Art Contest: Accelerate
Check out this contest my friend Adam told me about.
VSA arts and Volkswagen Group of America, Inc., are seeking artwork from artists with disabilities, ages 16-25. This year’s event, entitled Accelerate, is the largest award program in the country for emerging artists and will give a total of $60,000 to 15 finalists at a reception [...]
Wiimote Whiteboard in Education: A Tutorial
The primary aim of this post is to help spread that word that you can easily create an interactive whiteboard. You order an $8 LED light pen online, combine that with a $40 Nintendo Wii Remote, some free software, http://www.uweschmidt.org/wiimote-whiteboard, and bam you have an interactive whiteboard. Simple…powerful and..cool. Special thanks to [...]
2nd Generation OLPC Laptop has Dual Touchscreens
by Samuel Sennott
Things are changing. The second generation OLPC laptop will have dual touchscreens and will be designed to function like a book. What does this mean for early childhood education, special education, and augmentative and alternative communication? Over the course of this summer, we will be exploring this with the goal [...]
Photo Ball for Story Telling
by Samuel Sennott
Check out the Talking Photo Ball by Brookstones for creating a simple four location story telling voice output device.
Each of the four sides has a switch that can hold a recorded message. This could be a helpful tool for sharing short co-planned sequenced social scripts for direct selectors. Theoretically you could [...]
File Sending and Sharing with Wikisend
by Samuel Sennott
I have tried a number of file sharing sending and sharing sites and Wikisend is my new favorite.
Check out the clean interface and nice 100 MB limit. The upload and download speeds were fast.
From their website:
Why our site?
Simple & Free
Upload and download lots of files, big files, small files, data files, media [...]
SETT Framework Templates
by Samuel Sennott
The SETT Framework, by Joy Zabala, a popular consideration framework in the field of assistive technology, a subset of special education, has made a significant impact since its inception in 1995. It has also made a significant impact on me personally as a practitioner. SETT stands for Student, Environment, Task(s), Tools [...]
IconSpeak for the XO
by Samuel Sennott
Update New Site: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/FreeIconToSpeech
Current Article: http://s54379.gridserver.com/software/applications/free_icon-to-speech_open-source_speech_for_disabled.html
IconSpeak is the first attempts at a dynamic display augmentative communication software for the XO laptop. Recently, I posted about Speak, which IconSpeak is built on. Check out the main screen, as of Thursday 4/3/08:
You can see that there are sign language based icons, mixed with [...]
iPhone Drawbacks
by Samuel Sennott
There looks to be some significant initial drawbacks to the iPhone platform. The most important drawback, that only one application can run at a time, has come to my attention in a personal communication and in the form of this TechCrunch post. This will make the scanning software, as well as some [...]
iPhone SDK First Looks
by Samuel Sennott
The iPhone SDK has been released! Why is this important? Because it could become a key platform for learning and communication tools for people with special needs. From a 9 location pragmatically organized communication set up for an elderly individual, right down to utilizing digital images and visual scene displays [...]
XO Keyboard Shortcuts
by Samuel Sennott
As I am preparing for a flurry of XO based posts, I just have to get some of it out. The one to one concept is exciting me as a teacher more and more. It is important for us to learn the operational commands for the tools we use. [...]
