The Autism Helper Professional Development Membership is OPEN for enrollment.

Hi everyone! Hope you had a really great week. Happy Friday! If it was a hard week, that's okay. Next week can only get better, right? I know this is the craziest back-to-school season ever, so if you are feeling overwhelmed, if you are feeling stressed, know you are not alone. On the webinar I did yesterday and on Wednesday, I asked, "How is everyone's year going?" and people had some intense comments to say. A lot of people said they're totally overwhelmed, feeling tons of anxiety, and there's a lot going on, so it's easy to feel that way. I wanted to jump on here because you may have heard already, but the Autism Helper Professional Development Membership is officially open for enrollment. And in the first day that we opened our doors, we have already welcomed, welcomed 100 new members, which is so, so exciting. Enrollment is open between now and Tuesday the 15th. Please feel free to drop any questions you have in here during the live, or if you're watching the replay, I'll come back and check later. But I wanted to pop on here and answer a few questions that I got on Instagram today when I did a question sticker to see what questions people had on the membership, because I thought you guys might have some of the same questions. So if you're not familiar with the membership, let me give you a quick recap. You get access to new monthly training videos, downloadable resources, and a community within the Autism Helper Professional Development Membership. Really, I want to give you that path and plan for your classroom. So every month we're gonna focus on a few specific topics. Instead of trying to do all the things, do a few things well. And we're really gonna work on how to apply all these strategies to the non-traditional classroom that you're probably in right now. If you are in a virtual classroom, in a hybrid classroom, if you're in person and doing all social distancing and all that kinds of things, we are gonna talk about how to apply best practices and evidence-based strategies in in that situation. I have to tell you, the Facebook group has been on fire lately. So we have an exclusive members-only Facebook group, and when school closures happened in the spring, I was really in awe in how these teachers came together to collaborate, to troubleshoot. There's been new questions every single day, and all teacher— different teachers and educators and professionals are popping on, giving ideas and helping everyone troubleshoot. People are making each other tutorials and tip sheets. We've done some really cool exclusive webinars and Facebook Lives all focused on distance learning and Boomcards and all that good stuff in the membership Facebook group. So it's been a really fun place to be. So a few questions that I've gotten today that I wanted to drop in here, and again, if you have any questions, please leave them here. If you head over to our website, theautismhelper.com/membership, we have a little chat feature where you can ask any questions there as well. So one question that I've been getting today is about school licenses, and it is a perfect time to ask that because it's Friday. I know I probably missed your school window here, but we have two more school days, Monday and Tuesday, until the cart closes. If you go to our membership page, there is a school license button in the middle that will take you to a form. We do not need all the details of the school PO worked out by Tuesday because I know it takes a little bit to, you know, work with different schools and schools have different ways they do things, but we do need that form by Tuesday. So if this is something you think your school would be interested in covering the cost of, I highly recommend shooting them an email today, reaching out to an administrator or your special ed director on Monday morning and asking them if they would cover the cost. You'd be surprised, a lot of districts are willing to, and this is a time— this is a year that it's especially hard to get CEUs. To get professional development hours and to get access to a community of people that really get it. So I think a lot of districts are really open to, you know, outside the box and creative ways to get all the teachers the professional development they need. So it's all— to me, it's always worth asking. So if you're interested in school license, you know, fill out that form, talk to your administrator, and see if they're willing to cover the cost. The other question I've been getting is about CEUs. So CEUs are going to be particularly tricky to get this year because we're not going to in-person conferences. Maybe you're not going to workshops you'd normally go to. I know me myself, I typically spend a good portion of my year traveling around the US. I usually do about 25 live events. Obviously I'm not doing that right now, so getting CEUs might be a little harder this year. Within the membership you get 1 CEU a month. You can request CEUs every 4 months, so every 4 months you will get 4 CEUs for watching the videos and taking part in this community. Every school district is a little different on what they accept for CEUs. I am a Type 2 provider from the BACB CB. I'm an ACE provider, so if you're a behavior analyst, I can give behavior analyst CEUs, and I so far have not had any school districts not accept my CEUs. So that's just my little disclaimer. Um, I also had someone ask earlier today if they can try the membership. Yes, there is a no-risk 7-day trial period when you sign up. If you sign up and you try it for a few days and you decide it's not for me, we will refund your money. There's also no set amount of months that you have to join. You can join in the monthly membership and pay by month, or you can join in the annual membership where you get 1 month for free. So you pay for the whole year up front, but you get 1 month for free. If you decide to do the monthly membership, just take it each month at a time. If you decide after a few months that it's not the right fit or you're not using it as much, you can cancel it anytime. There's no set amount of time that you have to join. I also got asked a few times today, who is the membership for? I created this membership specifically with special education teachers in mind, But the basic principles and the best practices and the evidence-based strategies that we talk about in the membership, I think, really apply beyond just the role of a teacher. Currently in the membership, we have teachers, we have paraprofessionals, we have clinicians, we have BCBAs, SLPs, OTs, we have all types of clinicians, and we have a lot of parents too. A lot of rockstar, gung-ho parents who are all in applying strategies at home maybe doing some homeschooling right now. So I love getting the chance to welcome parents to the membership as well. We actually started in the spring setting up some think tanks where we were connecting people with the same role. So we did some special Zoom calls with all school-based BCBAs to connect people that were in that same role. We did Zoom calls with all preschool self-contained teachers or all homeschooling parents to really help connect you with people that are working in the same way that you are and have the same challenges that you are so you can troubleshoot together. So those are some of the questions that I've been getting today. If you have any other questions, please feel free to drop them in here, and I will be back later to answer them. Enrollment is open from now until Tuesday. We only open enrollment twice a year, so this is the last time to join for 2020. If you are at all interested, I do not want you to miss out, so I want you to sign up now so you don't forget, because the weekend will get crazy and then the school week will start, and then I'll get all these emails Wednesday and Thursday being like, oh my gosh, I forgot, I'm so sorry. So I don't want you to miss out because we want everyone to get in at the same time. You'll get your password right away. It was really fun to see when we opened the doors on Wednesday that people joined, and then within the first hour we can see on like the tech side they were already watching videos, they were already downloading resources, they were already in the Facebook group. So it was really cool to see people just jump right in. And I know this is a per— like I said, a particularly busy back-to-school season, so you might feel very, very overwhelmed. And to me, the— sometimes the thought of adding one more thing to your plate feels like, no way, I don't have time for anything else. But that to me is the reason to join, because professional development is self-care. It's kind of refilling your cup, refocusing, giving yourself that opportunity to think about your job, think about why you're doing what you're doing, and learn new skills. And I think that's a great opportunity to do that. Okay, okay, that's really all I have to say. My daughter really wants to be on the Facebook Live, so she wants to say hi. Can you say hi? Hi! She's my assistant helping me today. So if you have any other questions, please feel free to drop them in, and me or Audrey will answer it for you, right? Yeah. Yeah, can you say bye-bye? Bye! Say have a good weekend. Have a good weekend. All right, have a good weekend everyone!