Digital Organisation Hacks with Kristen Sharpless
In this episode, we will be talking all about digital organization hacks with Kristen Sharpless who is a certified Orientation and Mobility Specialist, Certified Vision Rehabilitation Therapist, and a Sign Language Interpreter. Let’s get into it.
In this podcast episode:
Introduction
Who is Kristen Sharpless
Working Multiple Careers
Challenges Faced
Teasers to the Upcoming Webinar
Outro
Transcript of the Episode:
Introduction
Kassy:
Have you ever met somebody that at the very beginning, you knew that you liked them, but you didn't fully understand how much you would grow to respect them; at the very beginning, when you guys first meet? Shannon, the planning committee chair for the symposium introduced me to Kristin a while back, and was sharing how great of an orientation and mobility specialist she was, and how many other things that she was doing in our field; and how impactful Kristen had been with her students, even though it had been just her first year last year. And with it just being our first year comes with a lot of different perspectives than we have as seasoned O&M specialists, I find that people who are new to this field don't have the same constraints that people who are experienced in the field have put ourselves in, they don't have that I've been doing this forever box to say, Okay, this is the way I do things, there is really no throwing them for a loop, necessarily, because everything is a loop. They're just starting the loop.
When I got to learn about Kristen, and what she's done, and also the challenges that she faced, and the way that she saw the challenges, they were just so different than anything that I had ever experienced. And it was also really impressive to see how somebody can be so organised when she has so much going on, within her own career, and outside of it, that we asked her to share her information with us. Now you'll get to hear a little bit about her here in the podcast today. And I'll do her formal intro in just a second. But what I hope you gather from this whole podcast interview are two things. One, that at any point, you can decide to do things differently because you've learned something new. She definitely dropped like a little tidbit of information that was just normal for her and I had no idea was possible and now has blown my mind. And to if you're interested in going deeper with this information, and getting a better handle on your digital resources, organisation and teaching strategies that I have an amazing offer for you.
As you know, every fall, we love hosting a free webinar, and this one is being held on November 9, from 3pm to four, let's say 4:30pm, Eastern Standard Time. It is accredited, which is amazing. And yes, we do have a replay available for those of you guys who can't make it live. And yes, you can still get your CEU if you come to the replay. However, I always think it's much better live are just much more attentive. And we can be in the chat and we can communicate with our friends, because the hosts aren't going to say everything that happens in the chat. And you won't be able to grab the links that are put in the chat by other people. There's just a whole community aspect that you miss out on. But if you can't make it at that time, and you still want this information that's totally cool. At the webinar, Kristen will also be giving away a free digital resource starter kit, which is all of the digital tools that she is used to catapult her career as a first year teacher, she's not moving from paper to digital, I'll be walking you through that during my portion because I had to go from paper to digital, I'm a little bit older, a little bit more… been in the game a little bit longer. Whether you are a new orientation and mobility specialist or you've been around the block a few times, there will definitely be something for you. At the very end of the webinar, as always, you want to stick around after the CEU code is given and get your first sneak peek of this symposium and see what we have coming down the pipe this year. I would love to have you join us for that part too. No pressure to join the symposium. You know what's best for you. We're just here to serve you and to have some fun and be in the community.
Who is Kristen Sharpless
Kassy:
Kristen Sharpless is a certified orientation and mobility specialist, certified vision rehabilitation therapist and sign language interpreter, working out of Ocean Grove, New Jersey. She graduated from the University of Massachusetts’ Vision Studies Programme in 2020. And has been working as a part time private comms, CVRT, and interpreter all at the same time, all at the same time ever since. She works with children ranging three to 18 years old across the state of New Jersey and she hopes to one day be an independent living specialist for those who are deaf blind. I cannot wait for you to meet her both here on the podcast and at the webinar. So let's just head on into the show.
Hi, Kristen, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Welcome welcome.
Kristen:
Hi thank you for having me. It's good to be here
Kassy:
It's so fun. It's you know, it's been really great getting to know you over the past few weeks months, as we've been working on this project and really looking at all of the wealth of information that you have as far as O&M even though you've only been in the field for a very short time. So I'd love for you to introduce yourself and allow our community members to get to know you a little bit better.
Kristen:
Sure, sure. My name is Kristin Sharpless, I live a little bit of town south of Asbury Park, New Jersey, so it's right on the beach in Central Jersey. I did not start my life wanting to be an O&M, I actually went to Bloomsburg University for my undergrad in American Sign Language Interpreting. So I graduated in 2012. And I was interpreting for about six or seven years and then I've always in the back of my head had this thought of wanting to work with deaf blind, wanting to work with deaf blind being involved in that world being involved in the community.; and I decided that I wanted to go back to school to be an orientation mobility specialist and a vision rehab therapist, which I now am both because I graduated in 2020 from UMass Boston. And I've been working as an O&M specialist and part time interpreting and VRT ever since.
Working Multiple Careers
Kassy:
Oh my gosh, wait, how do you have time to do all of that realise I knew that O&M was the second career. I knew about sign language interpreting, but also VRT, like, that's really interesting. What do you think was one of the components that propelled you which would combine all of those areas?
Kristen:
So surprisingly, not surprisingly, when I was really, really little, like when I first could pick up a book and read, I read a biography of Helen Keller, and I fell in love, I fell in love with her, I fell in love with how she saw the world and how she kind of navigated through life. And I knew from that moment, I've always wanted to work with I say, the Helen Keller's of the world that people with dual sensory losses. And now my career has kind of taken a little bit of a change. I'm now mostly full time O&M with part time interpreting, but it's a balance. It's a balance of staying organised, and making sure that you have enough time to be where you need to be. And when do you need to be there. I started out with O&M last September of 2020. And I told myself, I'm only going to have a couple of clients, and then I'll interpret Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I'll do my weekly kids whenever I need to see them. It has since shifted. Now I am everyday O&M. And then in the gaps in between all fits on interpreting in there. And I only have one kid that I do vision rehab therapy for.
Kassy :
Wow, I'm not complaining because I love our field. And you’re doing really great as an O&M specialist. So sorry to everybody else. But there's only so much time in the day. So we're just gonna snag you.
Kristen:
Yes. And I have taken a liking to it a little bit more than interpreting at this point in time. But and I think it's just because of the lack of interpreting jobs that are in the community because of COVID. And not a lot of people welcome in hospitals and that's okay, because I really thoroughly enjoy O&M and all the kids that I work with.
Kassy:
That's true. And you work with kids in a really interesting capacity where you are basically contract but you go really far all over your state. Will you share a little bit about that?
Kristen :
Sure, sure. So when I first graduated, or before I graduated, when I did my internship, it was through the RC commission and our state commission they allocate one O&M specialists per county and I think I moved to New Jersey six years ago, and I'm still not familiar with the whole state. But I think there's 22 or 23 counties in the entire state. So I did the internship, I left the internship and I kind of started wanting to branch my own way. So I made my own way. And now I'm in the independent contract business. So now I go to I think five counties I travelled to I go as far north as about an hour, 20 hour 25 minutes, and as far south as an hour and a half. And then I have some kids that are right around the corner.
Kassy:
Oh my gosh, just thinking about all that driving and the fact they've three different careers, you have your own business, right? So there's not somebody doing your two paperwork on the back, and you're doing all of that as well. And you have to do all of your invoicing and making sure that your data is correct for all these different entities who probably want it all written in different ways. And I have different schedules like girl, I have one student I showed up the other day, schools closed for a full week. And I was like, oh
Kristen:
That has happened, yup.
Challenges Faced
Kassy:
That schedule, darn. But to be so organised so that way you can fit it all in what do you think is one of the biggest challenges that you face right now?
Kristen:
The biggest challenges… First, I want to take a step back. And I do want to say that it's not only me who's doing the contracting and stuff, I do work for an LLC called Shore O&M. And it's just me and him. And he's the one that like, works with all the schools. And then he tells me, Hey, we got another one. Hey, we got another one. Okay, great, how far away is it? And we'll figure it out. But my biggest challenge right now is I have three kids who are an hour and a half north, one kid that's an hour and a half south and three kids that are kind of in the middle. So kind of figuring out their schedule, how many times I need to see them weekly, and try to fit all the North kids up on the same day and all the South kids up on the same day, or starting north and driving home. So I don't have to drive home during rush hour near New York City, because that's one thing I'm trying to avoid at all costs.
Kassy:
I can only imagine like scheduling a plus I don't want to drive home.
Kristen:
Plus, in the summer, if you're scheduling on a Friday, you schedule all the kids near you on a Friday, because Fridays at a beach town is no fun.
Kassy:
Oh, I bet so because people are coming into the town
Kristen:
Coming from the north and driving south. So we have the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey. And on Friday, starting at around two o'clock, it is bumper to bumper for like 40 to 50 miles.
Kassy:
Oh my gosh, yeah.
Kristen:
So my last kids at 1030 on Fridays up north for the day,
Kassy:
And you’re like, I'll just do this again, another day. And then you probably have paperwork and stuff like that. So you mentioned your internship. And one thing that we've talked a little bit about in the past, which I loved your perspective on; and it's not a perspective that I had ever taken or seen or heard about from anybody else. But it's so true. And it happened during your internship when you were expected to learn all those skills in a really short amount of time, but then got into the actual job. Can you talk a little bit about that, because it's so cool.
Kristen:
Sure. So the internship was about 350 hours, but it was right before the internship where we did the hands on like the one on one learning and I had to… so me and another girl from New Jersey, we had to drive up to Rhode Island once a week for the entire summer, sometimes twice a week. So not only was it a quick learning pace, but it's also a lot of drive time, a lot of organising, but one of the things I struggled with going into my internship and then since starting to work was the fact that during my we call it a practice lab. So during the one on one, like the hands on learning part, we had to learn everything from basic human guide all the way up to public transportation in a 20 week period. And that is not 20 weeks back to back. It's 20 sessions. And that's it. And then I like I felt confident I was like great, I can go out and I can do this. And I get like my first two students and I'm like, okay, you have to take a step back, because you cannot expect them to learn as fast as you do. You're a graduate student, this is a six year old. So like just kind of going from expecting to learn it in a very, very short period of time to now having a kid from six to 21. So for 20 years or whatever. It's definitely an adjustment that you have to take into consideration, and one that I didn't even think about until I actually started to experience and then you're sitting there and you're like, Okay, so how do I measure this kid's progress? I had a teacher I had an advisor, I had a mentor who's standing over my shoulder telling me Yeah, you're doing a good job or no, maybe you could do this better, or no, you're progressing very, very well. So now it's just me and this kid. And I'm like, Okay, how do I tell he's getting it? And it's just it's still a learning process. Now even a year later, I'm still like, oh, okay, that didn't work. So now we have to go back to the drawing board and start from the beginning. And we'll see if this one works.
And I have a bunch of kids that like I measure their progress through how well and how excited they are to have lessons. Like I have this one girl, she has a brace, she has CP, so she has a brace with her left hand. So I taught her the very first lesson I taught her how to, like fold her caning, because we need to learn how to fold our cane. She only had one hand, so I was talking her through it. And she wasn't getting it. She wasn't getting it. She was struggling with it. And we figured it out. And weeks pass months passed. And in her field day in the spring, she was coming up to everybody, Miss Kristin, bring your cane, bring your cane, I want to have cane competition, she can fold her cane in less than 15 seconds now, with one hand. I mean, like that's the progress that I needed for myself personally, that we don't really get as independent contractors, because not a lot of the people in the schools know what we're doing. Yeah, not a lot of people can say oh, I mean, people can say, Yeah, she's doing really well. But what does that mean? Like? How do you know if she's doing well, because you're not really understanding what's being taught because you're not on lessons with us. So like, even like just little things like that is good to see like how you're progressing and kind of like reinforcing, like, it's okay to take a step back. And it's okay, if it takes months to get from not knowing to being able to do it in 15 seconds.
Kassy:
Right. And that's the thing with our learners, especially our younger ones is that we do have great curricula, and amazing books that walk us through it. But we also have to individualise things so much. And they might have like one piece of this one piece of that. And it could be as simple as like, I had a student who I loved dearly. But if I wore the wrong shoes on the wrong day, he would not do O&M like apparently he knew what kind of shoes I needed to be wearing that day because he had decided before he even showed up. It was like, I guess I'm bringing my shoe closet to school next week, or you just don't know what's gonna motivate them. Or what's where they're going to get stuck unnecessarily until they actually start to do it. And if you look at the pyramid of learning all of the skills that we see there are the very top of that pyramid. But all of the components of the skills are down much lower. They're like underneath the surface of it all. So we can measure what we see. And we can measure where things are when we check for understanding and our lesson plans. But that doesn't necessarily tell us and a lot of times we do fall into concept gaps. Oh, that's right. Like you never seen a newspaper before. That's what that weird crinkly thing is and no, we shouldn't move it because it's not ours. But no, we shouldn't step on it either. You know, all of those little things that you already had the concepts of when you were going through school, right, but they may not. And oftentimes, we don't know until we fall in that concept gap. We're like, Oh, okay. I guess this is what we're doing today. This is our lesson. We're exploring whatever it is like okay, I sat there for half an hour my student explored a tree. Yeah, It’s just kind of it is what it is.
Teaser to the Upcoming Webinar
Kassy:
One of the things that I really have enjoyed learning from you are all the cool ways that you gather information, you store information, I didn't realise how much you have really not only grown up with this digital age and O&M, but you've had to lean on it. And it's kept you organised as a business woman working so far away from, you know, different places, and having everything in like a traditional paper form and then transferred to digital, but just to be a mind boggling mass. But I think it's been really interesting for me to learn from you about some of the really cool places or ways that you have gathered or disseminated information to your learners. I know we're going to talk more about this is our webinar on November 9, which Kristen will be our guest expert on. But do you want to give us a little teaser and just share you know, just one place that you've gone or idea that you've gotten from a digital resource?
Kristen:
Okay, yes sure. So social media in general, and not just lumping social media in with like Facebook, or Instagram. There's a whole wide variety of different social media. Besides that I kind of pull ideas from Facebook on Instagram, of course are some of them. But like two or three of the unexpected ones would be like Pinterest, you can get a whole bunch of different ideas and just crafty ideas. If you're like in a creative rut from Pinterest, TikTok has a lot of blind influencers, that you can not only look for yourself, but show parents or show kids who themselves have the vision impairment. And believe it or not the website Reddit, which is not a very well known one. It's an awesome, awesome community. And what I love about Reddit the most is that whatever question you have whatever topic you have a question about with your student with a vision impairment, you can go on to this group of this forum, and kind of type in everything's anonymous unless you want to make yourself known. So you don't have to worry about giving any personal information away, you can just say I have a student who's interested in this, how do I adapt it for somebody who's visually impaired, so like if they're interested in like woodworking or something like that, even though it's not like an O&M thing. But there are a bunch of different subreddits. And that's what they're called the groups are called subreddit. And you can pretty much get any question answered, like off the top of the bat, from people from all over the world from a whole bunch of different perspectives, and some even themselves who were blind, which is pretty awesome. If I say so myself, I'm like, connected to all these friends, and I don't even know them.
Kassy:
Yeah, I love that when you share that first, because I love Reddit as well. And I find so much inspiration from there and Pinterest, but Pinterest like I knew about, and of course, the Facebook group. So I loved that you share that. And it was really cool to think about Oh, that's right. It's an accessible platform, where Instagram, there are more people who have visual impairments going on there. But it's not meant for people with visual impairment. So if I want to get an honest opinion from somebody who has a visual impairment, like an anonymous web page, then you can just go then fact check whatever they said, and use that information in your teaching like, Oh, that's genius. And I think that's really cool. people overlook that. If you don't have X amount of years experience in our field, like no, you have a different perspective you are coming up through into this field and through our university systems with a different perspective. And it's all really valuable and interesting.
Kristen:
Absolutely. And I don't want to give any specifics, because I don't want to ruin the webinar, but tune in and you'll find out how right it has helped me.
Kassy:
Exactly, exactly. Okay, well, I'm just going to ask him one last question. And I completely forgot to share this question with you. Okay. So this is this might be new to you. I like to ask everybody who comes on the show, if you could give one piece of advice for our community to be able to take one step forward, in this case, take one step forward into bringing their digital organisation or their organisation into the digital age, what would that be?
Kristen:
One piece of advice would be to kind of just play around with it and see what works for you. I mean, there are a bunch of different ways that you can stay organised. And I can tell you right now, I used to be a paper planner kind of person. But now like since Google Calendar synced with like the iPhone, and I can colour code, and I can put in like, where I need to go and I can pin places so like, even if I don't have service I can get to where I need to go like that has been like my godsend, it has been my saving grace, but like just kind of play around with things that work for you. Like if you need a to do list play around like say you have a piece of paper that you write your to do list on and then try to do it on your phone and see which one works best for you just play around, there's a whole bunch of different options out there that you can use to stay organised.
Kassy:
That's true, and they can be super simple. Like the Notes app on your phone, or there's one I think maybe called Swipe where it's really just like a check mark, did you do this, swipe it away or not. You can get more advanced ones like Asana or there's even even further advanced ones. You mentioned pinning a location girl, that is genius!
Kristen:
I hold Apple Maps like or my Google Maps lights up like a Christmas tree because I have so many favorite places. So I can just like and you can label them too. So you can label them and you can just start to type in the name of the school or start to type in this kid's house and it'll bring you right to the address and you can just hit start and go and then that's also good for mapping out, like my clients where I'm so far away. It's good for timing and scheduling and stuff too.
Kassy:
Exactly that is so cool. So you are listening, on November 9, we are going to be sharing some ideas and some resources as well. You'll Got Kristen's whole digital resource starter pack, which I think is absolutely amazing. She has an invoice template, she has just so much that she is willing to share with you guys that we will give you right after the webinar. And you will walk away understanding how to start organising yourself in a digital way. So that way you can be a more effective teacher. And we want to make it easy and accessible and not overwhelming for you. And that is our goal. So that way you just walk away with easy tangible tips and ideas for how to move forward. Because really, that's the way that we're going. I still write on paper all the time, but it's so messy. And just the tools that you've helped me learn in the past few months as we've been working on this. I'm like, Oh yes, I need to start doing that. Oh, yes, like, that is so cool. I do already colour code my calendar. But I haven't pinned anything. So I'm going to start doing that just, you know this wealth of information. So that way we can be more organised, better schedulers. If you have an LLC, or if you are contract staff, and you need to be in charge of invoicing, she's got that whole thing for you bunch of templates. And it's going to be overall a really, really great time.
Kristen:
And the overall goal is to stop your work day after your last client so you don't have to work when you get home.
Kassy:
Yes, like you don't have to be the last car in the parking lot in order to be a good teacher right? And if you are, then maybe we need to give you some these tools. So that way you can go home and have a personal life. Because overall if you're still staying late every day, it's just gonna lead to burnout and we can't have that because we need you.
Kristen:
So use these to avoid burnout.
Kassy:
There you go. Alright, Kristen thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Kristen:
Thank you for having me.
Outro
Kassy:
Wasn't that just amazing? You want more information about the webinar, all you have to do is go to alliedindependenceonline.com/digital, that's alliedindependenceonline.com/digital, and it'll take you right to the registration page. I hope to see you November 9. And if you're catching this a little bit after that, the replay and see you will be up until November 18. One early bird registration closes. Alright friend, I will see you there.