Free Resources from the Net for EVERY Learner

Supporting Universal Access and Universal Design for Learning

January 28, 2012
by Paul Hamilton
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Engagement with Immersive Media’s 360° Interactive Videos

[Note: The video a the bottom of this post begins playing automatically. You may wish to scroll down and pause it. The video does not show up at all on an Apple iDevice.]

A priceless fringe benefit of my job is regular travel through incredibly scenic terrain. I spent most of the past week working on the magnificent north end of Vancouver Island, in the communities of Port Hardy, Port Alice, and Port McNeill. While working on the ‘North Island’, I always stay at a delightful waterfront B & B, aptly named ‘At Water’s Edge‘ in Port McNeill. This week, my hosts Chris and Karen Stewart made sure I was aware of an iPad app that shows off some of the area’s spectacular natural beauty.

The Nimmo Bay Helicopter Fishing and Wilderness Adventures app for iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch was produced by the proprietors of the Nimmo Bay Lodge, which is situated on the mainland BC coast, across the Broughton and Queen Charlotte straits from Port McNeill.

The app offers an interactive 360° helicopter’s-eye view of the region’s breath-taking natural beauty. By interactive, I mean that the user can zoom in or out to adjust the field of vision as the helicopter travels.  Or, the viewer can choose where to look–ahead, behind or to the side.  The video is made possible by technology developed by immersive media.

immersive media has developed a low-cost ($1.99) iOS app called im360  for showcasing and sharing its interactive video. After the initial purchase, a great deal of free content can be downloaded to the device from within the app. I believe the potential for engaging learners in classrooms with some of this content is tremendous. There are helicopter tours over cities and other landmarks, as well as land-based videos of museums, parks, wildlife, sports, arts, and more. It would work well to use a data projector to share some of these videos in classrooms.

I have embedded below the video version of Nimmo 360. You can interact with the video by clicking your cursor on the video and dragging.   At the conclusion of the video, if you click on ‘Find More Videos’, you will be directed to the free content that is available to be viewed within the im360 app.

On a side note, the delightful musical accompaniment for the video is Leonard Cohen’s ‘Halelujah‘, sung by the Canadian Tenors. It so happens that Clifton Murray of the Canadian Tenors is also part of the Murray family who are the proprietors of Nimmo Bay Lodge.

January 26, 2012
by Paul Hamilton
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Find Apps with Quixey – for iOS, Android, Chrome, Mac OSX and More

This afternoon, a school principal showed me the 15 Android-powered Toshiba tablets that her school district has purchased for her school. This principal is familiar with numerous apps for Apple’s iDevices, but she told me that she didn’t know quite where to start with Android apps. I referred her to Richard Byrne’s Android 4 Schools blog, and I was also able to tell her about a search engine that has been designed to search for apps that meet specific needs.

Quixey sums up the service they offer as follows…

Whether you’re searching for apps on your mobile device, browser, desktop or any other platform, we make sure you can always find the tools you need. We’ll find you apps for every activity and task imaginable. Just answer one question for us: What do you want to do?

As I’ve used Quixey, I have found it to do a pretty good job of accomplishing its intended purpose. It isn’t perfect, and you may need to cull through the listed apps to find something that will reaally work for you.  The image below shows the top four of more than one hundred search results that were returned when I entered the search term ‘text-to-speech for Android’. (If the image is too small for you to read, you can view an enlarged version by clicking on the image–at least if you are viewing this post on a computer.)

Hat-tip to Kerry Randle, SET-BC‘s provincial coordinator, for making me aware of Quixey.

January 25, 2012
by Paul Hamilton
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Qwiki: Extra Special Multi-Modal Resource for Online Search

Extra Special Learning Resource

I first wrote about Qwiki on February 15, 2011. It is such a powerful application that I think it’s time for another look. This is the second of my ‘Extra Special Learning Resource‘ series, and it profiles a resource of truly exceptional value.

Qwiki is an online search tool that is helpful for all learners, and it’s especially helpful for any who struggle with text. That’s because information is presented in multiple modes. The written text is read aloud by an effective text-to-speech engine; and the text is accompanied by related images and sometimes even video. I believe that all learners benefit from the opportunity of having information represented in multiple ways.

Revisiting Qwiki is timely because there is now a Qwiki app for the iPad. This means a Qwiki search can be done independently of the iPad’s browser. The user experience is exactly the same on the iPad as it is on a computer.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words and a video is probably worth millions, I’ve embedded a ‘Qwiki’ below for you to see for yourself exactly how it works. Here’s what you see, and hear, and can read, when you enter the search term ‘Himalayas’.

View Himalayas and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.

January 22, 2012
by Paul Hamilton
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Tar Heel Reader: Books for Beginning Readers of All Ages – An Extra Special Learning Resource

Extra Special Learning Resource

I’ve been writing about free digital resources here for almost 6 years. I’ve discovered and written about hundreds of helpful learning supports. Among these, there have been some exceptional gems–so special they deserve to be shared again…and again! This is the first of what I’m calling my Extra Special Learning Resource series. Series posts are likely to come at irregular intervals.

Tar Heel Reader is a truly exceptional resource that I’ve written about three times–on October 6, 2008; then on January 9, 2009; and yet again on October 4, 2009 when I discussed using it with PowerTalk.  When I first discovered it in 2008, there were about 500 books “for beginning readers of all ages” in Tar Heel’s online library. As I write now, there are 21,310 titles!

Tar Heel Reader recognizes the reality that there are indeed beginning readers of all ages. Although the reading level may be appropriate in some children’s picture books in a library, it is both inappropriate and counter-productive to use these books with older learners.

 [Tar Heel Reader is]…a collection of free, easy-to-read, and accessible books on a wide range of topics. The books may be downloaded as slide shows in PowerPoint, Impress, or Flash format. Each book can be speech enabled and accessed using multiple interfaces, including touch screens, the IntelliKeys with custom overlays, and 1 to 3 switches.

Tar Heel Reader’s description of itself is accurate. What it fails to mention is the engaging nature of its books. Each book consists of a set of images from Flickr, accompanied by a limited amount of text. The quality of  Tar Heel Reader books varies, but many are excellent. I’ve embedded an example here, and more at the bottom of this post. [Books from Tar Heel Reader cannot be embedded, so I have transferred some to Slideshare for the sake of this post.]

Landforms

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If desired, and a voice is selected, each book can be read aloud in a the digital voice of a child/woman/man. The quality of the text-to-speech may not be to everyone’s liking, but I have found that the voice is often not a major issue to the reader who really needs it. If you wish to enhance the experience of reading any Tar Heel Reader book, please see my 2009 post about downloading books into PowerPoint and then using then with PowerTalk and high quality voices.

I was pleased to discover that Tar Heel Reader stories work well on an iPad. There is just one significant difference. When a voice was selected for text-to-speech, I had to click on the text before it could be spoken. On a computer, the text is spoken automatically.

Kangaroos need help, too

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Animals of all different shapes and sizes

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The solar system it’s outta this world

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January 20, 2012
by Paul Hamilton
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Low Cost Tablets for ALL Learners

I write enthusiastically here about ways that Apple’s iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch can be used to support learning with free or low cost apps. Still, I am always conflicted  when I write these posts because I recognize that the high cost of Apple’s devices means they are only available to relatively affluent learners.

This unfortunate reality was re-enforced for me yesterday with Apple’s big Education Announcement where iBooks 2 and iBooks Author were unveiled. It  strikes me that the big winners will be affluent learners, wealthy schools, publishing companies and Apple. There is also the huge issue of making it too easy for publishers to shape and control curriculum, but that important discussion is for another day.

Sadly, poverty is a barrier for too many learners who would benefit from using digital learning tools. That’s why I’m excited by two recent news stories about the launch of low cost tablets. In each instance, the impetus has been a desire to provide affordable options for learners with limited means.

The mission of non-profit organization OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) is “…to empower the world’s poorest children through education.” To date, OLPC has put their extremely robust and innovative little laptop (pictured above)  into the hands o 2.4 million children. It is worth visiting OLPC’s website to learn more.

Recently, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, OLPC has unveiled the prototype of a robust and innovative low cost ($100) tablet that they hope to put into the hands of learners in developing parts of the world. This exciting project demonstrates that it is possible to make the benefits of tablet computing available to  ALL learners. The video below provides a pretty good overview of OLPC’s tablet.

The other news story comes from India, where low cost tablets with a focus on education, have recently been released. These are not rugged tablets, and there have been some initial problems; but these efforts in India also demonstrate that the benefits of tablet computing do not have to be available only to affluent learners. The earliest models of the Akash Tablet, have been sold for approximately $50 in India.