It has been shown that computer users who are forced to use just one hand can reach a very high rate of entry if;

• they use a method that has been specifically designed to give them an efficient method to move about the keyboard easily
• they start early in life and have not started hunting ang pecking, finding their own way.
• they practise on a little and often basis.

Which is the best OCR software in the world. Which is the most annoying to install on a stand-alone system? The same one, I think.

OCR Software is pretty essential when you are creating accessibile texts for user with disabilities; visually impaired, motor impaired, dyslexic. There will be a document, probably prepared using a computer but the original file has been lost. OCR can help you reconstitute the document.

Four years ago iansys.com were very helpful in doing a comparative review of OCR software available at the time. It was fascinating. It emerged that Abby Fine reader was the best available. However, none of the packages did everything they said they could. The developers ticked their own boxes.  In a particular all the packages failed to recognise correctly texts in European languages which use accents or non standard characters; ß, Ñ, François etc.

Abbyy Fine reader got this right in version 8 and I have stuck with them since. I’d be interested in anyone else’s recent experiences. Is Abbyy in fact still the best?

However, if you want to install it in a stand alone system, be prepared to waste a lot of time. There are on line forms and you can send an email to a server, but these do not work. Only sending  an email to European support brought a helpful answer from a Norwegian support person. You can also run up phone charges to Holland on a support call. As I recall, they speak pretty good English on that helpline too.

The next problem is that you are sent an activation code with 78 characters. Yes, 78. Here is an example of what it might look like! Is this really necessary?

697973-930566-558156-627071-318120-962720-622555-687533-155011-784308-108480-936009-983444

At last, the chocolate mouse!  (and keyboard)

Doorway First Words is the second piece of software in the Doorway suite to come to the site;  www.doorwayonline.org.uk.

It presents pupiks with the opportunity to learn how to spell, and test their spelling of over 40 level A words. Those that can be represented by pictures.

The target words are CVC words, words woth ‘oo’ ee’, ‘ch’, ’sh’ and ‘th’. The on-screen keyboard includes ‘keys’ to represent these digraphs. The words are spoken by a recorded voice.

To keep up with developments. follow the Doorway News blog;

www.doorwayonline.org.uk/news

I just blogged about the need to resize digital photos.

Here are some more solutions I’ve found for this tricky problem. These are tools that you are likely to be able to access in schools.

1) Use Microsoft Picture Manager. There is a detailed worked example here from the educationict website.

2) If you are using an RM network and have Colour Magic available, this can be used. There is an excellent help-sheet, again on the educationict site; here

3) Find an on-line web resizing service. Webresizer http://webresizer.com/, seems to be very useful. It has an easy to use cropping tool, and you can change contrast, ‘exposure’ and colour saturation, although these effects  are a bit tricky to use as you have to enter values rather than drag sliders.

Here’s a photo that I cropped, brightened and reduced its size. It of my favourite camera for work in schools; the Mavica FD 200 with memory stick. Still going strong! The picture is 93% smaller than the original, so webresizer tells me. It has also made a good job of the play people, though the upload time of this large file was longer than I expected.

I am still open to any other ideas! Please add a comment.

Digital cameras seem to boast more and more megapixels!

That means they are getting better and better doesn’t it. Well yes, for professionals and serious hobbyists, but for most purposes in schools, we don’t need anything like that size of a picture. By size, I mean file size. This picture was sent me by an LS teacher.  She used these characters as 21st Century Borrowers, to stimulate writing in pupils with low attainment. What a great use of pupils’ imagination. The teacher compiled the group’s writing into a word document illustrated by this and other pictures.

I asked her for a copy. She was unable to send the Word document as it was too big to send from a school networked computer. What’s the answer?

There are all sorts of ways to do this. If the software you want to use is Word or Powerpoint, you need nothing more than that. In Word there is a picture compression tool. It reduced the size of this picture from 1.38Mb to 93 Kb.

Well, this picture now takes up on fifteenth of the space on a hard disc. The Word document containing this picture is now small enough to be sent as an email attachment. I used Word to crop the picture, losing unwanted border areas, made the picture lighter and gave it more contrast, and finally compressed the picture. There is a  loss of quality, but for use as picture embedded in text,  it is not noticeable.

I also used Word to export the picture for this blog. I exported my Word document as a web page called – playpeople. I then went looking for a folder called ‘playpeople_files’. I found the picture in a web-ready state.

It was even smaller! A mere 16 Kilobytes. So it was taken on a fairly new 5 megapixels camera and on this page, the file size has been reduced to less than an eightieth of the original size!

There are more sophisticated ways of doing all this. At home, I use Picasa 3, but for use in school MS Word is a useful tool for changing pictures.

I know there are other ways to reduce file size and improve pictures. I’d appreciate any comments. I’ll follow them and include them in this blog.

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

A message is sent out every time a new post is added. This message is called an RSS feed. You need to use a ‘feed reader’ or aggregator to intercept the message and keep it or pass it on to you.

Click here to subscribe to the feed – and learn about feeds and aggregators, if this is all new to you.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ictsan

http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/scottishhistory/middleages/warsindependence/The_Bruces_and_the_Comyns/page4.asp

an Atlantic Convoy

Learn about rationing on the BBC Schools site;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2children/ration/ration_intro.shtml

Here is a site, made by RAF veterans. It has plenty of good information about rationing of food, clothes and petrol;
http://www.worldwar2exraf.co.uk/Online%20Museum/Museum%20Docs/foodration.html

Here are some posters about rationing in the war;
http://www.worldwar2exraf.co.uk/Online%20Museum/Museum%20Docs/posterpage1.htm

Here are some more posters from the Second World War;
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~pv/pv/courses/posters/

Here are some letters received from relatives in the forces, and a telegram;
http://www.rls.org.uk/database/record.php?usi=000-000-001-465-L

a German U-Boat

Write about – a morning at home in the war, going shopping