SpokenText Update: I’ve blogged several times in the past and talked in detail about www.spokentext.net in my text-to-audio workshops as one free way of creating audio files from text content for students. However, I’m sad to say that I was notified last week that SpokenText will no longer be offering their free accounts due to high volume of users 
…maybe I should have kept it a secret! 
Math Player (FREE): …enables Internet Explorer to display mathematical notation in web pages. It is based on MathML technology and requires Internet Explorer for Windows version 6.0 and later. This is made available FREE by Design Science in order to help foster the adoption of MathML (thanks Sandy): www.dessci.com/en/products/mathplayer
Teacher Training Videos: I’ve come across some training videos intended for teachers this week here. They are free. Some are very good and certainly worth your time: www.teachertrainingvideos.com
In particular, there are two pretty good Second Life Training Videos:
- www.harbornecomputers.co.uk/~teachertraining/second1/index.html
- http://trainingvideos.hscs.wmin.ac.uk/second2/index.html
SchoolFreeWare.com: Two free applications I found particularly interesting from this website are SpeakABC’s and Voice4me. These work both on PC and Mac. There are also other applications available here worth looking at.
SpeakABC’s is a free, simple, effective application for teaching letter names, which really isn’t a functional skill for reading (letter sounds is far more important that names, which is supported in the literature). However, pairing letters with their position on the keyboard and using this as an introduction to keyboard is a very functional application and I believe this is certainly a nice little tool. www.schoolfreeware.com/SpeakABCs.html
Voice4Me: Another application from schoolfreeware.com is a simple AAC or voice output device. It would work particularly well with a tablet or touch-screen computer, but could also be used with a mouse-type of pointing device. I haven’t played with it enough yet to know how well it could work with scanning and switches, but it’s FREE and certainly worth looking at. www.schoolfreeware.com/Voice4Me.html
Quest Atlantis: Are you aware of this cool 3D immersive environment being used at our own Indiana University for education? I’ve known about Quest Atlantis for a while now, but just this week got some time to download/install the program and request access to participate. Next week, and especially over the summer, I hope to spend some real time here. …yet another immersive virtual world for educational purposes! So far, this looks very interesting to me and I’m excited to learn more about it. Check it out on your own here: http://atlantis.crlt.indiana.edu/
