ictsan

This event organised by the CALL Centre Edinburgh, University is the annual event in Scotland to meet practitioners and suppliers in the field of ICT and additional needs. Click here for more details. It is held in three venues every year during one week in the Spring. This year the CALL Centre was not a venue and West Lothian Council hosted the SE Scotland day.

The sessions I learnt most from were;

CALL Seminar- An update on the Accessible Digital Exam Paper story, Stuart Aitken gave a very clear presentation. I’d like to study the figures in the Powerpoint presentation. Please can you put the ppt presentation up on the website.

The real costs of using readers and scribes against those of using the digital equivalenst were another compelling argument for using this method for some pupils to complete SQA exams in this way. See the site

Seminar 1- Primary Steps Phonics -

Using the software Primary Steps Phonics from Rambasoft.com – with the Dance Mat as an input device. You had to try it and I did!

Seminar 2 – Using the Nintendo Wii in the classroom – Using the Wii with learning suipport groups in a high school to form group cohesion and reward good learning behaviours.

Seminar 5 – Creating Accessible and Accesible eLearning Content – by Craig Mill, from JISC Regional support centre. Craig is the guru of low cost and free assistive software. He showed us the site: PortableApps.com which houses a whole suite of free software that runs from a memory stick.

Then he demonstrated several sites which offer free text-to-speech- creating an audio file in mp3 or wav format. There is a list here; www.dancewithshadows.com/tech/text-to-speech.asp

I’ll need to make time to start looking through them.

There is an all purpose on-line media converter which means you do not need converter software – such as PDF writers – installed on you computer. Also, it seems to convert almost any audio format into any other!

The Exhibition This had all the usual suppliers – see the list here. One I had not seen before was Discovery Educational Software from Angus. They had some nice software for teaaching basic English vocabulary to EAL pupils.

Thanks to the CALL Centre staff for organising this event, Laura Compton and Margo Kerr and their colleagues for great demonstrations. Thanks to West Lothian Council for hosting the event. Thanks for the lunch too.

Until recently Text to Speech has been available in software that has its origin in the education field – Clicker, Textease and Penfriend in particular. With the arrival of Wordtalk, Text to speech can be used with MS Word the most commonly used word processor in business. So what is the difference in the way text to speech is implemented in these different word processing/publishing packages?

Textease

• The strength of Textease is the “Click on a Word to Speak” option that is very powerful. It is most useful for pupils who are developing literacy through the use of materials such as those of “Well Worth Reading“. Pupils click on each word to hear it spoken. There is also the advantage that a teacher can see a pupil “listening” even if he/she is wearing headphones.
• Textease offers continuous reading too. Textease highlights the word being spoken, in both of the modes. This is a better form of highlighting than the reverse video (black is white) used by Wordtalk.

WordTalk

• This is a free add-on for MS Word so it is highly recommended for home use
• It has a very useful feature on the toolbar; “S for speak Sentence”. This feature speaks the sentence that has the cursor in it and puts the cursor into the next sentence. So a user can listen to continuous text, but with longer gaps between the sentences, allowing the meaning to sink in.
• WordTalk has a talking spell-checker, reading out the suggestions made by Word’s spell-checking

Unfortunately, in the current version of the software, Wordtalks settings – speed, volume, etc. do not survive a re-set of the computer and need to be set each time.

Penfriend

Penfriend’s text to speech has very useful features too;

• Read Clipboard; If you can mark and copy text to the clipboard, Penfriend will display the text and read it. This is the easiest way to have part of a web-page read to you.
• Penfriend has both continuous text and “Click on a Word to Speak”. This latter allows the user to click just the words he/she is having difficulty with.
• The means of showing the word being spoken is a different coloured background to the word, giving the effect of a highlighter sliding along behind the words. This is the best of all three methods discussed here as it does not visually distort the actual word.