okay we will start in one minute and I will let everyone in I'm trying to close out some windows here so many things open all right I'm I let everybody in good afternoon everybody and welcome to the meet the experts workshop with with Amy fuches of the bridging the uh bridgingapps.org and we're going to get started in just a few minutes we let a few more people come in um I would like to let you know if you would like to open up the chat box there will be information in there um as we go through
and you can submit questions in there okay for all right I think we'll go ahead and get started um welcome everybody I am Jackie soie I am the director of community outreach for finding independence by cpsh and um we have today our meet the experts workshop with Amy fuches from bridgingapps.org really excited to have you here today Amy um I think this is an amazing resource um for um our community and um we're going to learn today about the website um how to navigate it and some of the resource
s that it offers um if you would like to open up your chat box um we will have some information in there um also if you have questions you can hold them we'll have some times for Q&A um but you can submit questions into the chat box and we'll get to those as well and also just so you know this will be recorded and um we will offer this on our services list um on our website um through our services list we have other meet the experts workshops that we've had so um there's a lot of other uh record
ed workshops that we've provided so with that Amy if you're ready we can get going hi yeah thanks so much Jackie um so I am Amy fuches I am with bridging apps we are a program of Easter Seals Greater Houston um Easter Seals as a National Organization has been around for over a hundred years and our greater Houston affiliate has been around for 77 I believe it's the birthday that we're in now um so quite a while um we are um one of the we're the second largest provider of disability services um o
nly to the government so as a National Organization and we provide services to a lot of different kinds of people so the um kind of myth is that you have to um be in a wheelchair have some kind of you know obvious physical disability things like that and that's just really not the case now with um with Easter Seals so we have 12 programs at the one in Greater Houston um bridging apps being one of them but we also serve veterans um we have an ECI program that is really big that's our biggest prog
ram um we also have children's therapy so we provide occupational um physical and speech therapy um we have a transition program so we have job coaches that can be um that parents can access through Texas Workforce um just lots of different things going on um and the great thing is most of our services are provided at no cost to the clients um because we are Grant funded so lots of great free resources that we're going to share um bridging apps has a huge web presence um we are the only program
of Easter Sals Greater Houston that has kind of our own website and all of these things um because of all of the services that we provide that are web- based so we're going to start oh and a little about myself I'm a former special education teacher if you're wondering how I got here um and um I taught for about 13 years and then I also did um advocacy work for a few years educating parents on kind of um the IEP process basically um especially newly diagnosed families um or newly identified fami
lies and um and I've been with bridging apps for about six years now so almost six years um so I'm going to start here with our main website it's bridging app.org um like Jackie mentioned and you can get to everything we have from this one website um the main thing we're going to talk about today is our app database and you can get to it from app search and then find an app and um the thing about the app database is that this is where bridging apps really started so our program director her name
is Kristen Reit she and another parent um or the co-founders of bridging apps and the way it started is that they were in um support group for therapy services for their children so she has a now 20 yearold um who was born with Down Syndrome but he also has a diagnosis of autism he has a cortical visual impairment um and just lots of sensory things you know some Bine motor issues lots of things going on so when the iPad came out these parents started noticing that their children could do things
with this touchscreen technology that they could not do with a traditional computer mouse um and so the parents you know you see a need and you feel it the parents started kind of gathering lists of game apps and things like that that were really making a difference in their child's life so maybe it was a game app that was helping their child with autism learn about social skills or turn taking things like that so bridging apps the app database grew out of that um so to get to that and I'm goin
g to tell you more about it you go to app search and then find an app you also can go down here to app search people like to get to things from different ways so we have several different ways around our website so you can go to app search and then you enter our database so so we do not create any apps on of our own we may eventually but we haven't so far we have about 2700 apps in the database currently and um when you start looking through them you'll recognize some of them as apps that are me
ant for people with disabilities we have a lot of um AAC apps for communication we have um you know a lot of those apps that are tagged for autism for executive functioning things like that but the majority of our apps are not not actually meant for people with disabilities um what we do is very unique and that we take an app and we look at it strictly through the lens of a disability so we look at an app and we say what could this do for this population of people we work with that maybe the dev
eloper didn't even think of you know so like the example with the game apps helping with turn taking or social skills um so you can search the database by keyword or diagnosis like it suggests here you can also search all these different filters um you can do like the newest or the oldest first um all of these things you can see we have some very you know well-laid out categories here different tools you might be looking for we have a section on AAC um Independent Living you know if you're worki
ng with transition all of these are those kind of transition um categories and and young adults and older adults um and then so on we also even have a way where you can filter here by the platform which is the device that is going to be used on so one thing we always tell people is if you are an Android User it's probably a good idea to go ahead and Mark Android because there are just naturally for some reason there are more um Apple apps than there are Android um for those that the kinds that w
e look at for productivity and things like that so um you know it's really a bummer to find an app and think you love it and and then find out that you can't get it on your device so we always tell people you know narrow it down by that and these are live as soon as you start clicking things you'll see it you know start refreshing um so you can see how the search works um the other thing that we do on our app database is um it's we try to help parents by creating these lists so we always have a
featured list here right now it's spring and Easter apps um um because that's the time of year it is in April we'll have autism awareness um you know we have mental health awareness each month when things come up um all those awareness groups we kind of make a list to see like hey what are we saying about this particular group um but you can just go right here to view all list and then search for our pre-made list so autism is a big thing um part of the reason again behind this is is that those
parents wanted to be able to narrow down these options and unfortunately app developers have found that certain kind of um tag words can get their app more attention so if I make a new app and I say hey yeah this could probably be good for people with Autism I can tag at autism and maybe I don't really know anything about autism but when a parent goes in to search the Apple App Store and they use the word autism that app is going to come up it's going to probably be a waste of of the parents tim
e um we're trying to save them that time and and money spent searching for things so they can go here and know that they trust our searches so we can do let's search for not autism let's search for dyslexia so um you can see if a parent we we we've learned a lot about the way parents search and the way for they look for things and a lot of parents when they first get that diagnosis or they first you know have the teacher say like oh think we might have this um then they that's what they search b
y so we have that term where it can you know definitely use those medical terms or whatever they might tell them but we also can search for things like handwriting you know my child's handwriting is terrible they might not know that that's fine motor skills but they can search by whatever that effect is that they're seeing so you can search and see all these different apps for dyslexia um and then you can go in and actually look at the um reviews so I'm going to show you what's really different
about our review because so far you're like okay it's a smaller App Store and you may not really see what's happening here so let me show you more details about how we do our reviews and why they're really so special so I mentioned that we look at them through the lens of a disability um we do not allow anybody to review apps for us that isn't legitimates probably not the right word but isn't um someone who has experience with people with disabilities so for example I was a teacher for a long ti
me um I have a lot of experience with children with autism I could definitely even though I'm not in the classroom I can still look at something and say heyy this would be amazing in the classroom with this kind of student or in this kind of situation so if I review a classroom app I'm going to look at it through that lens we have caregivers people with disabilities themselves um people like you all who who may work with people with disabilities or have been caregiving or working around them for
a long time somebody who lends some um some expertise to that um so speechify text to audio is a great example um you know that it came up on this dyslexia list when I searched for that and speechify is a text to speech app that allows you to use the device the device's camera to scan text and then have it read to you it was actually created by a young man with dyslexia and it's been a while and you'll know when I say why he was in college and he saw his friends all sitting around reading the n
ewspaper which was happening when I was in college but not really so much anymore so when he's my age so when he was in college he would see you know people were reading about this stuff and discussing it and his reading was not that great like his comprehension was great but his word call was really really um weak and so he in invented this this device this um app that would allow you to take pictures of the text and then have it read to you because then he could have his earbuds in his headpho
nes plugged in whatever it was at the time and scan it with his phone and he could hear that exact article and then he was prepared to kind of have those conversations with people um about current events and things um it is just straight I AI um that does have some enhanced kind of voices that you can download um but it it's really amazing what they do and I'm going to show you skip over to the media so you can see a picture hopefully they have a scan a picture in here um what they do and you ca
n see kind of behind this part is when they scan it so if the page is a a book and it has pictures on it and words and everything when it scans it they do what they call speechify it so they take all that busy stuff out of it and they make it a simple text on a plain background so that you have all the distractions cut and then it also is reading it to you it highlights as it reads you can even um click on a word and it will help you with the definition things like that so lots of really great f
eatures um it is free to use um up to a certain word limit per month and I don't remember what it is they keep changing it um it does have a a premium version that you can buy um which is I think we have it in our review so you can get a premium version um as a subscription and I think that you can even buy like an annual so the um annual account is a little bit cheaper per month um but this is a great thing for young adults maybe who are given written instructions at work and they might have a
trouble with you know reading all of that and then also comprehending it at the same time maybe their comprehension is better when it's read to them so then they can just use their device have it read to them nobody realizes that they can't read it or that they're struggling to read it it's just a really great app um and it is free to download I actually only have the free version of it I've never paid any money into it um and I use it just for demoing and stuff like that and so um but it is a v
ery good app and it's available for Android and Apple so that's what our review is so our review you can see is really um detailed here we always talk about in our review um what the developer what the app was meant to do and then who we used who who we used it with who we test tested it with um and then you know a lot of times we'll talk about their diagnoses things like that um just in general and then we also talk about um the good and the bad um maybe if something wasn't quite like the way t
he developers said it would work we'll mention that and then at the end we always talk about who else it might be helpful for so here this little simple sentence great for older adults development delayed um diagnosed with autism those kind of things so um parents can come in and use this review to to understand a little bit more about how to use the app and if it's actually going to work for them or not again we're saving them time and hopefully money then we have the developers description all
of this stuff comes directly from the App Store we are connected in with the App Store and the Google Play Store so all of this is updated all the time um the features is a part that we Mark we can check these off and um kind of again helping the caregivers parents with with what exactly maybe great about this app why they should try it um and then the media of course that I was showing you sorry my mouse is um is straight from the App Store also so these are whatever images they have put in th
ere the user feedback is a place where you can the users can actually go in and rate this app if you've used it I don't want to do that because I'll skew the results because I'm partial I do like this app a lot um but one other thing about the user feedback is that if you you can see here it says hello bridging apps I actually signed in and have created a free account so the free account is going to go along with some of the other features that I'm going to show you too of the review so if you a
re logged in you can see that there's a place that says saved app list and saved searches so down here under the app icon we we have a way to download the app and this gives me a link to all the different ways this one is actually a web app also and so you can go straight to the web app or you can purchase it on either of the stores here and then you can also add it to a list so because I'm logged in and I've created some list if I'm reading along and I really like this then I might be like hey
this is great for that transition work this transition group I'm working with and I can click on transition and add the app and later on when I want to go back and look at what apps I was going to try out with that group they're right there for me um and again this is all free it's just a great way to kind of organize things we've had a lot of um School administrators and things like that that will tell me that like one of them said oh she has all of her special education teachers make their own
list so that they can save the apps they're using with different classes because you know they give those iPads back to be cleaned and re you know updated and all of that stuff during the summer and then at the the beginning of the next school year they get them back and they're empty and they don't remember what they were using so this is a great way for them to have that they can always go back to it and say oh yeah speechify is what I was using for that group or whatever the case may be so a
gain just kind of a timesaver um easy memory helper um and then you can also share the app through any of these ways um so if you're on your phone even and you're looking at it you can just just copy the link and text it to somebody and then we do the price of course I told you the price here was Zero but it does offer inapp purchases and there's a direct link to the people who created the app so if you want to learn more about that you can always go and visit their website and then the update d
ate is something that we use to help educate parents and caregivers and um anybody else who might be helping somebody with technology um if this app if I'm planning on putting money into this app and it says that the last time it was updated was 2017 and this is 2024 then I might be a little hesitant to put some money into that because anybody who has a smartphone knows that they update pretty regularly and my my phone has updated a lot since 2017 so what happens is if the app is not updated als
o it may not work very well so maybe you have an app um that kind of glitches sometimes it could be because the devel V is not keeping that app up and it's um not working correctly with the software so we just educate people about that again it's becomes really important when you're talking about apps that cost money um and some of the communication apps can cost as much as $300 so we want people to be educated and to understand that the official app means that it's been reviewed by bridging app
s team um and then all again all these supported platforms so this one is available on all of the options that we have um so let me go back to um I'll show you another one if you can get an idea very similar um so that was a speech to text let's look at oh let's look at this one let's look at an app to help keep us organized so this is another example I just want to show you this is another really great free app um it actually says in here that the unlimited task are $4.99 I have not checked it
this morning but um they have changed that to where you can actually P get you purchase unlimited task for free so once I show you this you you might want to download it go ahead and do that while it's still available um can plan is a task analysis and scheduling app um it is great because it was created by University and it's well supported um you know even though it says like 2022 um we've been checking on it pretty regularly and this one um because of the the basic basically how basic it is u
m that was a lot of basic but how basic it is it has still um remained functioning really really well um and they do check on it pretty often so um it is the electronic version of all of those velcro visuals schedules that I used to have as a teacher so all the printing things cutting sticking Velcro on it in my classroom every single person had a visual schedule I probably in my sleep would say check your schedule what does it say you're supposed to be doing you know so this is the the electron
ic version of that um I'm just going to skip over since I've already explained to you how the reviews work and show you the media for it so you can get an idea um you can use the devices CA to take a picture of whatever it is in this case the example that's built in is called is about washing clothes the really cool thing about this is because it is so easy you just snap a picture and then you type in whatever you want that to say and it automatically speaks it for you so this is not one of thos
e apps where you have to record your voice saying whatever it is you want that part to say so you type that in it speaks it the person can click through each page they can Mark done um of course we know with a lot of our young adults and um and and any adults with disabilities that they prefer I mean they understand more if they have the actual picture of what they're going to be doing or what theirs looks like I always tell people like if I try to teach my son how to wash clothes he's going to
be confused because we don't have a front loading washing machine so again this is an example um but it's really really simple and easy to use the best thing is you can make it a two-step task analysis or you know you know 12 or 13 steps if you want to so it speaks each part for you and then you can also set it up as a calendar so for today they have what time the person is supposed to do each of these things I do not drink coffee at 6m because I would not sleep but having someone charge their p
hone every night at 10 o'clock is pretty smart because if you're a young adult your person is living apart from you you don't want to lose that Lifeline to them so it's really easy again they can check off as they do things um I love this for job coaches um because they can well and for living independently also but especially for job coaches I think this is really important because most everyone has a smartphone and maybe there's a certain part of their job that they haven't quite mastered yet
and that job coach is not going to be there anymore they can easily take pictures of each step with a little short reminder of what they're supposed to do again the person can have ear buds in watch the little step and no one knows they think they're checking their phone no one understands that that person is struggling to you know and needs help remembering that job so again just giving them that um that sense of Independence back um but still being there to help so I really love this one it's
it's just a great app um but again that's just another example of kind of how we use our reviews this one the same thing um it has the uh you know the review talks about who we used it to in this case it was actually a younger group um ages 10 to 12 but this one we have I have done a lot of presentations with people who work with older adults that are starting to have memory issues and this has been a big one because maybe Mom has had the same kind of coffee maker for 15 years and now that she's
struggling to remember she's had to get a different one and she can't remember that process each day and needs those pictures and that reminder of how to do something like coffee you know to help get her day started so um just lots of great benefits for this um Jackie I'm going to kind of stop and switch over this is uh with leave the app stuff for a little while are there any questions in the chat anything don't have any questions at this time but if anybody would like to ask any um feel free
I'm loving this can plan um app I already just see a lot of really great um resources for that really can help people especially like you said with independent living and job skills um so I think this is a really already a good resource but this is interesting I'm I'm thank you I like this so yeah of course my favorite story about can plan is that I had this mom come in and you know like all of most of us that have teenagers my teenagers are both taller than me she came in with this you know 17-
year-old that was a foot or so taller than her and he had a diagnosis of a diagnosis of autism and she said here's our problem he's very smart he knows what he needs to do to get ready for school every morning but I find myself nagging him and by the time he leaves to go to school we're both frustrated and I don't want to start his day that way but I also don't want him to leave without taking a shower you know and so we introduced her to this and she used it that task analysis really was the th
ings he needed to do before he got ready for school so remember to you know take a shower brush his teeth um put the odorant on like all those things that you know it's easy to forget and to overlook and you know I always joke when I was teaching I would joke with parents all the time like no teenager wants this middle-aged woman following them around and nagging them all the time and so she tried it and within a few weeks she was emailing us and like this is absolutely a game changer she just s
aid you know he is happy to look at his phone and listen to everything his phone is trying to tell him but he doesn't want to hear me saying it's just made a huge difference and you know it is I mean like and it's the same thing when you're caring for an aging parent you don't want to feel like you're nagging them and they don't want to hear their child you know and so it's it is just a very um I think a very helpful um app and yeah it's really one of my favorites I'm glad it's still around I'm
glad they're keeping it up because it's just such a simple thing to use um and it looks like there are a couple things in the chat now is that there is a question there no cost to join bridging apps so the question was is there a cost no everything is free all of our online stuff is free we even will help you for free so if you have families that you know could benefit from some of these things maybe you don't have the time to sit and kind of go through these details with them that's what we do
so we serve a lot of people remotely of course if they were in the Houston area they're welcome to come in and see us but um but that is what we do so we we do our best to not have any cost to families um okay so I'm going to switch from the app search part and show you a couple of other resources we have and then I'm also going to show you one other website specifically related to transition but let me go back to our main site so back at bridgingapps.org um I'm sure when I was on here earlier y
ou saw that there are a lot of other things besides the app search um we do communities so one of the things that we've learned and researching apps and things like that is that people really want to see themselves they want to come somewhere and say hey These Are My People what do they have for me so we do um tools for educators for seniors for people serving all of these groups um veterans caregivers all of these kind of things so you can go here and they're going to be things like um we have
a teacher Tech table for educators where it's um from the Viewpoint of a special Edge teacher kind of helping General teachers with you know how to Institute calming areas in your classroom and things like that um again serving seniors Memory Care those kind of things and so on so that is kind of fun to explore again all this is free and then we have a very active blog we are lucky enough to now be able to afford a full-time writer and she's amazing and so everything we share is related to techn
ology and disabilities so a lot of times there'll be things about apps of course we have this client who has Down syndrome um she's a young adult she is amazing she has done some amazing things um not only with our help but the support of her parents and things like that so we have some stories about her um we do staff pick so this is our director Kristen and her son that I was talking about um just lots of things where you may a family hears about something but in you know in the news like oh G
oogle has this new captioning system or whatever it is and they don't really know how that connects to them and to their needs so we give them those use case scenarios we say just like in our app reviews we say hey this could this is made to do this and it could be helpful in this situation so maybe people don't really realize that for their child with dyslexia having something read aloud to them is going to be something really beneficial IAL because that takes out the work of the word call and
lets them concentrate on um on comprehension sorry I lost my word there on comprehension so again it's because parents can't know everything our our blog does the same thing our app reviews do it gives them that information to help them put the pieces together and then we also provide direct links so if we're talking about something with Google we're going to provide a direct link on how to get there um those kind of things so the blog is really interesting we also share all of those on our soci
als and then I'm not going to show you all of our socials because you all know what this look like but I do want to talk about the YouTube page so all of our Social Links are up here if you go to our YouTube page we do I'm Kristen Reed sorry I'm not gonna let you listen to that right now but that is our director Kristen Reed so we do um a lot of videos that are really um compact Little Learning opportunities so we do a lot of work with um seniors we do a lot of work with young adults with disabi
lities and there are several groups like those two and veterans that have a lot in common when it comes to technology and that is that there's a lot of Shame and not knowing what to do and not knowing how things work so a senior may be may feel a little bit ashamed because their grandchildren can use a smartphone and they don't really understand it veterans you know maybe have been deployed and kind of out of the loop and they come back and all these things are happening around technology and th
ey don't understand it um you know this the same thing with the young adults they don't want to admit that they can't read something and they need to have something read to them so our YouTube videos provide that free private way for them to learn and the really cool thing is that we have a lot of former teachers on our staff besides just me um and we have really kind of gotten um a great formula for how to teach something so I want to show you you can just see you know how YouTube works all of
these listed videos but if you go here to playlist then what we've done is we've tried to organize these so that people can easily find things now there are a lot of playlists because we make a lot of videos so you kind of have to dig but if you go here you can see this did you know if you're an Apple user iOS 17 was released um originally I think it in October um of last year and there are a lot of really big updates to it so that might be helpful for you but this is one that's helpful for anyb
ody you can share with clients and it's called did you know Welcome to our series did you know is a series on basic digital skills so these are those things that someone may have mentioned to you that your phone can do but you don't know how to do it so enlarging your font um having all of your text and emails read to you automatically um turning up the volume choosing which notifications you want and don't want your screen brightness all those kind of things that certain groups just really stru
ggle with how to do it my mother is constantly calling me and asking me to teach her the same thing over and over again if she has to scan something I have to rewalk her through how to scan it with her phone because she doesn't do it often enough to to remember it every time but this series covers those kind of things so what we did this first video that you're looking at right here is the intro and then there are 20 other videos and they cover 10 skills and so each skill has two videos one for
apple and one for Android because they are very different so if you have an iPhone all those apple videos are going to be helpful if you have any other kind of phone a Samsung a Google any of those android-based phones then you're going to look at the Android videos and we covered those basic things that we get the most questions about so someone can look at this video we don't care how many times they watch it they can stop it they can pause it go back um they're all formatted like I said the s
ame way so I'm going to show you kind of scroll through one I'm not going to make you watch it but um for example opening a QR code um this is a good one we get a lot of questions about this especially because during Co everybody started having this for their menus instead of regular menus so it always starts with what we're going to be talking about um and then we use screenshots and we will Circle things so like here you can see not only is she showing the screenshot but she's circling like th
is is the camera icon this is where you need to go so every single step we have put it on there this screen confused me first but when I was scanning through it but I realized this is what it actually looks like when you open the scanner and down here you can see that she um she has it marked here exactly what what she's talking about so because you have to make sure this camera is not facing you that it's facing outward if you're going to scan something and again it's very simple but we have a
lot of people that get confused by that part how to turn the camera around so um each part is like I said it all F they all follow the same kind of formula here she has showing you what it's going to look like which part of the document you need to be focusing on what the QR code actually is on that document she has an eror there um you can see just really really easy to follow videos we are very proud of the way we teach things and this is how we teach it in person if we were walking someone th
rough this we would probably all naturally do it the same way that this video flows so this is just how we teach and we've managed to to really be able to put it into video format also because we can't be everywhere um unfortunately we can't even really travel much during in Texas because you know we're a nonprofit and we don't spend money on that you know going and so we've always even before covid used a lot of remote um formats to be able to teach things you know all across the state and all
across the country so you get the idea someone can um you know scroll through here watch the video over and over we always give um an idea see this allows you to easily send information to your device um and uh who it who it's um helpful for all different kind of things so you get the idea so this is a great free resource that you can share with friends and family um to help them learn this you probably have some older people in your life that may not know about some of these um and how to use t
hem another one is setting up a medical ID which is so important for our young adults that are trying to get out and live on their own if they do have some kind of medical um problem setting up a medical ID and their phone is a great way to kind of handle that clicked on the wrong one and then that way if they are in an emergency and no one's around the um emergency workers now know to pick up their phone and look for that so this is how to set it up in both so anyway a little bit longer explana
tion than I meant to do but you can see that there are definitely a lot of great resources on that YouTube page just trying to get back to our homepage so again you just go to playlist there to find it the really exciting thing is that the person you heard talking her name is Alejandra um she is bilingual so she just finished creating that did you know Series in Spanish so you can see here that there's this whole Spanish playl list um so they can you know anyone who is Spanish speaking can acces
s that same information and she um is just amazing and and a perfectionist so all of the all of the videos are going to be very good in that one um so again just another great free resource I see oh someone was just leaving I was like I actually see the chat there okay so YouTube channel and then I'm going to show you one more thing on our website um when you go back to bridgingapps.org um another thing we have here under Services um you can see we have our assist of Technology Lab Services uh w
e've been doing a lot of digital Navigator training which is basically training people to help other people with um digital skills like we do um but we also have this um Family transition tool it's the Texas youth to adult so I'm going to show you that um and of course you can get to it from our page here this is a little blurb about it um but we're going to go straight out to the website so if you want to just go to this without going to bridging apps you can go to Texas youth the number2 adult
.com and this is a great resource for um older children young adults older adults um it was meant well older I'm sorry I don't mean older adults as in seniors but like adult age um past that school age but still College trying to find that um working age is what I should say um people with disabilities so this was built through a grant from health and human services of Texas um and what they wanted us to do was to make a One-Stop kind of shopping place for parents so I am logged in which is why
my home screen looks like this um this is also free when you log in and make a free account the first time it's going to ask who are you helping um are you helping yourself or someone else and I can show you actually I think I have that open here yes so I can show you kind of what that looks like it's going to ask you to take this quick three question quiz um we have a lot of education on here about transition because um you know we run into a lot of parents who say I had three other children go
through school and they're just fine they didn't need all this extra stuff you know like they don't really understand what else is involved in medical Transitions and things like that when um when you have someone with more complex needs so there are lots of opportunities for education on here but if they start with the quiz it's going to ask myself or someone else and then how old is the person you are helping let's just say they're 14 and then it ask about diagnosis or disabilities um very im
portant we do not collect any of this information we are not interested in housing people's Phi um so none of this is collected this is just simply to help with the filtering process on their account so if they Mark autism then autism's automatically going to be filtered when they're searching for things and they can um they can uncheck that so you can mark something or you don't have to at all and then you click next and it explains to you about the filtering and then I'm going to go back to my
logged in page so your homepage becomes this transition timeline this is really really cool because what these bubbles do for each age is they give parents a recommended list of things to do at certain ages so let's see my internet did this to me yesterday too it's a little slow let me go to it this way um yeah I don't know why it's having trouble loading that page um so the the 16 to 17 year old transition list as a parent it's going to start telling me things that suggested things to start wo
rking on at this age so um help letting your child make um their own medical appointments you know supporting them through well how do we magically get that appointment how does that work um I did this with my son when he was seeing a dermatologist regularly for some treatments and he was able to drive already so I said hey I made this next appointment for you and I signed permission for you to go by yourself and so he had to kind of go by himself do this little check-in um he knew he could call
me and he did if he had to fill out paperwork or it had a question but again if we don't teach our children these things when they're in our care then they're not ever going to be able to do it and children with disabilities who are going to be life time patients for whatever reason have to start learning this and doing it to to the best of their ability and we know there are limitations sometimes but if they are capable then this is a great thing to kind of start working on as a side note we d
id not just do all this only the bridging apps team we worked with several agencies and and um and hospitals and things around the state we had um specifically people from Texas Children's Hospital and bayor transition Clinic that helped us doctors that helped us with this and this is something they said like that they really want parents to understand to build in as much independent as you can as that child is capable of you know at an early age um also teaching them to explain their own condit
ion and how to access their medical records so these kind of things again these came from doctors and they're not you have to these are just recommended things maybe a parent hasn't even thought about this you know what is my child going to do when they are an adult all of a sudden and they're going to the no doctor and they don't know how to explain this lifetime condition that they've had um the insurance benefits I go to I got to be honest with you this one's hard for me because I don't reall
y like our I don't like explaining insurance it's hard to understand I get it but at least explaining to them why what what a co-pay is and what you know what you have might have to pay something when you go to the doctor um so the SSI redetermination very important we work with a lot of parents who don't didn't know that they were going to lose those benefits if they didn't have them redetermined before their 18th birthday um and again what we do here is not only do we recommend something but i
n like in this case we give them that exact link that takes them to the correct part of the Social Security website so we don't say hey it's on the Social Security website go check it out we give them that exact place to go to learn about that um so all of our links will be that way and again this site follows everything else we do and that we're trying to save parents time and money and frustration because if someone just hands me a stack of resources I'm probably not going to dig through them
but if I give them that exact they give me an exact place to go and make it kind of easy for me and explain why it's important to me then I'm going to be more likely to look at that so that is the timelines um when we were doing the questionnaire there was a part that said I'm helping myself that's because the website was also built for again those children young adults that are capable cognitively able to have their own account so in that situation there is a a to-do list for them also and the
caregivers can see all of them and it has very similar items on it so this is the one for the actual 16 to 17 year old that is transitioning and it's written directed towards them um the language will be a little bit more simple um it may you know give a few more kind of nudges about why something might need to be done um the only time that the task lists do not match each other is if there's something related to maybe end of life planning for parents who know that their child might not live pas
t a certain age um those kind of things we of course don't give that information to the person transitioning we leave that to the caregiver um to share how they feel you know is appropriate um so those things are not in there the really nice thing is that we have some articles and stuff about puberty um we have things about drug interactions with medication and alcohol um with unprescribed drugs and and your prescribed drugs interacting and how they interact with alcohol because teenagers are te
enagers they're going to try stuff and I have two living in my house I know they are going to test the limits and even those with disabilities are going to test the limits um so we want the doctors were very you know we need to the kids need to know that if you do drink and you're on this medication here's what might happen happen so again giving parents a way to talk about that with the professionals so the idea is that a parent can take this let me go back to the parent list a parent can take
this list and show it on their phone and say you know hey it says I understand that they need to start learning about how to explain their condition but I don't really know how to start that conversation can you help me with it and get the doctor helping with them with that conversation because again you know it's divided by all these different areas and all these people don't work together the medical professionals the educational professionals um the the lawyers and stuff they don't all work t
ogether so this is that one place where parents have information about all of that um I want to show you the Articles too and I know we're getting kind of close on time I want you to have time to ask questions but just one more thing the articles are divided again in these seven areas I want to show you this one article that I feel like everybody should have access to um there it is the right to make my own choices so you can see I knew the I knew like the subtitle of this one so I was able to j
ust type it in I could have typed in guardianship um because that word is in this article it would come up so the search is pretty smart um when you look at the Articles what we've done is again exactly what I was talking about with the list we spell everything out and kind of give a simple explanation of it and then that exact link you need to go to so like this is a video about understanding suppored decision making there's that link where you go we have the English and Spanish links on this t
oo um because this one is by disability rights Texas and they do a great job with um multiple languages but what this is is it's a good easy to understand guide for parents that spells out the difference in the the different options when it comes to um supported decision making guardianship um and everything kind of in between so I love that it gives kind of a dialogue for the parents let me skip to this page where it says like you know every day you you choose what you want to wear to work you
even chose where you wanted to work you chose you know you choose who you want to hang out with what you're going to eat like you make a lot of decisions kind of giving them the the things to talk about with their person to say like hey you can do this and maybe you just need my help in just a little bit or maybe that person does need full guardianship so again this is a lot easier to understand than the legal document if you've ever tried to read it it's really difficult um and so it can help p
eople with um with having those conversations and making decisions so all of our articles have that same goal in mind we're just helping parents find that information that they don't know the other thing is if you go here and you search apps you will see that there are lots of apps loaded in here we have some app list if somebody clicks on this app um article it will take them to a little article a little short thing about the app and then it will actually lead them to our bridging apps app sear
ch tool that I told you so that all of these things are tied together um to be an even bigger stronger resource for parents so I know that was really quick that felt really fast I'm going to unshare my screen so you all can um sorry so you all can ask questions if you have any um I know we're getting close to time any questions I saw something in the chat oh thank you for the information I just want to say I this is great information um the medical checklist that all of that that you're talking
about has been a very hot topic um that we've received from quite a few different places um and it is again that especially once you get out of transition there's just a a total cut off as to where do we find those resources so this information is very invaluable um so I'm I'm so excited to know about this resource um and and to be able to access this for our community so thank you so much yeah of course of course I'm happy to share and that felt really quick but again the same thing with the ap
ps and and the the rest of the website we are happy to walk parents through that we love when the professionals that are working with them can learn about it and do that walking parents through with someone they already trust but if you just need to send somebody to me we're happy to help people you know and to um and to do kind of a deep dive with them and help them find the exact information that they're looking for wonderful well is there any other questions anybody has um thank you so much e
verybody for your time um like I said we have Amy here so if you have a question feel free to ask it um and I know we we're doing good on time but um yes I have heard some families can use this absolutely I think so many um this is just a great place and um I I'm just excited about this and I think what you're talking about too it's so great to be able to send people to learn how to use their um devices I already think I have a few things that I need to go brush up on some topics I was like I ne
ed that so um I think that's great and and you're right we do have a range of people that can use these kinds of resources so that they're not it is hard to ask sometimes so I think that's really valuable um um something we've really found with working with caregivers too is that a lot of caregivers who have young adults and and again I have teenagers in my house they are very techsavvy my daughter who is 14 has had an iPad since she was two um but the thing is a lot of the things they do are ar
e really those you know downloading apps um using social media using YouTube those kind of things and some of those um those young adults who need things like having stuff read to them or having even the contrast change you know people with dyslexia sometimes need different color contrast they don't know that that exists they don't know because that's not what their peers are doing and then the parents are not techsavvy enough to know either so we feel like a lot of parents are like oh they don'
t need any help with their phone but then when we really dig into it that young adult really could benefit from some of these things that your device does but nobody knew it was there and the parents didn't think of it because they're not you know techsavvy enough and so there's kind of a gap there where people are like oh they don't need that but then when we really start looking at it you know there are a lot of things they can benefit from so um yes every and like I said my mother calls me he
r husband is like just call Amy stop asking me you know so I mean you know we're just not some somebody told me the other day like my mother always says that her mother always says don't make fun of me for not being able to use my cell phone because I taught you how to use a spoon and that is so true like one of the basic things we have in our society and so um we're all at different levels with that and and we have a lot of people on our team who are really great at teaching with dignity um and
understanding you know different people's needs and and helping them overcome that Shame about learning so we we love to help we we love to work with people one online we're happy to do that well I think with that we will wrap up um just to let you guys know um there will be we'll be having another meet the experts we're working on finalizing that right now it looks like it might be at the beginning of May um so it will be another interesting topic and great resource so I hope you will be able
to attend that um and again this Workshop will be on our uh services list on the um TX cp.org website so um we will have that up there probably in about a week or so and um I appreciate everybody being here I hope you have a wonderful weekend um I guess Easter is Sunday it's it just happened faster than I thought so um thank you everybody and have a great weekend and thank you so much we appreciate you're welcome of course thank you for having us thank you bye bye all right goodbye
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