ROUGHLY EDITED COPY

NTID

ROCHESTER, NY

6/27/05

10:00 AM ET

WEB-BASED APPLICATIONS FOR SCHOOLS

Presenter: Lori Elliott

Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc.

P.O. Box 1924

Lombard, IL 60148

800-825-5234

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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.

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>> DENISE WELLIN: Good morning, everyone.

Come on in.

You can take your seats.

Thank you for your patience this morning with our time schedule here.

We're hoping to get back on schedule after lunch.

Come on in.

We're going to go ahead and move forward with the introductions for the presentation.

I know you're waiting for the speaker.

This morning, we have some interpreters working with us.

Alisa Turk, Beth Midavaine and Lisa Menard and we thank them for their work this morning.

And we also have an option captioner with us, Chuck Motter.

And I would like to get right into the presentation.

Just know that Lori Elliott is from Arizona School for the Deaf, Day School for the Deaf, and she will be presenting for about 30 minutes or so.

I'll keep a watch on the time so we can then get to your questions.

I'm sure you'll have some.

And if anyone needs some evaluation sheets, I'll be coming around at the end to hand those out to you.

And with that, we'll get started.

>> LORI ELLIOTT: Good morning.

>> Good morning.

>> LORI ELLIOTT: I'm Lori Elliott and I'm a library media technology specialists at the Phoenix Day School for the Deaf as part of the state agency in the state of Arizona which is the Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and the Blind.

Let me get my presentation started.

What I'm going to talk to you today about is some various web-based applications that our school uses that I have found to be very beneficial, cost-effective, and many different reasons I'll explain.

The various items I'm going to show today are Power School, e-IEP pro, Cox Education Desktop, and ASSET.

And all of these are web-based applications that our teachers are use at home and at school and so can our students.

>> Lori.

>> LORI ELLIOTT: Yes.

>> Excuse me.

Are you going to hand out paper so I can make notes.

>> LORI ELLIOTT: Oh, yes.

I'm sorry.

They're right here.

I have stacks of handouts.

>> Thank you.

>> LORI ELLIOTT: There's also a brochure from one of the companies here, too, if you want to pick that one up later.

Why do we use web-based applications?

Over the years, we started using some different web-based applications at our school and we found out there's many reasons that it's beneficial for the school.

First of all, the most -- most important part is, it's anytime, anywhere.

With web-based applications, our students and our teachers can work from home, they can work from school, they can work from any computer on campus.

They can -- the administrator can work from their Palm Pilot, from their T-Mobile flip phone.

Any information you want is accessed anywhere you can get on the web.

The other part about it is the technical support.

The backup and security is all provided by these vendors, so you don't really have to have that level of technical support and backup, and all the equipment at your school site.

The other part are training and resources.

Training and resources are developed for each of these individual pieces of software, and the training and resources are developed by very highly technical, qualified people, so the schools themselves aren't -- we don't have to spend time developing training and resource materials.

All of these are cross-platform, so it doesn't matter what operating system you're on, is what computer you're on.

There's no need to open up the school network for access for the parents.

You'll see in our Power School, which is our student database system, our parents can access online information about their students.

They can log in, have their own student account, check on their child's grades, check on their attendance, check on seeing if they were tardy to class, and we don't have to open up the school network for that.

Because they are going to the vendor site.

The other part are the state and federal requirements are all met.

When we use our Power School, which is our student database system, all of the information you need for the state of Arizona is already in the system for sending any reports to the state.

For our e-IEP system, everything for the federal requirements are met.

So if we do our IEPs online, anytime any of the state and federal rules change, the software changes automatically for us.

And they -- we have, you know -- they have the technical support, and are staying up on the new laws, and so as soon as the laws are implemented, it changes in the software.

Along with in e-IEP, the state standards, the Arizona State Standards are in the system, so as soon as those change, they're already implemented.

And out of all these softwares that I'm going to show you, well, customize all of them to meet the needs of our school.

Money is an important thing, I think, and it's -- and we save a lot of money in all of these different products.

First of all, there's no need to have local servers.

Each of these individual companies are providing the volume of servers, the security for the servers, that we don't have to provide.

You actually need less on-site technical support.

I can tell you I'm a library media specialist, but for -- over the past four years, I've had very little I.T. support on my campus, but we can make all this work because it's all run by these other companies.

There's very minimal local installation of software, so basically if your computers are up and going, you have a current operating system, current web browsers, that's about all you need.

There's one application I'm going to show you of Cox Education Desktop that has some minimal installs that you have to put on your computer.

And also, all of these that I'm showing you help reduce paperwork.

Especially the IEP program and the Power School student database.

As a matter of fact, in Arizona we're able to purchase our IEP program with a paperwork reduction act and we're funded through the state.

All of these different products I'm going to show you are really reached through a portal.

They use a -- it's a place, a location you go to and you access all this information.

I'm going to start with Power School.

And Power School is our student database system.

It's used all over the country, and it's all web-based.

There's all these different kinds of uses we use for it.

We use student demographics, transportation, attendance, scheduling, report cards -- what eliminates?

-- else?

IEP information.

Staff information, student information, everything we need in our school for running the school is stored in this website.

And you can also take the information from this site and merge it over to our IEP site on a weekly basis, so that site is always up-to-date.

So you only have one website that you're keeping current with all your student data.

It merges over to the other site.

This is what the home page looks like.

This is the administration page.

And what I'm going to do is show you some quick glimpses of all this software and then at the end of my demo, if we want to go online and see how it really works, we can show how it works.

But basically you go into the site and this is where you're going to search for a student's information.

You can search for -- search by grade, you can search by all different criteria that you have set up in the system.

If I wanted to find everybody who's on the football team, I can find those kids, I can mark all their attendance at one shot.

I can find a teacher's schedule.

So for administrators, everything they need to see in the school is at this site.

Now, this site is an administration site.

This would only be used by school administrators, department secretaries, attendance clerks, things like that.

Now, this is the teacher's web page.

Now, the teachers have a web page they can access and on the teachers' page, they will only see information related to the students that they have.

So they can go on this site and if they pick the little chair, they can take attendance for the period.

If they pick the fork and the knife, they do the lunch count.

And the little backpack is your student data so if you want to look up parents' phone numbers and addresses, you can get it there.

The printer of course prints off all your reports.

And the book on the end is your grade book.

So the teachers can do the grades online.

So they can grade on the weekend at home and then it will link back to the school computer.

So it's all based on all these websites are interactive.

And this is what the parent website looks like.

So the parent will log in, and they can see information about their child, so they can see their child's schedule, and if they click on one of the numbers over there, that would be the grade for that -- for that child.

It will show every assignment that that child was given to get that grade.

They can check their attendance, so they can find out if their kid was late for school.

They could find out if they skipped school.

All those kinds of things would be in the system.

They can also e-mail their teachers automatically from the site.

Yes?

>> I'm sorry to interrupt.

I see different names on there, so as a parent, you can --

>> DENISE WELLIN: Excuse me.

Can you come to the mic, to ask your question, just so we have it on?

>> Sure.

>> DENISE WELLIN: Thank you.

>> I see different names on there, so as a parent, when we go -- when we would go in, we would not see all those names?

We would see -- we would be typing in something -- we'd be typing in our child's name and that would be all that would come up?

>> LORI ELLIOTT: Oh, this is -- this is actually this one student's page, so see the child's name at the top, Cameron?

So as the parent -- as Cameron, we would go in and then the names you're seeing here are his teachers.

>> Oh, okay.

I'm sorry.

I misunderstood.

>> LORI ELLIOTT: Yeah.

So see how my name is listed as the attendance person.

>> Old eyes.

Up at the top, there's a student's name there.

>> LORI ELLIOTT: Yeah.

So it's a first grader.

So the first grader, he's got Terry Spangler is his home room teacher, Ms. Elena is his ASL schedule.

>> So I could click on Terry for that teacher and everything that that teacher had done for Johnny would be on that screen.

>> LORI ELLIOTT: Actually, if you clicked on the teacher, that would e-mail the teacher.

If you click on the numbers, it would -- it would come up with all the assignments.

>> Very cool.

Thank you.

>> LORI ELLIOTT: Uh-huh.

And then on the side over there, you'll see it counts your absences and tardies, too.

So a parent can pretty much access anything they want about their child.

And it's unique to that individual child.

They can't see anybody else.

You can create custom -- custom fields and screens in this system really easily.

You can create all kinds of different screens, and the basic screen as you create them, they just kind of in a list format.

So all these screens are things I've created.

So we keep like, for example, the permission screen.

We keep permissions on everything we have for the child.

So if, say, a media reporter came to school and wanted to take pictures of the kids, I can go into the system and I can say, "Permission for TV photos equals no," and I'll have a whole list of kids who can't be photographed.

So all these kinds of screens can be created very easily.

You can also -- if you want, you can create custom streams in Dreamweaver and then they can be prettier and more laid out but mine are all kind of straight in a row and that's a very simple way to do it.

It's so easy to customize that I've taught like my diagnosticians, so I taught them how to do it themselves, I let them do it themselves and then I lock them out.

So they can create for a while and then we secure it again.

So the security levels are based on all the individual people's permissions of what they need to see and do for their job.

And these are some of the online resources, Power School when we originally started, we've been using it for five years, and my school in Tucson is just starting this fall.

So when you do the original setup, they come out for three days of training but after that, is there's all kinds of online resources.

There's all kinds of materials you can download.

There's all of -- there's little movies that you can, you know, go through an activity.

Say you forget how to set up your school year calendar.

There's a little how-to movie and you can just go through and watch it yourself.

There's also a Power School users' group through Yahoo, and it's all over the country and people use this software and if you ever have any problems, you can go to that users group and you can just say, "I forgot how to do this," and you'll get 10 answers within 10 minutes, probably.

Okay.

The next one I want to go into is e-IEP Pro 2, and e-IEP Pro 2 is from a company in Washington, D.C., media net solutions, and they do IEP software throughout the country, and they've really expanded greatly in the last few years.

We've used it, this is our third year of using the product.

They use it at MSSD, and they use it in some other schools for the Deaf are just getting started using it.

I think Idaho is.

Colorado.

Some schools in California.

So it's -- it's become very popular, and what it is is it's basically a full case management software online.

And we have it set up so that we have different groups set up, so if I'm an elementary teacher at the Phoenix school, when I log in, that's all I see.

And I can go online and create my IEPs.

This is kind of what the home page looks like.

So when you go into the software, at the top you would have a list of the kids that you have access to, and you can just find their name in a list or you can start typing in their name and then it will go to that student's account and you can do all these various things.

For our teachers, basically the only thing that they're doing in the IEP is they're going to the IEP designer and they're writing their present level of performance and their goals and objectives.

The rest of the part of the IEP can all be done by the individual people that need to do their part.

The nurse can go in and do the medical part.

The audiologist goes in and does the audiology part.

The speech therapist does their part.

So everybody can be working at the same time to create the IEP.

And they all can be online at the same time doing -- working on the same child.

And the three-year re-eval information is in there.

All the state reports, anything we need to send to the state, are in the system.

You can run reports that say who's due for an IEP in the next three months, who's due in the next six months, who's expired and hasn't been done yet.

All kinds of information.

This software -- let me go into a couple screens.

This would be the student profile page.

And what we're doing at our school, I opened just a generic student so it's empty here.

But this information would merge over from Power School.

So there's no need to go in and type all the information twice.

So if the address changes in Power School, it changes in e-IEP automatically.

So we only have to keep up one student database.

This is kind of the basic IEP cover sheet information.

I think the biggest change for our teachers in doing this was that they were so used to like using a form and filling the information on the form, and so that the form looks like the outcome, and in this software, you're just going to see a series of windows and you're going to fill your data in in all the different locations and then it's going to print and it's going to look like that form that you're probably used to seeing.

One of the important things I think about using this kind of system is the compliance issue.

It forces you to be compliant.

Because if you go through each screen and you do each thing, you're going to come out with a really good compliance report.

And our school was just -- had an audit this last year, and we didn't -- we came out extremely well.

This would be like the present level of performance page, and all these screens, wherever there's a text box, you can start typing in, and then there's spell check under each one.

And so you can like type and save as you go or you can save at the bottom of the screen.

It's pretty easy to use.

Anything that we had pre- -- in other systems, like any of our testing results, where you kind of have a template of what the test looks like, they've already put into the system for us.

So if it's a speech therapist and there's some tests they use on a regular basis, they can just pull up that test and fill in all the blanks.

So there's a lot less typing to do.

Some people also like to, like, type in word processing and just paste in.

You can do that too.

This is the goals and objectives area, and you can see along the top up there there are titles for all the different categories of goals, and those are connected exactly to the Arizona State Standards.

So if you open that up, all the Arizona State Standards are there, all the code numbers.

You just pick the standard, and then you can actually accommodate the standard.

You can adjust it a little bit.

You can personalize it.

Whatever you want.

And then you can pick what's the criteria and how you're going to evaluate it.

You can also customize these standards, so we -- I set up a committee just recently with the ASL specialists at MSSD, and our school, and the Tucson school, and Idaho school, and they're working on some ASL standards.

And they want to have ASL standards as another area up in there.

So then when that gets created, anybody who has this software would also be allowed to use those standards.

Okay.

And we're on to another one.

The Cox Education Desktop.

The first two we were looking at were really teacher-driven pieces of software, administration-driven.

And I want to say something I've been thinking about this morning, is that I've found that when teachers are giving these technical tools to improve how they do their classroom work, it makes them more willing to use technology in the classroom with the students, because they are comfortable with it and they see how important the tool is and they know that, you know, it makes their job easier, so now they're like more comfortable with the tool and now I see the teachers using technology more infused in the curriculum across the board.

So this is one piece of software that's really kind of cool.

In Arizona, this was created I think four years ago by the department of ed.

There was this plan where they were trying to get technology into schools.

Now, because we were a state agency, we were not considered part of the plan.

We were not a local school district.

So schools were given this free.

We had to purchase it.

But it actually is only one dollar per child.

Which I think is pretty reasonable for the year.

And what it -- what you get out of it is that you go online on this website, and each child has their own log-in and when they log in, there's different websites they're going to see.

There's a kindergarten through second grade website, a third through fifth grade, a sixth through eighth grade, and a high school.

And when they get on the website, they're going to see all different kinds of software this they can use from home or from school for their age level.

So this is kind of like what the home page looks like at the top, and because I'm the administrator, it's got all the software and I kind of took some screen shots of all the software.

But when the child logs on here, you can have this page set up any kind of way you want.

There's all kinds of different custom things you can put on it.

You could have a story of the day.

You could have photo of the day.

You could have a news clip of the day.

You can have a calendar.

There's lots of reference materials, and there's e-mail for the students to use.

And there's what's called the education backpack and what that is is it's a storage area where the kids can save their work.

So they all get a storage area on the servers by Cox, so if the kids work at home, they can save their work.

When they get to school, they can get to their work.

Or if they want to do the opposite, save it, go home, work on their project, come back.

Here it shows some more of the different pieces of software.

You can also customize bookmarks.

You can have bookmarks set up from this website that you think everybody at the school wants, and then the individual can have their own bookmarks, too, so you can do the combination of things.

But as you can see through here, there's things on career education, language arts, typing, learning how to type, math, and anytime you open any of these pieces of software, the full software starts loading.

And you get to use the software from home.

You can also take -- and you could actually add links and you can get license permissions to add different pieces of software.

Say your school owns Inspiration.

You could have Inspiration linked off there.

Or say you wanted to use Office suite.

You could have that link off there.

Whatever you want to do.

I'm going to just kind of go clipping down the page here to show you more pictures but there's web tools.

There's a whole bunch on teacher/staff development, too, and I'll show you some more of that later.

Science, social studies, all kinds of different pieces of software.

Current events.

Now, I opened up -- this is the e-pals.

This is the e-mail for students.

So you can see it basically looks like any e-mail.

It's just a little bit simpler for kids to use.

And so when the kids go online, they can type an e-mail to someone.

It actually translates into other languages.

I think 10 languages.

So they can go in and they could type a message and they say, "Change it to Spanish" and send it home to their parents.

They can -- and other languages, too.

Now, when you open it, it's going to stay in Spanish.

It doesn't translate back.

That's something the kids were experimenting with each other, and it's like, "No, I don't know Korean," so you have to send it to me in English.

(Laughter)

>> But it's a great way for your school to have e-mail for the kids and not have to worry about setting it up on the school site.

You don't have to set up all those users and all that it's all done by the Cox people.

And then it also has different levels of security you can set up.

You can have it a very secure e-mail all the way down to a more open e-mail.

The first level, you could say that the kids can only e-mail each other at the school.

Or you can say they can e-mail anybody in the world.

So you can set it up all different levels.

I have it set up basically for the security that if they use a bad word in the e-mail, it comes to me first.

And site like kind of filters through the system.

And also, if they do any attachments, it comes and then I can double-check it before the attachment goes on.

You know, just in case somebody was sending some picture that was inappropriate or a virus was attached.

Now, this is an example of the typing program.

So like the typing program, when the student logs on, they can log on and they can set their level of their skill, and it's going to keep it and track all their progress.

So next time they log on, they're going to start off where they were and then they can just continue practicing their typing.

And you'll see as the -- as the apples change colors, that means you've finished that lesson.

And you're on to the next lesson.

So basically all the softwares work like that, and they all open a separate screen and then that Cox page stays there in the background.

The other thing is that because we work with the Deaf and the blind in our agency, we have gone through all their software and we've made a little list up for the teachers that say, this one works, you know, really good with the Deaf, this one doesn't work that well with the Deaf.

Maybe it has some voice-over and doesn't have captioning.

These work really well with the screen readers.

So we kind of left all the software there, and we -- and we just left a note for the teachers so they know which ones work best with the kids that they work with.

Now, this is an example of like a math program.

So when they log in to this, this is all an interactive math program.

And all the software that's been selected on this site aligns with the Arizona State Standards.

So if the teachers are using it, and it's on the website for K-2 and it's a math game, they know it matches the K-2 standards.

Okay.

The last one I was going to explain today is the Arizona School Services Through Educational Technology website.

This is a website that was developed quite a while ago.

It was -- originally this group was started back with our local PBS station, which a long time ago always did the online education classes for teachers on the TV, and all those kinds of programs.

And through the years, it's changed and now it's gone to this website.

And you used to have to -- you had to pay to be a member of this organization.

And the last couple years, it's cost us about a thousand dollars for our entire agency to be a member of the organization.

Well, the Arizona department of ed just announced that they're providing it free to every school for the next five years, because they feel it's really vital and they really want to encourage people to use this website.

Here's what the site looks like, and it's a site that's kind of a mixture of student activities and teacher activities.

So the teachers can log on and you can actually set up student accounts, too.

It's supported by a number of vendors.

Apple, Microsoft, Intel, PBS stations.

There's lots of people who support this site.

When you get online, each teacher has their own account and it's set up and you'll see up across the top there, it has professional development curriculum resources, and because I'm the administrator, there's an administrator tab.

But basically when they log on here, they have all different kinds of resources they can use.

And let me click through here.

To start with, the professional development part of the website.

They can go on this website and there are hundreds of courses that are taught online in all different areas of education.

So the teachers can go on and they can click on the course catalogue and they can search for things.

Say they want to teach -- they want to take a class on improving technology in science education.

They could go and look and see if there's a class offered in that area.

And when they would log on, here's a class for phonetic awareness for merchant readers.

They could log on, they could find this class, they can read the syllabus and there's two different ways the classes are taught.

They're taught where they're self-paced, where you go on and you have eight weeks to take the class on your own, or it can be a structured class where you have to be online at a certain time and you have discussions.

There are so many classes to pick from, and they offer them fall session, spring session, summer session.

So there's classes in all those different times.

If you want to just take the basic online class and you're just doing it for maybe credit hours or just for your learning experience, the classes are only $21, and the only reason they made it $21, they said, is because sometimes people would sign up for the class and then just not do it.

But if you -- if you pay $21, you're more committed and you'll stay in the class.

Many of the classes are offered by the local universities, by ASU, U of A, NAU, and if you want to take the course online and pay the college credit, then you get a full college credit course.

So you can do it either way.

It works out really nice for our Deaf users because everything is online.

Everything is print.

There's no need for worrying about scheduling interpreters and getting to class, things like that.

Yes.

>> I'm curious if you must be --

>> LORI ELLIOTT: Will you come to the mic?

>> Oh, yes.

And I'll let the interpreters do the work.

I was curious if you must be a member of this ASSET program in total in order to take the individual $21 classes.

>> LORI ELLIOTT: Yes.

Your school has to be a member.

But that made me think of something else.

You don't have to be a teacher to be a member.

The school, when we -- when the school joins, and in Arizona it's totally free, but -- and I think there's similar programs in other states.

I can sign up everybody in my school.

So I've been using it for instructional aides who need hours in classes so they can get No Child Left Behind certification, that kind of information.

So it's really open to anybody and the school can take the classes and I sign anybody who wants.

Secretaries, food service workers.

If anybody wants to take classes online, they're signed up.

There's also a section in here called the 360ƒ circle achievement evaluation, and basically this is an online tool that you can use to evaluate your staff's technical skills.

And they go on and they answer a series of questions and when they're done, they will get a little report card that says, you know, "You're really strong in educational technology, you know what you're doing" versus, "Very entry level."

And this is a new assessment that they just started this year.

In the past, I've used the assessment -- we had a different assessment.

It took a lot longer before.

It took about an hour to take the assessment.

But I required all my teachers take the assessment twice a year.

They took it in the beginning of the year, and then I looked at the results and they will give you charts that says, "Your school" -- and my school came out very intermediate in skills.

They all had basic skills but they were at the point where they needed help on inclusion into the classroom technology.

So when -- then we developed all of our training based on those needs, and so then at the end of the year, we had them take it again, so I could see if they had improved on those technical skills.

Now, this is a new format, so that we're going to have to start fresh again and test our -- our teachers' technical skills in this format.

But it gives some great reports to administration.

I've used it a lot in grant-writing, where if I'm requesting money for educational training or technology, I set up a technology tutor program through a grant, and I could show that as evidence of the need.

Okay.

We're almost there.

These are the -- these are the areas that the testing comes in, so that you can test your content area.

You can actually go online and take the test that determines if you're a highly qualified teacher, and you'll have some criteria for your school to use.

So that's kind of interesting.

That's new.

And then there's all kinds of resources you can access.

There's lesson plans online, there's all kinds of things that other teachers have created that you can go online and you can just pull up their resources and use them in your classroom.

Okay.

This part is kind of the kid part.

There's video streaming online.

And so you can go in and there are -- I think it's almost 30,000 videos now that are streaming videos.

And you can go online and you can search in subject areas and you can find the video you want, and it will play on your screen.

The part I really like about it is that you can pick the video -- and this -- right here, in color in art, that's a video playing right now.

I took a screen shot of it.

But you can also subdivide the video so you don't have to download the whole thing.

So say you were teaching something on cell division and you wanted just that little part that shows the video of what you want to show.

You can just pull that part down.

And you can also take these videos and then put them into other products and -- you know, if you're doing some kind of activity with the kids.

All of the movies, all the videos on there, have full teacher guides.

And this teacher guide right here that I pulled up about cells was like 36 pages long.

It had all kinds of activities.

The it had handouts.

It had questions.

It had tests.

It had everything with it.

And it all was based on the Arizona State Standards.

Some of the movies are captioned.

Not all the movies are captioned yet.

That's something that we're probably the first school for the deaf that they've worked with and so now like, "Oh, now we get it."

So it does come online before you pick the movie, and it does tell you if it's captioned ahead of time and you can play them in media player or quick time, but it will show you if it's captioned.

This is the part I love.

This is the part for the students to help them learn different pieces of software.

Or the staff.

But I really like it with the kids.

So if you're working with a group of kids and say you're doing PowerPoint and you want to teach them some new thing.

Actually I pulled up Excel here.

And you want to teach them something in Excel.

You can pick that little part of what you want to teach them and it will create this little menu, and it's the "how-to" of doing that part of the piece of software.

Now, you can pick up and find out the whole menu, everything in the software, but you can do little clips of it too.

So this window can actually stay open as the kids are working on their PowerPoint and over here they're learning how to put a movie in their PowerPoint.

The other part that's also neat is has three differently levels in reading instructions.

So if you pick the tab, you'll get the right level.

And then here are -- there's a whole series of interactive math activities on this website.

So you see it has a lot of teacher resources but it has a lot of kid resources, too.

These math activities were all created by a grant in Arizona which is interesting, because they're all in Navajo.

And Spanish and English.

And these are all interactive.

Click and drag math games online for the kids to use.

So these are the -- the softwares that I went through now.

I do have links to all these, if you want to see anything more in-depth.

I can really open the -- the exact program and show you how something works.

But I'm open to questions.

>> I'd just ask that -- yes.

>> Okay.

I'll just stand right here to sign.

I am not American.

I'm from Finland.

So I'll try to sign in English.

Thank you so much for showing these different types of software.

I came up with a question, though.

Do they also have sign language in the programs, or is it just in English?

Captioning?

Or is it able to be translated to other written languages?

You know, suppose the kids can look over and see what the sign is for their language and then look back to the captioning.

Is that a capability that they have?

>> LORI ELLIOTT: I think that's a good idea.

These products don't have that at this point.

It would be really kind of interesting, especially in the -- like the K through second grade area to have some of those things on the Cox website.

But we've used them with the kids and they are limited in language because they are software for young kids, so it's not been a big issue.

The kids understand what they're doing.

Do I have any other questions?

>> I'm loving all these ideas and the conference is just beginning, but my overall concern is, how do you afford it?

What do you do?

How do you get money to purchase these wonderful things?

>> LORI ELLIOTT: Actually, they are all very inexpensive.

That, to me, is the goal of this product is that, for example, the ASSET now is free but it was only a thousand dollar before.

And when I say -- but this is the entire -- my agency.

The whole state of Arizona is paying for this.

So this is -- you know, we have the schools in Tucson, the schools in Phoenix.

We serve about 3,000 kids in the state of Arizona, so this is coming out of the admin budget for them.

So a thousand is not too much when you think about the whole school.

And Power School costs us $5,000 a year.

But if you think about what it does, it does everything that your entire school needs to do for school administration.

I think 5,000 is very reasonable.

We don't have to have any servers.

We don't have to have any equipment on-site.

If something goes down, I make a phone call, they fix it.

So you don't have to pay for the technical support.

So I think it's pretty reasonable, too.

E-IEP pro is probably -- it's now about -- I think it's about -- it's just under 5,000 for our entire agency.

That covers 800 kids who are in the system.

So if you think about the case -- the price per student, that does all their full case management and makes sure that you're compliant with the state of Arizona, that -- I think that's pretty reasonable, too.

And ours actually has been free up to this point because the state of Arizona has paid for it because of the paperwork reduction act.

So -- and then Cox is now free.

So I do look at everything in terms of cost and I try to find the cheapest thing possible.

And sometimes if you think about paying for that license, you know, you might think 5,000 is high but if you think you don't need a tech support person and you don't need a server and you don't need some equipment on campus, it's pretty reasonable.

Yes.

>> Do you know if that e-IEP pro is in accord with any other state standards?

>> LORI ELLIOTT: The company actually works with many different states, so you -- I have their brochure.

And if you want to call them.

And they're willing to work with different states.

They told me that they found, in starting with our school in Arizona, that they found working with a state school for the deaf, you know, since every single kid is on an IEP, we're really experts in IEPs.

So when they came to Arizona they kind of worked with us and it really blossomed their business in the state, and they've now sold most of the public schools in our area and all of northern Arizona, so they've been talking to Colorado and the same thing.

They aren't working in Colorado but they talked to Colorado School for the Deaf because they think it's a great place to start because they start with MSSD, you know, but MSSD didn't have the state rules that we have.

So they do have to make it compliant and I'm not -- which -- do you know what state you're from?

>> New York.

>> LORI ELLIOTT: New York?

I'm not sure if they're working in New York yet, but the phone number is in there.

And I have to say they're the most responsive company I probably ever worked with.

If anything goes down, you call them, they're on the phone, it's fixed immediately.

All these people, all the companies, the tech support is amazing.

Our site's probably never down more than 20 minutes, at the most, ever.

>> It sounds like you're very lucky because in Arizona you have a state agency that's doing all this for you.

For a lot of us, like I'm from Katzenbach, our school doesn't have that same support from the state.

>> LORI ELLIOTT: I know.

>> I know for Power School it's a minimum of $5,000 whether you have 50 kids or 8,000 kids.

>> Right.

>> LORI ELLIOTT: So that's where the problem comes.

>> My question is, does the state also do all the core curriculum and the standards for you?

Do they do everything for you, or how much of it is locally controlled?

And how much input are you doing personally?

How much work is it for you?

>> LORI ELLIOTT: Oh, to put it into the system.

>> Yes.

>> LORI ELLIOTT: Well, actually, the state standards are set for the whole state of Arizona.

We don't really have any control over that.

And what -- what this IEP company does is they work with the state department of education, and then they just get downloads and update it.

So I don't have to physically do any kind of uploading into the software myself at all.

>> You're very lucky.

(Laughter)

>> DENISE WELLIN: And with that, we're going to close today's presentation, and I would like to thank Lori for all of the work you've done in putting this together.

It's a lot of information.

And I see you have some other pamphlets on the table.

I'm going to move them to the table outside.

>> LORI ELLIOTT: Okay.

>> DENISE WELLIN: So that we can get ready for the next presentation in this room and you all can move on to your next presentation as well.

I would ask that you remember to fill out the evaluations, and thank you to the interpreters and the captioners again.

Enjoy your day.

>> LORI ELLIOTT: Thank you.

***

This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.

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(Session ended at 11:00 a.m. ET)