Orator: Orator is a free Text to Speech and Text to Audio File application for the Mac OS. Orator is simple and clean! It’s a very light app that runs quickly and w/out problems. It allows users to type into a window for text to speech/audio file OR to copy/paste text from other sources (docs, websites, accessible books, etc) into the window. When producing an audio file, Orator creates an AIFF file, which of course goes straight into iTunes and onto your iPods! You could also use iTunes to do a quick conversion of the AIFF file produced from Orator into another digital audio format like mp3 or AAC, etc. I’ve been using Orator to quickly and easily turn some of my text documents (that I don’t have time to read) into audio for my iPod to listen to in the car. Check it out: http://homepage.mac.com/dougeverly/orator.html
Contact a Family (in SL): A new place I’ve come across in Second Life (SL) this week. This is an advice center for parents with disabled children to meet others and access support and advice from a trained professional. This organization is based in the UK and has been around for 30 years in Real Life (RL) and ventured into SL support for families just this year. Definitely worth a visit! The SL Slurl is: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Aloft%20Nonprofit%20Commons/20/54/23
NeoOffice: Think of NeoOffice 2.2.5 as Free, Open-Source office-type software for your Mac! Includes word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases and even a drawing program. This is based on the very popular OpenOffice.org office suite, but runs natively on the Mac without the need for the X11 windowing system. You can also exhange files with other popular applications such as Microsoft Office. This is a free download, but donations (even very small ones) are encouraged! I’ve been using NeoOffice a little bit this week and have found it to be easy, quick and full of features. I haven’t really been unable to find any tool or feature I’ve needed yet! In fact, I think I’m on my way to donate now.
Also, look for the NeoOffice 3.0 version mid-January ‘09!
www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/productivity_tools/neooffice.html
Should I Forward This Email? If you’ve ever wondered when it’s appropriate to forward emails, here’s 5 rules that might help guide your decision. Or, if you’ve got that colleague who is constantly flooding your inbox with hard-to-understand forwards, you might pass this link on to them! This follows last week’s posting and the recently added online etiquette widget to the right side of this blog and the idea of trying to incorporate online etiquette into your lessons with students as they grow up in this increasingly ‘online’ world. www.netmanners.com/email-etiquette/5-rules-of-forwarding-email
Is Banning iPods Cheating Our Kids? This week in the UDL Online Book Review for the newly selected UDL Pilot Schools, lead by Tina Jones, a familiar discussion came up about iPods and other devices coinciding with school policies. So, I thought I’d link back to when I posted on this topic about a year ago. There’s a great article here: http://nepatins.edublogs.org/2007/11/09/1192007-tech-security-in-our-schools/
