A Step Forward

October is such an exciting month, you guys! For one, it is the Blindness Awareness Month which we all love. We also have White Cane Day coming up which is our favorite. And of course, with that, I’ve got some easy activity ideas that I would love to share with you guys to implement with your students for White Cane Day! You will get to hear five activity ideas that you can also mix around for you...

Problem solving in orientation and mobility is always about figuring out the solution right after something was done incorrectly. What if we can take out that idea and make problem solving broader? In this week’s episode, we are so excited to be bringing on board Dr. Fatane Amiri from Iran. Dr. Amiri is a member of ICEVI. She has a PhD on creativity and engineering in the field of disability incen...

Do you have a strategy that has been working for you but you’ve never really considered it as something to celebrate? Do you have an idea that you wanted to share but am not sure if it is presentation worthy? In this week’s episode, I will be sharing all about what you need to know when preparing a presentation. This episode will be full of information. You will get to know what I look at when I s...

My friends, we are so excited to be bringing Dr. Nicholas Casias in this week’s episode. Dr. Nicholas Casias is a certified orientation and mobility specialist and holds a doctorate in educational leadership from the University of Laverne. He also serves as assistant professor in the orientation and mobility program in the Division of special education and counseling. This conversation is going to...

As summer comes to an end, it marks the start of a new school year. With that, I’m bringing you this week’s episode, all about my predictions for the 2021-2022 school year as well as a few things that I am here to support you with. I hope you can get some inspiration and ideas from this episode, to help you kickstart the new year on the right track. Links: Allied Independence, Website Episode 26 ,...

Hello my friends! Being human, one thing for sure is that we are not perfect. With that, have you guys ever made any mistakes in your career? In this week’s episode, that is what I will be sharing with you guys and I can’t believe that I’m actually sharing these. I will be talking about the 3 mistakes that I made early on in my O&M career and let me just tell you, we are getting vulnerable tod...

Surprise surprise friends! I am so excited to bring you this bonus episode. This episode is a replay of our workshop last Thursday, all about ways you can increase your learners’ independence with ease. You’ll be able to get a lot of takeaways from this episode that can help you increase your learners’ independence. Also, if you want CEU credits for this presentation or to get the visuals, you can...

Welcome welcome, my friends! Are you struggling to increase your learners’ O&M skills? Have you ever wondered if you’re doing all the things correctly when it comes to increasing your learners’ independence? You can find out about all of that in this week’s episode. Did you know that there are 3 essential things to take note of when it comes to increasing your learners’ O&M skills? We are...

Welcome my friends to another episode of A Step Forward! I’m sure all of you know by now that our community consists of a bunch of quirky people. How do you think it would feel to have a partner doing just what you do and be able to be together forever? This week’s episode is where you may just find out! I am so excited to bring you Becky Keller and Jimmy Morris, both who work as an Orientation an...

Hello, hello my friends. It is the summer and I bet you’re excited! Because I am too! However in this episode, I am even more excited to be sharing my opinion with you on whether young learners should be given an NFB Cane. You will get to hear all about my teaching experiences as well as what I learned from it. Most importantly, you will get to hear about my opinions on today’s topic, on whether w...

It’s June you guys! The school year 2020-2021 is finally behind us as we approach summer. Exciting times! I’m also excited to bring you guys this week’s episode where I will be sharing with you a few summer plan ideas that can help your learners increase their independence this summer. What’s more is that these ideas can be done by their caregivers! Isn’t that amazing? You’ll get to collaborate wi...

Have you guys ever downloaded an app and realized how life-changing the app is? In today’s episode, we are talking about that one specific life-changing app, Soundscape. We are super duper excited to be bringing in Jarnail Chudge and Amos Miller, both are app developers who worked for Microsoft Soundscape, bringing us a technology that provides support for accessibility, mobility, and empowering t...

It’s the beginning of May you guys! With summer break coming soon, there’s this thing called summer slide that comes along with it. Summer slide is the loss of skills in students, due to the absence from school for 10-12 weeks. Studies have shown that students could lose up to an equivalent of 1 month’s worth of learning for not being in school for a period of time. But I’m here to let you guys kn...

Are you feeling overwhelmed? Feeling like you have so much to get done but not sure if you could complete all of them? Don’t worry there, I’ve got your back! This week’s episode is all about how we can strive for a more balanced life by deleting, automating, and delegating tasks in our work and even personal life. I will be sharing a few work and personal stories on how I do exactly that in order...

We are officially in April which is exciting! It’s actually my favorite month of the year because it is the month for us, teachers, O&M specialists, and VI specialists to have a proper look on how much our students have grown to be more independent. We could also help support them and guide them into taking more steps forward toward their goals. In this week’s podcast, you will get ideas on ho...

Do you ever feel scared to be in a leadership position or scared to advocate for you students? Maybe because you don’t feel heard, you don’t feel confident, or maybe you think that you may come off too strong and irritate people? Most of the time, being in this situation is never easy but that doesn’t mean that there’s no way to work around it. In this week’s podcast, I will be sharing a few tips...

We all have those moments where we participated in different webinars, presentations, and perhaps the most recent O&M Symposium, getting all that information coming but once they’re over, you find yourself sitting in front of your computer like “Now what?” Don’t worry, I got you there. In this week’s episode, I will be sharing about how you can turn strategies that you learned from presentatio...

Welcome back my friends! I have a question for you today. Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you had to create one or multiple tactile maps for your students but you just don’t have the time and energy to go to the store, get the materials, draw every street and lines from scratch, while trying to get you other tasks done? What if I told you that there is a faster way to do that? In th...

It’s January, my friends, the month of this familiar cycle where we make new resolutions, we break them, and we make them again. Most of us tend to struggle when it comes to sticking to a new habit or anything new in general. But in this week’s podcast, I will be sharing with you on a few hacks that can get you out of the cycle. This episode is all about productivity hacks that can help you get th...

Welcome back and welcome to 2021! Can’t believe we are finally here. 2020 is filled with so much changes and events happening around the world but it has also brought us so much clarity in everything we do. Starting from coming up with new ways of living our lives, new ways of coping, new ways of teaching, of communication, and so much more new ways of what we have been doing before 2020. With all...

Navigating the world around our everyday lives can be tricky at times. It’s even trickier when it comes to new places that we are unfamiliar with. This is where the importance of spatial awareness and mental mapping came to play. How exactly do we subjectively assess and teach mental mapping skills to our students? In this week’s podcast, we are so excited to have Lil Deverell with us. Lil has bee...

Change is something that most people fear. But what if I tell you, a huge change is not necessarily needed in order to make an impact and that you can make a bigger impact by just implementing small adaptations? Well, this episode is all about that. We are so excited to bring Kirsten French, programs manager, sport’s adaptations at Camp Spark and co-camp director at Camp Spark for Northwest Associ...

It’s always interesting to hear people blame everything that’s happening right now in 2020. But perhaps we are the one who’s stuck in the old paradigms where everything around us is affected. Our education systems as we know, started with the industrial revolution where indoctrinating children to be industrial workers is the norm. While that hasn’t changed, we can agree that all of us have changed...

In a year full of bumpy roads and uncertainties, many of you can’t help but wonder where remote teaching is taking us? What’s going to happen to O&M teaching? As some of you are probably transitioning back and forth from remote teaching to in-person teaching, or even to hybrid teaching. In this week’s episode, we will be talking exactly all about the future of remote teaching. I will be bringi...

Friends, I’m sure most of you experienced working or planning on something for a while, only to realize that you could’ve lessen your work had you worked more efficiently. I’m here to say don’t worry, I’ve got you. In this week’s podcast you will get to know how you can work in a much simpler way with less work and less stress where the focus this week will be on creating IEP goals. You will get t...