Dyslexia Journey Gratitudes for 2023

Hey everyone, happy new year, and today we have a special episode where we want to share our gratitudes from 2023.

So as always, we are Nick and Sonja, and this is Dyslexia Journey, where we help you support the dyslexic kid in your life. And that head that just went down a little bit, hopefully you saw him for a second there, is our dog Rolo, who is our special guest today. And he's here today because we're sharing our gratitudes for 2023, specifically around dyslexia, but we thought that it would also be nice to have Rolo here because we are grateful for him almost every day of the year.

All right, so today we have eight gratitudes to share with you, dyslexia-related gratitudes for 2023. So our first gratitude is for all of you who have watched, listened, liked, and commented on our episodes on the podcast and the YouTube channel. Thanks to you, we had over 10,000 downloads of our podcast in 2023 and over 50,000 views on YouTube in 2023. So thank you. We appreciate it very much. Next up, we just wanted to list and appreciate each of our guests from this year.

So we had psychologist Aletha Solteron, science teacher Kevin Nugent, and therapist Donna McCutcheon. We also had author and literacy advocate Sherry Rae, dyslexia advocate Amy Dubroigny, and authors and dyslexic voice Lynn and Jonathan Greenberg. Language arts teacher Diane Bramble, psychologist and the head of the Gifted Development Center Linda Silverman, and author and mom of a dyslexic son Lois Letchford. And finally, we finished out our guest interviews of the year with dyslexic voices Julia Wild and Justin McSweeney.

And we also wanted to thank ahead of time, because they've already done their interviews, but these are upcoming, so look for them coming out soon. Ed Thompson, who will be talking about neurodiversity in the workplace. He's from the organization Optimize. And Cliff Weitzman, who's the founder and CEO of Speechify. And is also a dyslexic voice. All right, our third gratitude for 2023 is for everyone out there who is advocating for dyslexia awareness, for educational changes around dyslexia, for legislative changes around dyslexia.

We really appreciate all of you who are putting your time and money and effort into making the world a better place for our dyslexic kids. So number four is that we're grateful that we live in this time of greater understanding. There's still ways to go, but there's a lot better understanding than there was even a couple of generations ago. And so we are very grateful for the increased recognition and support. So I'll do number five as well, because along those lines, we are grateful for those teachers who are so supportive of our dyslexic kids, some of which are the guests we've had on our show, but many other teachers out there who do recognize and give a lot of support around our dyslexic students.

All right, our sixth gratitude around dyslexia for 2023 is all the technological advancements that have made things easier, both for our dyslexic kids and for us as parents and teachers to help our dyslexic kids. And specifically, two that I'll just call us explicitly are ChatGPT and Speechify, both of which are fantastic tools for helping our dyslexic kids. If you want to know more about our thoughts on ChatGPT and how it can be used, we do have an episode on that.

And more on Speechify when we have an upcoming interview with Cliff Weitzman. And our seventh gratitude for 2023 is to all of the parents, caregivers, friends, other family, everyone who supports, encourages, and really helps our dyslexic kids. That's so important. We've really discovered through our own experiences and through everyone we've talked to, all of the Dyslexic Voices interviews, there's a common theme of really it's the support and love of the caregivers that really makes a difference in the lives of the dyslexic kids.

Okay, and then our eighth and final gratitude from 2023 is that we are grateful that we have the time and resources both to support our own dyslexic daughter and to produce and share Dyslexia Journey. All right, well, so those are our eight gratitudes, plus Rolo, who's made a guest appearance on the show today. So, happy new year, and here's to an even better 2024. Thanks, everyone.

We'll see you next time.