ATU728 Jamworks with Josh Ferry Woodard

Hi, this is Josh Ferry Woodard, and I’m the marketing manager and AI prompt engineer at Jamworks. And this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson, with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana.

Welcome to Episode 728 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on May 9th, 2025. On today’s show, we are joined by another Josh, here to tell us all about Jamworks and how this tool can really help folks with note-taking and a whole lot more. We’re also joined by BridgingApps with an app worth mentioning. But you know what? Let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Listeners, I thought we might start off today by talking a little bit about the AT Act. As many of you might know, here at INDATA, we are the AT Act provider for the State of Indiana. But what exactly does that mean? Well, it means that the INDATA Project is one of 56 similar federally-funded projects across the nation designed to increase access and awareness of assistive technology. So really the goals of INDATA and of all the AT Acts is to get the word out about assistive technology and to get it in the hands of folks that can use it.

So here at INDATA, our core services, we have information and referral. Anyone can reach out to us at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org with any kind of questions, anything from available services, to devices that are out there, to funding options. If we don’t know the answer, we can usually get you to someone who does. We provide device demonstrations and loans through our loan library where someone could come out to your home, show you different devices, as well as actually loan those devices out so that you can try them out for yourself.

We have an equipment re-utilization program and a recycled computer program through our depot. What they do is they take in video magnifiers, assistive technology devices, laptops, tablets, and other electronic devices. We refurbish those, and then give those out to individuals in the State of Indiana with a documented disability. Our alternative financing program allows individuals to get low interest loans to purchase their own assistive technology. To get the word out, we have our full day trainings as well as this podcast, our blog Tech Tips, and other tools to really just get the information out. You can find all of our different services at EasterSealsTech.com.

Now, these are all available to anyone in the State of Indiana, but if you’re not in Indiana and somewhere else in the United States, you can go to EasterSealsTech.com/states and find the program in your state and find out what services they might offer to help you, your family members, your friends, those you serve, or others in your community. And you can find your local AT Act at EasterSealsTech.com/states.

Listeners, our next INDATA full day training will be coming up on May 22nd, 2025, and it’s titled Mobile Device Assistive Technology. This training will be 100% online, but you do have to register. I’ll put a link down to EasterSealsTech.com so that you can get to all of our full day trainings and register for Mobile Device Assistive Technology coming on May 22nd. Members of our team here at the Assistive Technology program at Easterseals Crossroads will present on built-in technologies for iOS devices, Android devices, and other mobile technology. We’ll also be joined by our partners from InTRAC. InTRAC at Indiana Relay not only sponsors the captions to the show, but also do a lot of other amazing things related to helping individuals with mobile technology with communication. They’ll present on some of these programs as well as some amazing tools that are out there to help individuals access mobile technology.

And we’re also very excited that we’ll be joined by our friends from BridgingApps, who you will hear later on this show as well. BridgingApps will be here to talk about their amazing search tool, how you can really look for some great different apps, also to talk about some of their favorite apps. So if you’re interested in learning more about mobile device assistive technology, do join us for our next INDATA full day training on May 22nd, 2025, from 9 AM to 3 PM Eastern Time. Again, this online training does offer CEUs and is free to attend, but you must register before the training. We’ll put a link down in the show notes so that you can check it out for yourself. Listeners, next up on the show, we welcome back our friends from BridgingApps, with an app worth mentioning.

This is Ale Gonzalez with BridgingApps, and this is an app worth mentioning. This week’s featured app is called Audible: Audio Entertainment. Audible is the world’s largest selection of audiobooks, audio shows, and original series. With the app, users can listen to audiobooks anytime, anywhere, at home or on the go. Even if you switch devices, you will never lose your place. The Audible app can help people with disabilities build literacy skills, enjoy entertainment like their peers, and be exposed to authors sharing their own experience of living with disabilities.

Users can pair their smart speaker with Audible to listen at home using just their voice or follow along with real-time highlighting on their Kindle. It offers a wide selection of content, including Audible originals that are exclusive to the app. A favorite feature is that users can download books for offline listening, which is great when you are traveling and have spotty signal. The Audible app offers a 30-day free trial with two free audiobooks for Prime members, or for non-members, one free audiobook. Audible is currently available for both Android and iOS devices, and it is free to download with a 14.95 per month subscription and optional in-app purchases. For more information on this app and others like it, visit BridgingApps.org.

Listeners, note-taking is an issue for a lot of individuals with disabilities and, well, let’s not lie, for probably most of us, regardless of the presence of a disability or not. Our guest today, who has an amazing name, I might add, is from Jamworks, and Josh is here to tell us all about how this AI note-taking program can assist with your note-taking needs and so much more. Josh, welcome to the show.

Hi, Josh, nice to be here.

Yeah, I am really happy to have you on. Before we get into talking about Jamworks, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, so I’m the marketing manager and AI prompt engineer at Jamworks. I’ve been with the company for three and a half years, quite soon after its inception. And personally, I love to play football, ping-pong, reading and swimming in the sea or rivers.

Very, very cool. Well, so Jamworks sounds like a music festival that I would’ve probably attended in my younger days, but it’s actually something much, much more helpful. So I guess just start us off by telling us just kind of overarching what is Jamworks?

Yeah, so essentially what Jamworks does is it records classes, transcribes what was said into text, and then uses AI to make that information easier to understand and personalized to individual student needs. So we take the transcript, which is a wall of text. People like to review transcripts occasionally because they can find the specifics of what was said, but often it’s quite overwhelming to look through a massive wall of text for an hour lecture. So to make it easier to understand, we break it down into a summary. So we give students a summary of the full class. We also break the class down into chapters about specific topics, and then we summarize each chapter. So it’s kind of like a case of you could look at the title of a chapter, read a summary of it, and then decide whether you need to listen to it again or whether you’ve already understood that.

So we have two different ways of using the app now. There’s one way where a student would prefer to actively listen in class, not worry about technology and distractions, not become overwhelmed with listening and typing notes at the same time. For those students, they will get a feature that we have called Key Points where they’ll have basically a perfect set of text notes provided for them within two to three minutes of the class. So they’ll have a headline, a two sentence description, and a list of bullet points about each important topic. So it’s the same format. It’s organized in the same way. It’s easy to understand. And they’ll get that from every recording that they make.

The other way that a student can use Jamworks for their note-taking, so this is for the student that does want to engage with the note-taking process in the moment, but maybe they struggle with the organization, the detail, the specifics, the spelling, maybe they get overwhelmed if they miss something, and that can kind of derail their whole learning process because either they lose track of what’s going on in the moment or their notes become a bit of a mess if they’re listening and more is said at the same time. So to help these students, and this is probably the majority of students who they do wish to take some notes, but to take perfect notes is very difficult while listening at the same time. So for these students, we have a feature called Enhanced Notes where during the recording, during class on their laptop they can just type whatever rough messy notes they can. They don’t need to worry about missing anything because they’ve got the transcript, they’ve got the recording, got all the things that they’ve noted.

So those specific points, however much detail they do or don’t go into, as long as they mention the point, the notes that they do make, afterwards Jamworks will use the transcript to make sure it’s relevant and then AI to flesh out their notes. So each topic that they talk about, it will add the details. It will obviously ensure the veracity of, if they’ve made a slight mistake, it can use the transcript to determine whether there’s been a slight mistake and then correct it. If there’s additional details that they’ve missed, then it will add them and it will basically just flesh out their notes for them. So they still have the cognitive process of taking the note, committing it to memory, but they don’t have the cognitive overload of trying to arrange and capture every detail in the moment.

Nice. So it sounds like Jamworks can not just, I don’t want to say take my notes for me, but create those notes for me if I need to actively listen, but also enhance my notes if I want to actively take notes at the same time while also just making sure that I’m staying on subject and making something useful out of it.

Yeah, yeah, that’s it exactly. Because we started with the Key Points, so provided notes feature, and we know it’s that a lot of universities have programs like peer note-taking programs or provided note takers who will sit in the class and attempt to write notes for different subjects and then provide that to the student because that was the most effective way for that student to have materials that they can use to study from later. And then from feedback, we heard people say how amazing that was, and they absolutely loved it that they could just get this in their pocket and they get it in the same style and quality every time. But we also heard the feedback that there’s some students that need help don’t need the full provided notes. They want to be involved in that process to learn how to take better notes and to commit the notes to memory, but they can’t take the quality of notes that they need in the class. So yeah, that’s what we’ve kind of built for them.

Nice. I love that. Because yeah, it gives you the opportunity to make sure that the information you think’s important is going to get in there and come out and also just let you actively participate and not just kind of rely on the technology to do it all for you. So that is awesome.

Yeah, that’s a big concern with AI. You want to make sure that you’re using it in a way that works for learning. You don’t want to do too much for the students. So we’re always thinking about how to ensure that what we’re doing is accurate, relevant, and useful for learning.

And kind of talking about useful for learning, Jamworks is so much more than just note-taking. Tell us about how it can assist with, I don’t know, learning, quizzing and kind of the flashcards feature.

So once the student has captured the class and taken their notes or reviewed their provided notes, we want to quickly enable them to start to engage with learning the information that was presented to them in class. So it’s not just about capturing, it’s about learning. So we have a few ways to do that. One of them is flashcards. So from the chapters we make a question, so it’s automatically made, it removes the time-consuming process of creating flashcards. So automatically they have a quick way to test their knowledge.

So they’ll have a question and they can click to show the answer, it will tell them the answer. If they didn’t quite get it right, or they still don’t know, if they don’t fully understand the answer, this is a really unique feature to us, they can just click and listen back to the time in the lecture where that specific piece of information was described in their lecturer’s own words. So again, it’s really trying to blend the abilities of AI to take out some of the scaffolding work of creating the flashcards, but then still relying on the human teacher to provide the information, and to signpost the student how to get to that information to understand what they know and what they don’t know, and then to help them get back to revisit something that they don’t know.

Nice. And yeah, I’m glad you brought up kind of time-consuming because I know at least for a lot of students I work with, it’s, “Well, what information?” Or, “How do I make these useful? I know what I know. What don’t I know?” So I love that it really gives you that. And it can even go a little bit farther as far as answering questions and making up questions, kind of a personal tutor kind of feature. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, so we have JamAI, which is, like you said, our personal tutor. And the main way JamAI works, the basic way it works, is for every class you have a tutor that is locked to that specific class and can help answer questions about the topics in that class. So you can just say to the tutor, “I don’t fully understand this topic, blah, blah, blah, can you help me understand it?” And it will give them an explanation. They can say, “I don’t quite get this specific part of it.” It can give you an explanation. You can ask it to simplify it, to write it in an analogy or whatever. But the whole idea is that unlike just going to ChatGPT or a generic chatbot, it’s personalized and relevant to their classes. So you can rely that the answers it gives are accurate and useful to them.

They’re all getting better, the average generic chatbots are very good, they’re better than they were a year ago, better than they were two years ago, but they still have that element of the training data is massive and it’s not necessarily the same syllabus or the same piece of information that they need to learn for their course. It also has a load of, something that’s quite new, we call them quick prompts. So it’s basically in the chatbot interface, they have the ability to ask anything, but also to kind of help get them started when they have lower motivation or they don’t know where to start. There’s a list of five or six buttons that they can select, and these are kind of learning modes that help them to engage with the material.

So one of them is called Quiz Me, and it starts by asking easier yes, no, true, false questions. When they get a few of those right, it moves on to multiple choice questions. If they get it wrong, it asks some questions around the same subject to help them prove that they are now understanding that topic. And then once they’re committed by they’re like eight to 10 questions in to this specific class, they will get more active recall where they have to type to answer the question rather than just select from choice.

And the whole idea with that is, like I mentioned, if a student has low motivation, they don’t know exactly how to get started, a tutor mode like that, that kind of guides them through, gives them emojis, gives them positive feedback when they get a question right, helps them understand if they’ve got something wrong, we’ve found that that’s really helpful. We have other modes like Definitions where they can request a list of a glossary, like a list of definitions, key terms, subject-specific terms that were mentioned, and then they can ask questions about any of those if they need to. We’ve even got an Emoji Quiz where topics from the class will be translated into a list of emojis, and the student then has to guess from the emojis what topic it is. It’s a bit of fun, and again, it’s not the most intensive learning, but it’s a lighter way in if you’re thinking about studying and you don’t know where to start.

Oh, for sure. And sometimes you do just have to kind of keep it fun or make it interesting in order to stay engaged. So just sitting there and being quizzed constantly is not going to be fun for anybody. So Josh, I noticed, because I’m going back over my notes and stuff, it had something called Focus Reading. Can you tell me what that is and how it assists?

Yeah. So Focus Reading is a mode that students can turn on for their text notes. So for the transcript, the summaries and the Key Points provided notes. And what it is is it’s a method that helps some people read more quickly or with less effort. So it kind of highlights around the first half. It’s not exactly the first half, but there’s an algorithm, but it’s around the first half of every word is highlighted. And the idea is that for some people, seeing the text like that, it encourages the brain to process the information and read the rest of the word quicker. So with accessibility in mind, we’ve tried to provide lots of customizations and options that people can use to make it easier to access the information. So that’s a mode that some people love and some people it’s the opposite, it makes it more difficult to read, it’s a distraction.

Sure, sure. Now, Josh, is this able to kind of integrate with my learning management system at my school, my college, or anything like that?

Yeah, so there’s levels of integration. We’re working to set up a more in-depth integration with products like Canvas. So at the moment, any recording that is made within Jamworks can be linked to from a learning management system. Very soon it will be able to be embedded. Say you recorded 10 lectures, you could have them embedded in Canvas or another system like that. We are ultimately looking to be able to pull more information from those systems to enhance the personalization within Jamworks as well.

So later down the line, the idea is that a student will be able to be prompted, like, “You’ve got a class on this tomorrow. Would you like to review these materials that you have previously made that are related?” as like a primer. The whole idea is we’ll move towards being able to prompt before and after class the appropriate materials from their library to help reinforce their previous learning and address the forgetting curve by a week after every class, give them a little test to see where they are and how much they’ve remembered or forgotten in that week and then to be able to keep giving them more information.

There’s a tool, I’m sure you know, Panopto, that is used to capture lectures. We integrate with that. So any student that attends a Panopto uni can set up their profile in Jamworks to basically import all of the recordings from Panopto into Jamworks, and they can do that. So if they join in year two, they can recall all of their future materials and they can also backtrack and import the recordings from the previous year so that they’ve got it all in one place.

Awesome. And Josh, what kind of platforms is Jamworks available on?

So it’s pretty much across the board. It is cloud-based so your whole setup is synced across, so you can record on a laptop or a mobile. And that could be iOS or Android, it can be Windows, it can be Mac, it can be anything really, and then you can access it on any browser or on your app. So yeah, it’s very flexible in that sense.

Awesome. Josh, you probably have a few of these, but could you tell us a story of maybe someone who had challenges with note-taking, with learning, and maybe how Jamworks was able to help them out?

So I’ll try and convey this as accurately as possible, but it’s basically, we speak to a lot of the customers in the US and they give us their feedback. So a disability service coordinator at North Central College, Noah Cooperider, he gave us this bit of feedback, which was amazing for us. He said, “Before we had Jamworks, note-taking was a constant point of frustration for students on our caseload. I have personally witnessed students’ entire academics turn around with this tool. Students have cried in my office because they are so happy and relieved. Many have said they never imagined something like this would be possible.”

That is super cool. Because yeah, you’re not just doing note-taking, you’re giving them some different learning tools and other things and just taking a lot of the frustration and pressure off folks. And it’s a lot easier to learn if you’re not stressed out about, am I going to write down the right information, am I going to forget this, and everything else. If you know those things are handled, it’s a little easier to stay engaged and everything. So that is awesome. Josh, if our listeners want to find out more about Jamworks, what’s a good way for them to do it?

The best way is to go on our website, which is just Jamworks.com. We have Instagram and TikTok channels, which is @jamworksapp. And if anyone wants to arrange a personal walkthrough or just ask any questions, you can email me at josh@jamworks.com and I’m happy to talk people through the product or anything like that.

Awesome. We’ll put all that information down in the show notes. Well, Josh, thank you so much for coming on today, for telling us about Jamworks and all the just amazing things it can do for note-taking and really beyond.

Thank you, Josh. It was a pleasure.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter, @INDATAproject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation, or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nikol Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners, or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update. I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.