Dave's Literacy and Disability Links

Frustrated by the crushing weight of NC's legislation on teachers, students, and NC's future? Here's a non-profit teacher-created organization providing information, advice, and advocacy.

If you think NC's legislation isn't impacting kids in special education, think again.

Typing requires teaching if you want to keep the tool from getting in the way of children's thinking. Here's a free way to get started.

What a great site! 250 comics and editorials, give or take, updated daily. Pearls Before Swine, Pooch Cafe, FoxTrot, Non Sequitur, Peanuts, Stone Soup...

Funding appeal for Rett University, nonprofit designed to improve literacy, learning, and communication outcomes for girls with Rett syndrome.

Nice guidance for teachers in using Twitter effectively.

Lists and other word resources at Spelling City website. Heteronyms are words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently. e.g., I am content with my blog content.

This little girl has a great deal of difficulty with word identification. She is doing repeated reading of easy text to increase her sight word vocabulary, general fluency, and expression.

Family's struggles in trying to get appropriate educational services for their son, who has autism.

units, lessons, passages. Frieda Hiebert and Joanna Williams on their board.

Video of really interesting use of typewriter by artist with cerebral palsy.

Blog entry at Dave Koppenhaver's literacy and disability website about struggling readers and writers.

Bookr is a free writing tool. You can easily insert pictures from Flickr, add pages to make longer book. User-friendly. No supports for kids with disabilities, but one more place for parent-child or teacher-child co-construction and conversation. Can't beat the price.

The best flash-animated alphabet book I have every seen. Very clever. Not the usual dumb drill and practice with lame content. Impressive.

One way to support wide reading developing readers is to pursue their interests. Search "videos with onscreen lyrics" and add the singer, music type, title, etc. This broad search of just "videos with onscreen lyrics yielded 150 million results--that's a lot of motivating text for a lot of readers.

Key search terms to find music with lyrics as reading source material.

Exemplar text supports broken into grade level bands. Useful for folks looking for texts to implement Common Core (or just provide easier text versions of regular classroom texts.

American Association of School Librarians (AASL) selected sites that foster innovation, creativity, active participation, and collaboration in 6 categories: media sharing, digital storytelling, manage/organize, social networking, content resources, and curriculum collaboration.

American Association of School Librarians' (AASL) chose apps in 5 categories (books, science/tech, org/mgmt, soc science, content creation) that foster innovation, creativity, active participation, collaboration, and are user friendly

A limited number of scholarships are available for persons with disabilities or parents/guardians of children with disabilities. Apply here.

Closing the Gap is an outstanding assistive tech conference. Discounted parent registration rate.

Painter with dyslexia who continues to contribute to education of struggling readers.