Therapy Ball Seats: When I was teaching, I used to use 4 straight pieces of PVC w/4 PVC elbows to make a square that I’d put therapy or exercise balls into. The PVC squares kept the balls from rolling too much. I’d then allow my students the option of sitting on these balls instead of sitting in chairs. I took video of this because the amount of work and the level of work produced when my students were sitting on the balls was far better than if I made them sit in chairs. The balls allowed them to move, bounce, get a little sensory input, etc., w/out having to disengage from their desk/their academic task. I was reminded of this when I received this news story yesterday: http://www.morrissuntribune.com/articles/index.cfm?id=16344. If you’re interested, I still have a PVC square and would be happy to loan it out! Remember, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is not all about high-tech gadgetry. It’s about allowing students to receive, produce and engage in the ways they are strongest. Therapy Balls and PVC are relatively cheap!
Second Life Art: A few good places for art-related content in Second Life were recommended to me this week. I haven’t been able to spend much time in any of them yet, but thought they were worth sharing at this point. Check these out and tell the art teachers in your building to check these out! Let me know if you need help w/Second Life.
- The Present Age: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Utwig/153/253/291
- Gallery: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dakota Skies/125/67/22/
- http://slurl.com/secondlife/Immersiva/116/157/24/
Converting Video Formats? I’ve had the question come up several times this week about good, free programs for converting a video from its current format into a different format, so I thought I’d post my favorite tools once again. (Remember that VIDEO is one of the new Accessible Formats listed in Indiana’s Article 7 (511 IAC 7-36-7). The other 7 are Braille, Audio, Digital Text, Large Type, Tactile Graphics, Captions, Audio Descriptions.
- “Any Video Converter” is still a favorite of mine: http://www.any-video-converter.com/products/for_video_free/
- Another good one is “Super”: http://www.erightsoft.net/SUPER.html
- A third one I really like that works well on both Mac and PC is “MPEG StreamClip“: http://www.squared5.com/
Accessible Book Resource: This resource came across one of the groups I read this week: LINK HERE.
More TRLD: Another tool I learned about at TRLD that’s well worth discussing this week is ZOHO www.zoho.com. I was instructed to think of Zoho as Google-Docs on steroids! Being a big fan of Google Docs, I was very keen to spend some time with Zoho, and I have to admit that the steriod comment was probably an accurate assessment of this tool.
As this screen shot indicates, Zoho offers LOTS of great tools including apps for mail, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, file management, databases, invoicing, web conferencing and more! Did I mention that Zoho is FREE? You do need to create a login or you can use your existing Google account or your existing Yahoo account. IMPORTANT: One thing I recently learned that you should also take note of (if you don’t already know), is that with most of these free tools such as Google Docs, when you create docs using their applications, they technically own those documents. This was very startling to me. However, Zoho’s Terms of Service pretty clearly state that you own the content you create. This is a huge positive for users! In fact, Google’s and Zoho’s Terms of Service are pretty much exact opposites of one another in this regard. These are things you should think about when using tools like these. Keep in mind however, that the real power in these sorts of tools is in the COLLABORATION opportunities they provide. Multiple people, from multiple locations w/out needing any other software, can collaborate on a document or a project and be making almost real-time edits! That’s powerful and exciting stuff! Zoho also has chat, calendar, planning and utilities like website monitoring and polling that I’m hoping to explore further soon!
Plan To Attend
PATINS TECH EXPO 2009
April 16, 2009
9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Junior Achievement Building
Indianapolis, IN 46240
No Cost to attend! Door Prizes!
To Register:
http://patinsproject.com/training.html
