February 22, 2008
The Advisory Unit has created a site The Whiteboard Room giving details of materials that can be used with an Interactive Whiteboard, touch monitor or, of course, a mouse. They are mostly suitable for young learners and those with Additional Needs. All the materials have been created by practitioners, and are usable without cost
They are in a variety of formats - Powerpoint, Smart Notebook, and some programs which need to be installed on a computer. There are also web links to software that runs directly from a website- usually Flash programs.
The categories are; Maths, English, Science, Geography, History, RE, PMLD, Art and Design, Design and Technology, ICT
You’ll find the materials there from Graeme Bruce at TASSCC in Aberdeenshire, which can easily match commercial software. These are programs that need to be installed.
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Learning Materials | 
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Posted by ictsan
February 6, 2008
There have been some problems with the installation of Penfriend on some networks. Here’s how to check it.
- Open RM Explorer 2 and Click on the Accessibility Tab
- Click on the Penfriend icon
- If this user has not made any use of Penfriend before, Penfriend should load up, showing briefly a note reminding you to save the current Lexicon
- Save the lexicon, you’ll find it saved as “My Penfriend Lexicon” in the users “My Documents” folder.
Great, Penfriend is working well!
If anything else happens; a message saying that permission have not been set for you to poerform the operation, please conact the network admin team by sending in a QSM call.
No Comments » | Prediction, Text to Speech Output | Permalink
Posted by ictsan
February 6, 2008
Textease has a wonderful ‘Click to Speak’ facility. Pupils are able to gain support for their reading from clicking on a word, and hearing it spoken. For most pupils, this is a more useful facility than continuous reading of a piece of marked text. Also, if a pupil is wearing headphones, an adult can be certain that the pupil is carrying out the task.
Bordertalk, Talking Tasks and Well Worth Reading all take advantage of this facility.
On networked computers, you usually have to reset the speech option every time. Here’s a helpsheet that reminds you how to do this.
www.educationict.org.uk/ictsan/docs/textease-click_on_word_to_speak.pdf
Here’s a new document that shows you a slightly different way
No Comments » | Accessibility, Documentation, Learning Materials, Text to Speech Output | Permalink
Posted by ictsan
