For anyone expecting a post on Friday, I apologize. I was out of the office for the majority of last week with the PATINS Tech Expo, Purdue Leadership Development and the Autism Conference and I just didn’t get to finish my blog posting! I feel really bad about it as I’ve made it a point to try to be consistent about blogging every week and have done pretty well for about a year now. Anyway, I am sorry that I missed Friday and will post today instead (as well as this coming Friday).
Tech Show!!! Thursday of last week, the 2009 PATINS Tech Expo seemed to be a big success both for vendors and attendees! Vendors came with great displays and offered great information, resources and suggestions to the educators in attendance. There were lots of great door prizes and vendor booth drawings. We also collected nearly 200 surveys from attendees on their interest and desire to pursue professional development and technical training via Second Life. Initial analysis of these surveys indicates a strong desire to learn more about the training opportunities through PATINS in SL!
Some photos of the Tech Expo, primarily of the door prize winners collecting their goods, can be viewed here: www.patinsproject.com/PhotoGalleries/TECHEXPO2009/
A Few Quick Links From Sandy!
http://tarheelreader.org/ – A collection of free, easy-to-read and accessible books on a wide range of topics. They are text to speech and have a choice of voices.
http://www.literactive.com/Home/index.asp – Literactive is the leading provider of reading material for pre-school, kindergarten and grade 1 students available online. The program is comprised of carefully leveled guided readers, comprehensive phonic activities and a wealth of supplemental reading material which gradually develop a child’s reading skills in a sequential and enjoyable manner. Developed and approved by teachers and parents across the United States, Literactive is the acknowledged leader in early learning online. (I actually use Literactive quite extensively with my own girls and have for a few years now. I’m a fan!)
http://staff.prairiesouth.ca/~cassidy.kathy/browserbooks/index.htm – This website was created to allow beginning readers to read books on their web browser. Readers can click on the triangle in the lower right-hand corner of each page to turn the pages. If they are unsure of a word, they can click on it to hear a child’s voice read the word to them. It has an awesome child’s voice.
http://webanywhere.cs.washington.edu/ – WebAnywhere is a free web-based screen reader for the web. It requires no special software to be installed on the client machine and, therefore, enables blind people to access the web from any computer they happen to have access to that has a sound card.
Thanks Sandy for letting us know about all these!
Here are 20 Mostly Free Tools for Creating Timelines www.shambles.net/pages/school/timelines/…credit to Chris Smith (Shambles Guru), whom I follow on Twitter and from whom I’ve learn a lot about Second Life and also received many free educational and presentation tools for use in Second Life.
Tomorrow and Wednesday I’ll be attending the Free Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference at Purdue University, that I blogged about a few weeks ago. I’m excited for the many exciting sessions and especially to hear Sarah Intelligirl Robbins-Bell, coauthor of Second Life for Dummies and PhD Candidate at Ball State. I hope to have many exciting and useful resources to share this Friday on the blog!
