ictsan

Numbertable in use

Numbertable is a new  activity in the Doorway suite.

Practise sequencing numbers by placing counters on a table. Users are shown a complete number table, then after some numbers are removed, the user fills in the blanks using counters. The number tables can be set to specific ranges including: 1-10, 1-20, 1-50 and 1-100.

First Sounds

Identify the first sounds in words. Users see and hear the word before attempting to pick the starting sound using the keyboard. Pressing the keyboard allows the user to hear the letters and diagraphs. Choose from 56 words, starting with vowels, consonants and the diagraphs “ch”, “th” and “sh”.

FirstSounds in use

Access all the Doorway activities here;

www.doorwayonline.org.uk

Thanks to Midlothian ICT Development Team for this program that aims to help pupils learn to recognise a hundred words. They have been chosen from words which cannot be represented by pictures. Here is the full list of words;

1-25

A- the, of, and, a, to
B-is, you, that, it, in,
C-he, was, for, on, are,
D-as, with, his, they, I
E-at, be, this, have, from.

26- 50

A- or, one, had, by, word
B- but, what, not, all, were
C- we, when, your, can, said
D- there, use, an, each, which
E- she, do, how, their, if

51 – 75

A- will, up, other, about, out
B- many, then, them, there, so
C-some, her, would, make, like
D-him, into, time, has, look
E-two, more, write, go, see

76 – 100

A-number, no, way, would, people
B-my, than, first, water, been,
C-call, who, oil, was, find,
D-long, down, day, did, get,
E-come, made, may, part, over

Give it a try. It should be on computers in your school. The hundred words are spoken clearly in a Scottish voice. A real treat. to have something so useful for free in schools and Scottish too.

Wordtalk is the excellent utility from Rod MacCaulay of Aberdeen City.  It is available for download from; here; http://www.wordtalk.org.uk/

I have already posted about its excellent text-to-speeech features. In particular I like the option- S: Read the current sentence, which does just that and puts the caret into the next sentence. This means that the user can reflect on that sentence before listening to the next one. It works really well with Heather, the Scottish voice, which has been licensed for all schools in Scotland. Working with youngsters using Heather and Wordtalk together is a real pleasure. This combination is available now for installation on all computers in the authority.

There’s more in store. I have been testing a new beta version (4.0) of Wordtalk. There are two new icons. One loads the previously saved settings.  In this way, you’ll be able to use Heather as the voice each time just by clciking the load saved settings icon. Even more compelling is the “save as audio file” option. Mark some text, click on this icon and you’ll create a .wav or a .mp3 file of Heather (of course) reading a worksheet, short story or whatever.  Youngster can use an mp3 player to keep these audio files and listen  when they want.

The new Wordtalk also has a feature that allows user to listen to a single word, by clicking on it. This is very similar to the single click-to-speak-a-word feature found in Textease and Clicker.  Hoping that it will not be long before Wordtalk 4.0 is released.

For a picture of Rod receiving a Microsoft Innovative Teacher Award – see here

Inclusive Technology, among the largest suppliers of additional needs software and equipment in UK education, has opened a new website with free activities suitable for pupils with access difficulties; HelpKidzLearn

You’ll find;

• a range of games from “press to see what happens”, to game of skill
• text-free stories which move on with a press or a click
• creative play activities – drag and drop to build up pictures, or click to colour in
• find out activities-how to make biscuits etc – using a photo-story – rather like a powerpoint presentation

More – there is more if you look on this site.

A fair number of the activities are accessible to switch users, although from this supplier, it would have been better if they all were. Most are suitable for touch screen and Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) users.

The software on this site is fully working. There is a similarity between some of the activities and some commercial software from Inclusive Technology. These are mentioned on the site.  So perhaps it’s a very careful piece of advertising. Or perhaps Inclusive T are dipping the toe into the big pond of delivering software on-line. Whatever it is, thanks Inclusive. We can even forgive the ‘z’ in the name – well almost.

Tar Heel Reader is indeed a remarkable development. I’ve now given it a try and have created  a book about cats. It ’s very easy to do. It has to be the easiest way to make a  talking book.

It’s here; http://tarheelreader.org/2008/09/08/cats-can/
There are a few things to note;

• You need to register before you can make your own books, so give yourself some time to do this and receive the activation key
• You can create books and save them as drafts. These will not appear on the Tar Heel Reader site until you publish them.
• When you save a book, it might not be evident that it has been saved. It almost certainly has. To continue editing, use the book or publish it, go to ;” Books you wrote”

There seems to be an intermittent fault, as I was not able to create a Powerpoint presentation from it this time, but it worked perfectly in the web based version.
The save to Powerpoint, Open Office and Flash .swf options seem to be working well now. This is by far the easisest way to make simple presentations.

I am still bemused by this name for the people of North Carolina.  There is even a talking book about it; http://tarheelreader.org/2008/09/04/tar-heels/

Tar Heel Reader is a really wonderful development. There is a bank of talking books on-line. The ‘pages’ can be turned by pressing a the space bar, or using a switch.  You can use pictures from Flikr, the on-line repository of millions of photos, and type in your own sentences. The books are kept on line. This is the best place for them.

You can even download them as Powerpoint presentations, Open Office presentations or Flash files (.swf). The downloaded presentation will not have the text spoken.

I had a few problems with some pictures not loading from Flickr, while using a networked computer in schools. There is an acknowledged problem and this is being addressed by the creation of a new way of storing images on-line.

This development has been brought to us by a collaboration between  the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies and the department of Computer Science  at the University of North Carolina. The odd name name is taken from a nickname for the area, apparently

Give it a try; http://gb-cs.cs.unc.edu/TarHeelReader/

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.

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.

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

Textease – How to use the Speech Tool

Audacity is an excellent way of preparing short sound clips.

This software is totally free. The latest version can be be downloaded from this site; http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Any sound that the computer can make can be captured by Audacity; a CD playing in the CD drive; input from a microphone; a radio programme being listened to via the internet.

Short extracts can be taken from copyright tunes to use in Powerpoint, Clicker or other software to create personalised materials for pupils with exceptional needs.

Audacity saves projects in its own format – .aup (Audacity project). It also will export files in .wav format. It will also export files using a Mpegs (.mpg format) which are smaller files because compression is applied at the time of saving. However you need to have a module available to the system. This is called ‘lame_enc.dll’. This can be downloaded from the site too. You will only be using short clips, so compression is not an important issue.

Great news, Audacity will run from a pen-drive! It does not have to be installed on the computer system at all. There are Windows, Mac and Linux versions.

Even greater news. Audacity will run from a pendrive. Make sure you put ‘lame_enc.dll’ on your drive beside the Audacity application. That’s all you need. Have fun with it.

Note – this week – last week of September 2007, it has been impossible to download a working version of the software. The version downloaded is corrupted. Not such good news.

Here is some documentation to help you get started with Audacity;

Audacity-Capturing_sounds.pdf