I have been enjoying exploring Google Plus over the past few weeks and am appreciating it as a social networking tool. You can see what Google has to say about it here: http://www.google.com/+/demo/ You probably have heard a ton about this new project, so I will keep it brief.
One of the key features is sharing to groups of other users, called circles. I have nice AAC and UDL circles I am building up. While I like sharing on Facebook and Twitter, it seems like those networks get overwhelming at times. The tools they have built in to focus conversations or create communities are nice, yet they still seem more difficult to use. I am also quite excited about the idea of the social networking tools wrapping around services such as Google Docs. This concept is very exciting to me for my collaborative work and also for the learners I serve.
Google has recently provided a way for users to give out invitations. If you would like an invitation, click here.
It would be terrific to hear about your impressions of Google Plus?
![[Post to Twitter]](http://www.alltogetherwecan.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter.png){kind=icon}
I am really blown away about how rich the Accessible Instructional Materials Consortium’s website has become. http://aim.cast.org This is a terrific resource for learning about the latest information regarding digital texts and accessible instructional materials in education.
Sennott to Focus on Research, Sells Share in Proloquo2Go
June 3, 2010
Amsterdam, The Netherlands; State College, PA
Dear Proloquo2Go user, community member, and/or Proloquo2Go partner,
Samuel Sennott, co-creator of Proloquo2Go, is selling his share in Proloquo2Go to AssistiveWare in order to focus his research and development efforts on his PhD at The Pennsylvania State University and on his new company, Sennott Technologies, LLC.
Proloquo2Go has made a large impact on the AAC world over the two years of the collaboration between AssistiveWare and Sennott Consulting. When they came together almost two years ago, they believed they could make a difference by creating a new AAC solution that was powerful, affordable, and cool. From the amazing user community, to a front-page feature in the NY Times, Proloquo2Go has had a profound impact.
While Sennott will not continue to be a part of Proloquo2Go, he will remain fully committed to the AAC community, serving through his research and future endeavors. He has full confidence that AssistiveWare will continue to provide great service as well as many further enhancements to Proloquo2Go that will benefit the Proloquo2Go community.
David and AssistiveWare would like to use this occasion to thank Sam for the important contributions he has made to Proloquo2Go and, not in the least, his success in drawing public attention to the needs of AAC users. With his ongoing research, he will be able to make even more contributions to the field of AAC in the future. Let us all give Sam a big thank you and wish him well in his further pursuits.
Samuel Sennott would like to specially thank David Niemeijer for the amazing work we did together. He would also like to thank his father, mother, family, Deirdre, Joseph Barnick, Pam H., Sue M., Mads, the Penn State community, The DC Crew, TLC, Origin Instruments, Apple Inc. and the whole Proloquo2Go community for their support.
Best wishes,
David and Sam
This goes out to Kara Lynn and her family. Kara Lynn is a mother. She is a mother who has ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease and struggles to use her natural voice to communicate. She is a mother to a son Aiden, who has Down Syndrome, who also struggles to use his voice to communicate. They both use Proloquo2Go, the augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) solution for the iPhone and iPod touch. I look up to all mothers who work hard raising their children. Yet, today, we salute Kara, a mother who works extra hard!
Read about Kara and Aiden in the New York Times Technology column:
For Speech-Impaired, Insurance Fights Remedy
Kara and Aiden - Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
iPhone App Gives Voice to Those Without
as seen on ABC News Channel 8 Washington, DC on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 Read the background story on the News Channel 8 site.
Proloquo2Go: AAC in Your Pocket
Proloquo2Go is the new augmentative and alternative communication solution for the iPhone and iPod touch. www.proloquo2go.com has just been updated in anticipation of the release of version 1.0 of Proloquo2Go. There is new and extensive information about who Proloquo2Go is for, what it does, and how it works. There are some terrific stories and quotes about some of the children, teenagers, and adults who are currently using Proloquo2Go. Additionally, a couple news updates are:
The Making of Proloquo2go is featured in the April/May issue of the Closing the Gap Magazine
Sennott Interview from AT Oral History Project
I work to transition, or observe the transition(either way you want to look at it), from the comfortable and familiar yet always challenging classroom teaching and technology specialist practice, into doing a hybrid of that same teaching practice combined with research. Not that I didn’t research before, it is just the level, scope, and goals are shifted. During this time of productive change and rebirth of sorts, I am trying to focus on fundamentals. Lately, from many different places I have been learning from a great teacher and basketball coach, John Wooden. Here is his TED talk for you to enjoy. It would be terrific to hear your impressions of it.
by Samuel Sennott
MCAS….hearing that word ring out after being outside of Massachusetts for a year definitely made me feel funny this evening. Whatever word you have for the standardized testing movement, MCAS, FCAT, or SAT even, many students, families, and teachers all are connected by this concept. I was forwarded this video about a girl from Brookline and her father. They tell the story of many in their simple question, “Why do we have to do this?”
After three years of creating electronic based alternate assessment portfolios on many students, I found myself asking the same questions. While I believe in portfolio assessment systems, my main qualm with the MCAS was that my students and I worked tirelessly for 180 days plus our summer camps. We worked super hard on AAC, literacy, and content area subjects, while still having an inclusion based program. Projects worked on were being nationally recognized. Everyone was growing in so many areas! While they nearly all passed with flying colors, when the results were reported back to score in the district, every student received a failing grade for the district because we were mainly working on access and content entry points.
While at the time, this was not our battle to choose, we considered a boycott. Yet, after many heated discussions with friends, colleagues, and families I have come to believe that it is inappropriate in 2008 for any educator to complain about alternate assessment without offering at least one clear component in the plan for the next generation of the assessment system. It is our responsibility as educators to create a system that works.
A substantial portion of my work on the subject will be released this fall. One of the main components that will be shared is an open source PowerPoint based flexible portfolio system that works.
For right now, my best advice regarding the alternate assessment systems is to get Stages, the alternate assessment framework and assessment software by Madalaine Pugliese and have fun with it. You can get some great data that is graphed for you and it has good accessibility features to accommodate a wide range of learners.
While it is important for us to speak about standardized assessments, it is very important that we are working on the solution. The seemingly simple, yet complex goal is to have a solution that can help drive instruction.
by Samuel Sennott
Children, teenagers, and adults need books to be able to learn to read and getting accessible books to them is the goal of the Tar Heel Reader. This open source library of books that are switch accessible, talking, internet accessible, and downloadable will grow exponentially due to the terrific job Gary Bishop, a computer scientist from UNC Chapel Hill, has done designing the Worpress powered interface. This combination of efforts between computer science and education is phenomenal. He presently teaches a course in Computer Science focused on accessible software and hardware. Karen Erickson, Gretchen Hanser and Gary Bishop have been meeting and collaborating for quite some time. It is inspiring to me to see as an example as I emerge into the research phase of my teaching practice. From earlier efforts from this team of computer scientists, The Tar Heel Typer and Dance Dance Revolution mods, to the present and into the future, they surely serve as a powerful example of what we can do as educators to team up with computer science programs. Karen Erickson and David Koppenhaver have worked tirelessly on the concept of creating accessible texts that are age appropriate, rich in quality, and powerful in the literacy instructional process. See the Beginning Literacy Framework by Karen Erickson, Caroline Ramsey Musselwhite, and Ruth Ziolkowski to understand types of texts helpful to early readers. This project has the potential to make texts available to people in a way only possible with the advent of the internet and the concepts behind the Read/Write web and Web 2.0.
I believe in this project and concept with all my heart and am more than happy to be now seeing it come into the world. As I step forward from teacher to both teacher and researcher, I have seen a very powerful lesson: combine your dreams, visions, gifts and technical skills with others who have other dreams, visions, gifts, and technical skills and you can create and help more than ever imagined.
So start getting these books to your students and start authoring. Remember if one thousand people each work for one hour on a project with agreed upon standards you can create…
Go to the Tar Heel Reader
Let’s See the Books and How it Works!
Here is how you choose a book.
Here is a page from a book:
You have multiple options for accessing the books:
- on the web
- download the PowerPoint File
- Open Office Impress File
- Flash File
Speech can be enabled or disabled.
Switch Scanning
Switch Scanners can access the books with various keystrokes, including most of they keys on the keyboard. (soon to be optimized to go forward and back)
The power of this project is in the exponential amount of material to be available for all types of individuals learning to read. I have been working on this concept quite a bit and I believe that this is a One to One Thousand scenario. One key concept is the availability of age appropriate texts on an unprecedented level.
Here is how the book building process works:
- You use images from the Creative Commons section of Yahoo’s Flickr.
- The images are automatically cited. See how it works here.
- You add your text to each page you create.
- Add some keyword tags, such as words about the content, if it is an enrichment, transitional, or conventional text, or anything else you would like.
- Click to post your book. A talking book that is switch accessible and and able to be downloaded offline is created.
- It is that simple. No more PP notes citations, large file problems, conversion nightmares! Hallelujah.
Let us rally behind this amazing project in a way never before seen! Let’s go! We can do it all together!
