Meet the team—Maddie Jamieson
‘Meet the team’ is our series featuring the people and teams who are here to give you support and advice during your time at university. This week we spoke to Maddie Jamieson, digital inclusion coordinator at Te Amaru—Disability Services.
Kia ora, I’m Maddie and I’m a digital inclusion coordinator at Te Amaru—Disability Services
My role involves doing training workshops for our main digital inclusion softwares, which are Glean, Read&Write, and EquatIO. The main focus for me at the moment is creating content to make sure students are getting the right instructional process when they access these softwares. It’s important that people know how to use the software before they download it, so that there are no barriers and that it’s enhancing their learning from the start.
The digital inclusion softwares are super helpful for students. I wish I had them when I was at uni!
Glean is the one I’ve been doing a lot of work on recently. It records audio from your lecture so you can also take notes along with it, and it attaches them to the relevant section of audio—so when you go back, all your notes are in the right place. You can also mark things as ‘important’ with a key press, so if you really can’t interact that day you can at least mark the spots in the lecture to revisit.
We also have Read&Write, which is a literacy support tool. It has a really in-depth spell checker and proofing tool, and great screen reader support—it can read from PDFs and from images. One of my favourite features is that you can use coloured highlighters to select text, and then it will sort all those highlighted things into one document by colour—AND cite where they came from!
And finally EquatIO is a numeracy based software. You can input equations using voice, text, and verbal descriptions. It can also read equations from images, and from handwriting. On top of that, it can produce graphs, it’s got a scientific calculator function—it’s a really great software.
I love working with students like me
I have ADHD, and one of the most rewarding things is working with people like me who have struggled with similar issues that I did at uni. I really love getting to help people and seeing the positive results. Seeing students actually using the product out in the wild and getting good use out of it, hearing their feedback on things that might not be working—I really like that. It’s a great thing to be able to take away from work.
My biggest piece of advice for students? Ask for help when you need it
Sometimes we need to reframe the way we see things we’re struggling with, and find out how we can be more accommodating to ourselves. Reach out for help—we have a lot of help to give and we’re always really keen to give it. We’ve got loads of workshops for the software, and we can do one-on-ones if you’d prefer—just get in touch!
Maddie Jamieson is a digital inclusion coordinator with Te Amaru—Disability Services. Find out more about the inclusive learning softwares available to students.
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