinking in your classroom is using our AI, um, lasso search.

So let's say that you're doing a little lesson on cats. Within the, um, floating tool, we have this little AI button and you've got a little lasso tool right here on the left. So when you tap on that, you're actually able to circle an object and that will bring up our AI search. So it says that this is an image of a ginger cat resting on a wooden floor with its eyes closed, seemingly relaxed or content.

And so it also gives us some concepts and emotions for that. But if you have students that are really curious and they want to ask a lot of different questions, You know, something that your students should know about you is that you don't know everything. And so it's really helpful to be able to use the Ask AI feature and actually ask it a question. So it's going to tell me again what that image is.

But then once it's done, I can actually tap and ask it a question. So if I want to know something about cats, I want to say, let's say, um, how long do cats live? All right. Now it says cats typically live between 12 and 16 years with some reaching into their early 20s.

So if there's something you ever don't know, you can always utilize that lasso search and, um, the AI features in order to actually answer your students questions right there on the fly. But yeah, that could be really helpful for, again, you, uh, for that inquiry based learning. Katy Chen: Right. Because we all know that we have a million questions and not just the kids.

Crystal Yao: Yeah, exactly. Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you learned some features from our BenQ boards that could help support your neurodiverse classrooms. We know, again, that your students are all very different.

They all think very differently, so. Being able to teach in multiple ways and use different tools can be really helpful to all of your students. Katy Chen: Thank you for all of that information, Crystal. I believe that inclusivity is a foundation to all of academic and it's so great that you're sharing all these tools that could level the playing ground for so many students.

Now, before we close up, is there anything else that you would like to add to the session? Crystal Yao: Yeah, I'm actually just wondering because I know I've been out of the classroom for a few years, but I know that. You guys are doing so much wonderful work in your classrooms, and I'm wondering how you guys are utilizing some of our BenQ board tools, um, to help support your, um, your, the different students in your classroom. So, if you would please, like, leave something in the comments if you, uh, would like to share some really great tools that you're using and how you're using them.

Katy Chen: That sounds great. If you have any more questions or if you like to further the discussion, feel free to contact us through our BenQ resource or even connect with our customer success team. To conclude, I want to say my last thank you to Crystal for joining us today and sharing all these tips and tools on how you can use BenQ. These for your classrooms and as always, thank you for being a part of our community, supporting us.

Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe to our channel and you can always find us on our Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn pages. We look forward to seeing you in our next episode of Teacher Wave with BenQ with the latest tips and tricks for your boards. Thank you. Narrator: Thanks for joining us on Teach Your Way with BenQ.

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