Friday, April 15, 2011
Document camera and WYNN Wizard!!!!
It is not difficult for me to get excited about technology, but this week I am VERY excited about a new discovery that our wonderful tech support guy came up with! We have a bright student with low vision and motor impairments in a 4th grade general ed classroom who needs to have worksheets and reading materials enlarged so that he can see them. Writing is also a challenge and this student does best using an on-screen keyboard on a touch screen. Solution: document camera + WYNN Wizard + touch screen monitor = success! Worksheets or reading materials are simply placed under the document camera that is connected to a computer with a touch screen monitor. WYNN Wizard is then opened, the scan button is pressed, and the worksheet or book appears on the monitor! At this point, all of the wonderful tools in WYNN can be used--enlarging, reading, highlighting, dictionary etc---and the student can answer questions by typing in the answer (using the on screen keyboard w/ touch screen in this case). Quick and easy solution!
Friday, March 4, 2011
Free Mind Software
Today, while waiting to teach a class at CMS, I had a chance to check out a program that is loaded on the computers there called Free Mind. I was very impressed! This program is very much like Inspiration (but is FREE) and would be extremely useful for our students who struggle with organization of written work. I found a tutorial on You Tube that does a great job of explaining how this program works. Imagine how powerful this program would be if paired with Win7 voice recognition. Check it out!
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
HelpKidzLearn = WOW!
I am so excited about this website that I stumbled across last week!
http://www.helpkidzlearn.com/index.html
It is filled with WONDERFUL activities for students who use switches to access a computer. I especially love the "splat the clowns" activity under the games tab...it reinforces switch timing in a fun way that is easy to understand. There are plenty of games, stories, and activities for all types of student needs and levels, including mouse learning activities. These would be fun activities for switch and non-switch users to play together--the non switch user can simply use the keyboard (space bar).
To access a computer with a switch, you will need a switch interface with a simple jelly bean switch (or similar). Each of our self contained classrooms already have these on one of the classroom computers. If you have an adapted mouse (the type with the holes on the side) you can plug a switch into that and use it instead of a switch interface.
Have fun switching!
http://www.helpkidzlearn.com/index.html
It is filled with WONDERFUL activities for students who use switches to access a computer. I especially love the "splat the clowns" activity under the games tab...it reinforces switch timing in a fun way that is easy to understand. There are plenty of games, stories, and activities for all types of student needs and levels, including mouse learning activities. These would be fun activities for switch and non-switch users to play together--the non switch user can simply use the keyboard (space bar).
To access a computer with a switch, you will need a switch interface with a simple jelly bean switch (or similar). Each of our self contained classrooms already have these on one of the classroom computers. If you have an adapted mouse (the type with the holes on the side) you can plug a switch into that and use it instead of a switch interface.
Have fun switching!
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Getting Started with WYNN--using highlighting tools
Now that WYNN Reader and Wizard are available on most of the computers in our district (all the new ones updated with WIN 7 have both), I have been able to try it out with students who struggle with reading and writing and have seen some amazing results! Here are a couple of examples of how you can use WYNN for struggling students:
1. For secondary students: When doing research on the web, have the student open WYNN Reader. The student can copy and paste information from the website into WYNN and use the reading, dictionary, and highlighting tools to decipher and extract relevant information needed for the research topic.
2. For elementary students: If the student is using a book downloaded from Bookshare, make use of the highlighting tools to highlight information that the student needs for a book report. For example, use one color to highlight information about the setting and another color to highlight information about the characters. By choosing "list view" the highlighted words can be extracted and printed off so that the student can use these words to refer to when writing the report. Or if the student uses Clicker 5 for writing, you (or the student) can put these words into the word banks so that the student can complete the book report with minimal help.
For some great lesson ideas using WYNN see:
http://www.freedomscientific.com/LSG/resources/Lesson-Plans.asp
1. For secondary students: When doing research on the web, have the student open WYNN Reader. The student can copy and paste information from the website into WYNN and use the reading, dictionary, and highlighting tools to decipher and extract relevant information needed for the research topic.
2. For elementary students: If the student is using a book downloaded from Bookshare, make use of the highlighting tools to highlight information that the student needs for a book report. For example, use one color to highlight information about the setting and another color to highlight information about the characters. By choosing "list view" the highlighted words can be extracted and printed off so that the student can use these words to refer to when writing the report. Or if the student uses Clicker 5 for writing, you (or the student) can put these words into the word banks so that the student can complete the book report with minimal help.
For some great lesson ideas using WYNN see:
http://www.freedomscientific.com/LSG/resources/Lesson-Plans.asp
Friday, September 24, 2010
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Read Naturally and WYNN---a great combo!
Today while visiting one of our elementary schools, I was thrilled to hear of a creative and innovative use of technology for teaching reading fluency that was discovered by one of our fabulous teachers and her EA. As some of you may know, WYNN is a software program used in our district to support students with reading difficulties and is now available on all of our computers district-wide. Documents can be opened up in WYNN (much like opening a document in Word) and customized according to the student's preferences. WYNN can then read the text to the student and provides numerous other features such as a highlighting tool, dictionary, text to speech, word prediction, etc. This teacher and her assistant also use Read Naturally to teach fluency but were frustrated by the fact that the reading rate on the cassette tapes seemed too slow for most of the students and did not give them a target rate to attain. They discovered that the reading rate in WYNN can be adjusted to exactly match the student's target reading rate (under the "settings" tab) and have figured out that if they scan the reading segment from the Read Naturally book into WYNN, the student will be able to hear the target rate and follow along with his/her finger while reading along with WYNN. I can't wait to see the results they will have this year!
Friday, August 27, 2010
New Web Based Assistive Technology Tracker
Adaptive Solutions just released the web based version of their popular AT Tracker Plus---to be officially announced on September 1st! I think we were the first in line to order it! We will soon be able to not only manage the assistive technology library on line but will be able to keep track of student AT trials, AT consultations, technical support/repairs, etc in a web based format. This is a great improvement over our current system which consists of an excel spreadsheet on my laptop! I am working on setting up an AT request system, but for now, you will need to email me with your request for an AT device with the student name, school site, and anticipated duration of need so that I can enter it into the new data base.
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