Group items tagged

Educational and Assistive Technology to support Universal Access and Universal Design for Learning"

"Looking for Universal Design (The View from Here, Part 2) "

"So what needs to be in place to actually create a UDL classroom? What prevents teachers from creating one? In my opinion, the following needs to be there:"

This is a story of a first-time instructor and her discovery of Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

"These apps are all educational in nature and will have you learning about math, science, geography, history, English, and foreign languages; help strengthen your skills with brain exercises and quizzes; provide reference material; and offer opportunities to boost your productivity so you can devote more time to your studies."

Collection of ideas for using Google docs in a variety of ways. Archive of previous posts by month

"Two thumbs up to Web 2.0 Guru that has put together this complete list of resources. Anything you may need, everything!" Web 2.0

"Eight Great Interactive Sites that let you Paint like a Famous Artist"

How cool is this? Paint the walls to become a whiteboard?

"Her list is titled, "20 Online Tools and Sites to Engage Students in Learning," and without any further ado, here it is! The Internet is loaded with tools and websites that teachers can use to engage their students in math lessons, language arts, history, art, music, and other subjects. Here are 20 online tools and sites to try throughout the school year:"

"What tools do teachers need to use to be Tech Savvy Teachers? So was born the List of Essential Tools For The Connected Teacher. Of course these are not all the tools teachers need. Nor are the tools in each category the only tools perfect for that category. They are just a jumping off point. A way to get started. So for the next 4 Fridays I will be posting a different category of connectedness and several tools."

"To help address this challenge, we've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they're off, they can still be helpful-and the technology will continue to improve with time."

"For any student having trouble reading material on a screen, text-to-speech technologies can be wonderful. My March 2008 post, "Converting text to and from speech for accessibility and convenience" addressed some of the software options available today for text to speech functionality. Of those, "CLiCk, Speak" is probably the main one to check out. It's cross-platform, works in the FireFox browser as a plug-in, and is free. In addition to those text-to-speech options, the latest version of the Macintosh operating system (OS 10.6 "Snow Leopard") includes the built-in ability to convert highlighted text in many applications into an audio file. Here is an example of a file I created while writing this post, of this paragraph."

"Presentation and workshop documents During the last six or so years I have created a number of 'how-to' documents and presentations for a variety of web based and related technologies. They are available from the various workshop web pages however I thought it might prove helpful to link to all the documents from a single page. Some of my workshop participants have referred to these documents as 'cheat sheets'."

"I received a question from a technology director this week regarding different options available for text-to-speech conversion software and web-applications. I'm posting what I know here in hopes that others will be able to chime in with more options."

"Whatever your philosophy regarding frontal teaching methods and the uses of Smartboards, there's no denying two facts: 1. Smartboards have become extremely popular tools in educational institutions 2. Smartboards are relatively expensive and eat major portions out of our shrinking school budgets What if you could create a parallel experience using nothing more than an iPad and a $50 piece of software? One software product with a matching iPad app claims that it can. Doceri is an iPad app that provides an alternative to interactive whiteboards at a fraction of the cost. Doceri lets an educator control and annotate on a computer connected to a projector from anywhere in the room. "

Patti's comment - if only it would read the text aloud the real magic is all the visual elements. You can expand every photo and graphic to fill the whole screen; they look spectacular. At this point, you can interact with them. You can tap the corner of any photo, for example, to see where on the planet it was taken. You can press your finger on a bar of a chart to "explode" it into smaller bars, showing the component data underlying the primary bar. (For example, one bar chart shows the six gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect. Hold your finger on a bar to see it split into smaller bars, showing where those gases come from: transportation, buildings and so on.) Some of the illustrations become narrated animations. Some turn out to be movies (there's a total of an hour of video), most narrated by Mr. Gore. The interactivity, the zooming into graphic elements and the videos aren't a gimmick. They actually add up to a different experience"