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Doorway Speller is very near completion for use in schools. It is an implementation of the well proven method of improving an individual’s personal accuracy in spelling; Look, say, cover,  write and check.

Users can practise the lists of words with Doorway Speller  using the keyboard  an on-screen keyboard.

The lists of words to practise are, on average, about 10-12 words long. There are based an work done by Isabel Middleton, Learning Support teacher at Howdenburn Primary School. The words have been categorised into  five levels; A,  A-B, B, C and D, following the Scottish National Curriculum 5-14.

It is expected that this software will also be available from a website so that pupils can be set spelling homework that they can practise on-line.

For schools in Scottish Borders, to find out more, please send an email to; pwhittaker at scotborders dot gov dot uk

Thanks to I King for this contribution;

Batch resizing of photos can be done with:
Picasa (free from Google)

Microsoft image resizer – free from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

picturetray – free from here:
http://www.picturetray.com/

or pixresizer – free from here:
http://pixresizer.en.softonic.com/

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.

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/

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