Supercharge Student Social Skills: Screen, Teach, Learn, Progress Monitor, Assess

Outline

1. Introduction and Session Format Description (5 minutes)
Participants will be encouraged to open voissadvisor.org and will be introduced to the format of our session, the presenters, the VA chatbot, and VA’s extensive resources. We will model the use of Mentimeter to poll the group for demographics and interest, which will help guide our emphasis and focus. The cyclical format of the presentation will also be explained.

2. Introduction to VOISS Advisor (5 minutes)
We will introduce the federally funded, open-education resources found in the Advisor website and the research guiding our efforts.

3. Model Use of VA Chatbot with Emphasis on Prompt Writing for Personalized Results (5 minutes)
First we will model the use of VA’s custom, built-in chatbot using a specific student who found success when their teacher used VA. Educators love to start here because they immediately see how VA ties back to state and national standards, IEP/learning goals, evidence-based practice, and practical solutions that they can turn around and use in their classrooms immediately.

4. Exploration of interactive chatbot (5 minutes)
Users will be given time to independently prompt the chatbot and recommended resources. Presenters will be on hand to answer questions and provide guidance during explorations.

5. Introduction of the Social Skill Inventory (2 minutes intro, 5 minutes exploration)
A big teacher favorite, the social skill inventory is a free, open access, easy-to-use screener tool to help educators determine what social skills students need and how best the educator can utilize VA.

6. Introduction to a Classroom Story #1: Prompt Refinement (3 minutes)
We will highlight a specific student who struggles with social skills, share their unique characteristics, their classroom story, their inventory results, and show a quick video of the teacher introducing the student. We will share what ISTE Standards and specific challenges are being addressed by this classroom story. By modeling with a case study, educators will learn how best to prompt AI and the refinement necessary to truly personalize interventions.

7. Demonstration of Specific Strategy and Associated Resource (3 minutes)
The presenter will do a brief demonstration of the intervention selected by the student’s educator. VOISS is a free student application available on iPads, Chromebooks, and Oculus headsets that helps students learn and practice social skills. Attendees will explore the associated lesson plan that the teacher used to support practice and generalization of learned social skills from the VR environment into the physical classroom. For example, Marcus, is a sixth grader who struggles to understand body language and nonverbal communication of others. His teacher, Mrs. Jones has him complete the VR scenario that focuses on understanding and participating in joking. She then uses the VOISS Advisor website to learn what instructional strategies, instructional settings, generalization tactics and support strategies are needed to help Marcus take the skills that he learned in the VR scenario and practice and generalize them into the classroom. She then used the VA chatbot to construct a personalized lesson for Marcus. We will use video and live demonstration to walk participants through the model.

8. Exploration of Specific Resource (3 minutes)
Participants will be given time to refine their original prompt, offering more detail about their student(s)’ needs and discovering more resources within VA. Presenters will circulate, fielding individual concerns and questions during this brief exploration time.

9. Reflection (1 minutes)
Attendees will be encouraged to crowd-source, swapping additional ideas and resources with other attendees using a provided MagicSchool fill-in-the-blank package effectively saving their take-home lesson plan and/or professional development plan.

10.-11. Repeat Steps 6.-9. (10 minutes x 2 more)
Repeat steps six through nine, so that a total of three classroom stories will be explored and prompt refinement and/or new prompts will be employed to ensure that participants have what they need to go back to their classrooms and/or their professional development roles and implement powerful social skill instruction immediately.

Jolene – she struggles to communicate with respect to her teachers and is often inappropriately casual with peers. Jolene learns and practices the use of slang and idioms in an appropriate setting and then her teacher uses video modeling, small group instruction and peer coaching to practice and generalize those learned skills within the classroom.

Jackson – he struggles with understanding personal space and boundaries. His teacher uses role play and prompting to support classroom practice and use of the newly learned skills.

12. Beyond VA: Implementation enhanced by AI (5, 3 min rounds)
This team has works with 100s of educators as they implement social skill instruction and AI has become an integral sidekick for effective and efficient best practice. Presenters will round robin the following tools in mini-blasts of resources and specific field-tested examples of use:

Driffit - enhance your lesson plans by asking Diffit to generate graphic organizers beyond what even VA provides

Brisk - generation of slide deck for teacher PD/sharing using VA lesson plan and/or evidence-based practice guide

Poe Ludia - chatbot designed with Universal Design for Learning to ensure multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression

Notebook AI - generation of a podcast for parents to introduce VOISS Advisor (or any resource being used for student success)

MagicSchool - SEL lesson creation from scratch

13. Participants share their top SEL AI Enhancement Tool in a pair-share, highlight in whole group (8 minutes)

14. Participant Questions (10 minutes) Questions and whole group discussion.

Supporting research

The following articles are all linked from this page: https://projectvoiss.org/publications/ and show the breadth and depth of the presenters' research and resources. This session is derived from this work.

Carreon, A., Rowland, A. Smith, S.J., Lowrey, K.A., & Mosher, M. (2024). Designing for Successful Educational Experiences in Virtual Reality Environments. Journal of Special Education Technology. 01626434241277191.
*This article reports on a study where educators and students share what their preferences are within virtual reality design and how AI will ensure those preferences are met during VR development.

Mosher, M. A., Carreon, A., Smith, S. J., Rowland, A., Frey, B., Lane, K. L., Sailor, W., Jackson, H.A., Goldman, S.R, Ruhter, L.C., Williams, A., & Bhattashali, A. (Accepted). The Social Validity of Video Modeling Versus Virtual Reality for Improving the Social Communication Skills of Middle School Students. Issues and Trends in Learning Technologies.

Mosher, M., Frey, B., Carreon, A., Smith, S., Rowland, A., & Lowrey, A. (2024). The Technology Immersive Presence Scale (TIPS) Proof of Concept: Creating a Student Accessible Measure of Presence in Virtual Environments. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 35(1), 101-133.
*This article reports on an assessment the authors of the session designed and validated for measure presence in virtual reality environments.

Carreon, A., Smith, S.J., Frey, B., Rowland, A. & Mosher, M. (2023) Comparing immersive VR and non-immersive VR on social skill acquisition for students in middle school with ASD. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, doi:
10.1080/15391523.2023.2182851

Carreon, A., Smith, S.J., Mosher, M., Rao, K. & Rowland, A. (2022). A Review of Virtual Reality Intervention Research for Students with Disabilities in K-12 Settings. Journal of Special Education and Technology. 37(1). 82-99. doi:10.1177/0162643420962011

**Carreon, A., Smith, S.J. & Rowland, A. (2019) Augmented Reality: Creating and Implementing Digital Classroom Supports. Journal of Special Education Technology. DOI: 10.1177/0162643419882423
(**Article of the Year in JSET)

In addition, VOISS Advisor is built upon well tested Implementation Science (Dunst, et. al., 2013). Researchers in special education have made strides in identifying EBPs for students with disabilities over the past two decades. Cook, Cook, and Landrum (2013) describe how empirical and theoretical literature outside of our field may offer the insight needed in how to facilitate the ideas taking hold in classroom practice, particularly Heath and Heath’s (2007) model of characteristics that are likely to “stick.” Advisor can increase the direct instruction and support teachers are provided for social skill interventions making the initial instruction more effective and allowing the student application of the learned skill to be consistent and impactful within the demands of the school setting (McCurdy, et. al., 2014). Advisor purposefully empowers teachers to effectively and efficiently support the implementation of social skill evidence-based practice and generalization.