By Carolyne Smith & Ruth Gallagher Carr
Getting AT Ready is back! Our annual event took a bit of a hiatus last year due to Covid. We took AT Ready online in 2020 and that was phenomenal – it was wonderful to see so many people engage with us. But last year, we decided to take a break because we, like most of you, were feeling some Zoom fatigue and didn’t want to ask people to sit in front of a computer screen all day.
So now we’re back and we wanted to make it bigger and better than ever. What can you expect at the Getting AT Ready Festival? We’ll have all of the fantastic content, keynote speakers and workshops that we normally have. One of the biggest bits of feedback we had from our online event was that people missed having an opportunity to meet in person, to grab a cuppa and chat! So, we thought we’d give you all of the great stuff that AT Ready normally offers with loads of opportunities to catch up with colleagues and others you haven’t seen in a couple of years.
We want people to be immersed in the whole festival vibe because there’s going to be so much going on. The event is being held at the Technology and Innovation Centre at the University of Strathclyde on 7th and 8th July and we have been so impressed with their Covid protocols and preparedness.
We have a theme for each day – Lessons from Lockdown and Universal Design for Learning (UDL). As always, it’s not just about the technology, it’s about how to utilise it in a new and accessible way. We’ve got some fabulous speakers who are incredibly knowledgeable. We have Frank Rennie, Professor at the University of the Highlands and Islands – what a personality! What he doesn’t know about how to deliver specific learning online, nobody does! He’ll have a fireside chat with Tom Farrelly, who delivers the Gasta sessions and we’ll also have All Able, who are experts in the digital accessibility field, who work with universities and Government.
On the theme of UDL, we’ve got Rohan Slaughter, who delivers the MSc in Assistive Technology at Dundee University. he’s coming along to talk about what he does there.
We won’t give everything away right now – more acts to follow!
You can expect timed events, with workshops and sessions happening at a particular time on each day. But outside of that there will be plenty of space for people to be able to network at their own space because we know this can be overwhelming. And we will of course have our amazing assistive technology exhibition.
Stay tuned – more information coming very soon. Until then, get your place booked so you don’t miss out. www.atready.co.uk