On the weekend, my love affair with Google Chrome was the subject of a humorous exchange on Twitter. I was surprised to discover that my friend @imalloryb was unaware of just how much I appreciate Google’s browser. So here’s a quick post that will reframe points I’ve made here before. But first and just for fun…here’s the video that prompted the Twitter comments–a wonderfully soppy commercial for Google Chrome.

Google Chrome is leaner and faster than any other browser I’m aware of, but that’s not what has me enamoured. It’s Chrome’s add-ons that have won me over, especially the add-ons that make the Internet more accessible for individuals who face all kinds of challenges and barriers. Google Chrome offers tools to support such a wide range of learning needs that I’m convinced it should be introduced to ALL learners everywhere.

The following are just a few of the helpful add-ons available in the Chrome Web Store. (I’ve linked each add-on below to a post where I’ve provided more detail.)

• Speakit for reading web pages out loud with excellent text-to-speech
• Voice Search for using voice-to-text to search. (Voice Search knows how to spell whatever it is you are looking for!)
• ChromeVis for magnifying text on web pages and adjusting colour and contrast of background relative to text on a website.
• Readability Redux for reducing clutter and adjusting font size, margins and text style on web pages.
• Google Dictionary for quick and convenient definition of any word on a web page.
• Speech Recognizer for versatile voice to text or voice recognition.

Finally, and this is really important…

…where Google Chrome is not available, there is a portable version of Google Chrome. This can be loaded on, and run from, a flash drive, along with whatever add-ons are needed. This means the user has access to Chrome on any Windows computer anywhere. This is especially helpful at public libraries, on school computers where Google Chrome has not been loaded, at a freind’s home when I’m doing homework, etc.

So, please introduce Google Chrome to ALL learners everywhere!

It was wonderful that her teacher informed Annika’s parents that they could view Annika’s work online. On the other hand, it was extremely frustrating that Annika’s parents were unable to access it–because they do not have an iPad. I think it’s unacceptable that Pictello, an app that costs almost $20, does not offer export options for convenient universal online access. (Pictello productions can be exported as PDF files, but all audio is lost.) It is also wrong for schools to assume that all parents have easy access to iPads!

So, I was pleased by the recent release of a free app that facilitates the creation of multimedia projects that can be exported as videos, and easily shared with anyone online.

Picle is a free app for iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch that works well for putting images and audio together to create digital stories or multimedia projects. It’s hard to imagine an app that’s easier to use.

Images can be imported from the camera roll. Or, pictures can be taken directly by the app with the iDevice’s built-in camera. Then it’s just a matter of clicking a record-button to attach audio narration or other desired sounds to the image. Alternatively, you can record while taking a picture to capture whatever sound is present when the picture is taken.

Each image, with attached audio, is known as a ‘picle’. Individual picles can be woven together into movies that tell a story. These movies can be uploaded and shared on Picle’s site. Or, movies can be saved to the camera roll and sent from there directly to Youtube. Of course, individual picles can also be shared.

This video was created from 7 picles that I made with images to which I had added text, so it combines visual information with both spoken and written text. For teachers, it is important to present information to learners in multiple ways.  Likewise, it is essential to give learners alternative options for sharing what they know and as for creative expression.

Note: For adding text to images, an a free (ad-supported) app that I have found to work well is Fotolr Photo Studio.

]]> http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2012/04/25/picle-free-iapp-for-multimedia-presentation-or-digital-storytelling/feed/ 6 http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2012/04/05/smart-spell-checker-in-google-docs-provides-awesome-support/ http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2012/04/05/smart-spell-checker-in-google-docs-provides-awesome-support/#comments Thu, 05 Apr 2012 22:36:15 +0000 Paul Hamilton http://paulhami.edublogs.org/?p=6442 Continue reading →]]> I’ve said it here before, and I think it’s worth repeating. I LOVE GOOGLE because it keeps working to make the Internet more accessible for individuals who struggle with text. I wrote recently about the helpful equation editor that Google has built into Google Docs. Now the new spell checker in Google Docs offers powerful additional support to anyone who struggles with spelling.

The Spell Checker for Google Docs has recently become way more intelligent, and therefore much more helpful. The spell checker for documents and presentations is no longer based on a fixed dictionary. Instead, it has become completely contextual. The developer illustrates this by showing how it distinguishes between Iceland and island when both are misspelled in the same sentence.

A common problem with spell checkers is that they don’t catch mistakes when the error is a real word. For example ‘here’ is written when it’s supposed to be ‘hear’. Google’s new spell checker looks at the context and offers suggestions accordingly.

Better yet, the new spell checker in Google Docs is constantly evolving and becoming better. That’s because it is fed by Google’s search bots as they comb the web! Among other things, this means the spell checker recognizes relatively new words and knows how they are spelled.

For now, Google Doc’s new spell checker is available only for English, but Google is promising to make it available for other languages as well.

Gmail Tap adopts an ingenious concept to enable all text to be input by using only 2 keys. To start with, this new “keyboard” is available only on the Gmail apps for phones.  It’s clear that the potential of this method for text input is limitless. Check out Google’s introductory video.

This is an April Fools prank by Google that really turns my crank! I wonder if the concept is as far fetched as Google thinks.

FlexT9 is a powerful and versatile keyboard app for anyone who needs alternative text input methods on a phone or tablet. It’s a four-in-one keyboard that offers speech-to-text, handwriting recognition, and tracing, in addition to ordinary touch typing. There is also very good word completion, as well as word prediction.

FlexT9 is beautifully designed, and it can be set as the default keyboard on an Android device so that it is available whenever writing of any kind is required. At $4.99, FlexT9 is not free, but this is by far the best option I have seen and tested for anyone who finds conventional text input challenging. It is noteworthy that a writer can combine text input methods.

Now here’s a quick video overview of FlexT9 in action. It’s especially worth watching if you’re not sure what I mean by “tracing” for text input. This is an input meth0d that significantly increases the speed of my own text input.

It was great to meet up with Tricia Fuglestad again. It’s been several years since I first “met” Tricia. I think that was at Teachertube, when Teachertube was very new, where Tticia had posted videos that caught my eye. Since then, we’ve connected a few times at other online venues, most recently on Twitter.

As I’ve written here before, art classes were invariably painful for me when I was in elementary school. Then in my early years as an elementary teacher, I was sometimes expected to “teach” art. My students were generally good sports about our “projects”, but they didn’t learn much art from me! Things would have been different if Tricia had been my art teacher, or if I’d had the resources she now shares online to help me in my efforts as an art teacher!

Fugleflicks is a collection of  videos (currently totalling 153 hosted on Vimeo) that Tricia Fuglestad has created with her art students at Dryden Elementary School in Illinois.  The videos present art concepts, techniques, tools, and much more. Fugleflicks is accompanied by an index wiki that is presented visually and that organizes the videos under helpful headings.

Fugleflicks are engaging to say the least, with liberal use of music, humour and infectious enthusiasm. The children in Mrs. Fuglestad’s art classes are clearly engaged, and they’re learning about art in the context of meaningful opportunities for creating and sharing it.

Tricia offers more than Fugleflicks on the Dryden Art website, so it is rewarding to explore the site. Tricia has embraced the iPad and the interactive white board as vehicles for learning and teaching; and she shares examples, along with valuable practical insights into uses of digital technologies in the elementary art classroom.

Here are a couple of sample Fugleflicks that illustrate the art that is being learned and some uses of digital technology in the elementary art classroom.

Elementary Musical from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

Painting on iPads from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

SocialSpeech is an app for iPhone or iPad that will read your Twitter tweets or Facebook updates in the preferred accent of your selected language. With SocialSpeech, you can also use voice-to-text to “write” your tweets or Facebook posts. The app is easy to use, and the quality of both text-to-speech and voice recognition is excellent.

SocialSpeech isn’t quite perfect, but I think it offers a great return on a 99 cent investment! I’ve tried it on both iPhone and iPad, and it works well on both.  My biggest complaint is that a rather large ‘Cancel’ button appears while the app is reading, and this can cover up the text being read. This is especially problematic on the smaller iPhone screen. 

Here’s a video by ‘Crazy Mike’ that shows SocialSpeech in action on an iPhone.

SocialSpeech iPhone App Review – CrazyMikesapps from Michael Vallez on Vimeo.

helloslide invites registered users to upload presentations in PDF format. Audio narration may then be typed in for each slide. helloslide uses a high quality text-to-speech engine to create the audio. Slide shows can be embedded anywhere. Free registration includes up to 50 slide shows, and paid premium options are available.

The the user interface is straightforward and the process for producing slide shows could not be easier. Editing is possible even after the slide show has been published. If the original presentation was created in PowerPoint, this simply needs to be saved as a PDF file before being uploaded.

The second distinguishing characteristic of helloslide is that its slide shows run well in browsers on Apple’s iDevices. helloslide does not require flash. Presentations look and sound great on my iPad! UPDATE: I’ve noticed that the right edge of the presentation seems to be cut off, when viewed on an iPad. I hope the developers will be able to rectify this.

I’ve embedded two samples below. The first is ‘The Solar System: It’s Outta this World!‘ from Tar Heel Reader, and the second is a great presentation by Kathy Schrock entitled ‘The iPad as ePad‘.

PaperPort Notes stands head and shoulders above any other iPad app I’ve tried, in terms of its potential to support individuals who struggle with writing. Text can be written with the keyboard, with a stylus, or dictated by voice. As well, audio recordings can be attached to any note.

It is the speech-to-text that sets this app apart. Whenever the keyboard is called up, the user has the option of dictating by voice. Using only the built-in iPad mic, I found the accuracy to be almost flawless, even when dictating with low levels of background noise present.

As is the case with Dragon Dictation, the iPad must be connected to the Internet for speech-to-text to function. PaperPort Notes is from Nuance, who are also responsible for Dragon Dictation. As is the case with the Dragon app, text-to-speech is only available via Speak Selection when the keyboard is visible. The opportunity to hear what has been dictated is important for anyone who struggles with both reading and writing.

There are numerous other features that make PaperPort useful. These inlude the ability to create text boxes and sticky notes, to incorporate images, and to conveniently import and annotate files and web pages, or even cropped parts of web pages. Notes can be created on a yellow or white lined page, a blank page, or on a graphing page. The image below illustrates just a few of these possibilities.

,

There are multiple options for sharing notes–via email, into Google Docs, DropBox, etc. Notes can also be printed directly to an AirPrint printer. Or, notes can be opened in other iPad apps as PDF files.

A 20 page User Guide is made available by clicking on the ‘Help’ tab. This can be viewed within the app or downloaded as a PDF file.

]]> http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2012/03/04/paperport-notes-voice-recognition-built-into-versatile-note-taking-app-for-ipad/feed/ 1 http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2012/02/25/rover-for-online-flash-learning-activities-on-ipad/ http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2012/02/25/rover-for-online-flash-learning-activities-on-ipad/#comments Sat, 25 Feb 2012 15:22:37 +0000 Paul Hamilton http://paulhami.edublogs.org/?p=6147 Continue reading →]]>

Apple’s cavalier approach to the use of online flash activities on their expensive iDevices robs learners of the opportunity to access thousands of high quality learning activities. This is especially hard to take because many of these activities are ideally suited for use on hand held devices with touch screens! After trying several less than satisfactory options over the past couple of years, I think I’ve now found a free app that does a pretty good job.

Rover makes it possible for online flash activities to run well on the iPad. I’ve tested Rover with some of my favourite flash sites, including Peep and the Big Wide World, Storybird, Starfall.com and BBC Bitesize. Everything I’ve tried has run well. For good measure, I even tried Hyuyndai Canada‘s website, which comes up in Safari on the iPad with “THIS CONTENT REQUIRES THE ADOBE FLASH PLAYER AND A BROWSER WITH JAVASCRIPT ENABLED”.  Hyundai’s website opened and functioned perfectly in Rover.

Rover functions by running the content of the website you select on its servers, and then streaming that content to your iPad. This is probably why there is an occasional very slight lag. I can’t help wondering, too, if this streaming might challenge a school’s broadband capacity if multiple iPads are using Rover simultaneously. Nevertheless, I have found it to be surprisingly effective on a single iPad.

Rover is listed under “Education” in the iTunes store, and its developers (iSwifter)describe it as a “free education app”.  In this regard, Rover is more than a browser app. It offers filtering on its server in an effort to ensure that learners do not access inappropriate content.

As well, Rover “features” sites such as Discovery Education, and includes a built-in “bookshelf” of flash activities that target K-12 learners. It is worth exploring this collection to discover options that may be of value.  This bookshelf, pictured below, is organized into Elementary, Middle School, and High School activities.

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