Google Notebook helps you collect notes and information from the web for anything you might be doing—researching a trip, planning a purchase, or putting together a dinner party.

To collect text and images while you browse, you should download the Google Notebook browser extension.

You can access your notebooks from any computer or from your mobile phone. You can even share your notebooks with your friends!

So, this tool could easily be used by students when they are researching online, gathering information for a podcast, blog or paper.  Students can collaborate with one another using the Google Notebook and also with you, with parents, etc.  Additionally, you can share and collaborate with colleagues as professional development funds disappear and opportunities to network with other professionals decrease.  www.google.com/googlenotebook/faq.html

2008 CASE Conference: Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week I’ve been attending the Council of Administrators of Special Education Conference in S. Carolina and I just need to say that special educators are the neatest people!  I got to meet one very knowledgable gentleman from New York, who is a regular reader of this blog and another great Director of Special Education from our very own Anderson, Indiana!

The focus here is largely on data driven practices and RTI.  My session here focused on how RTI, UDL and AT should co-exist and how the professionals working in each of those areas should be well aware of whats happening in the other groups to help reduce the duplication of services and efforts and to improve efficiency.  What I’ve found with many of the school systems I’ve talked to is that the UDL folks don’t know the RTI folks and then there are AT folks sprinkled in who may not be familiar with either the RTI or the UDL groups in their buildings or districts.

A highlight from the conference:
As a teacher, I’ve always felt that if my students weren’t learning, it was almost always because I had not been creative, skillful or determined enough with their instruction. It’s encouraging to me now to see that RTI/UDL issues are forcing us all to really consider blaming our curriculum, our instructional methods, assessment methods and our materials rather than blaming our students for a lack of performance/achievment.  The notion that the curriculum or that the instruction is disabled, rather than the student is a very interesting one worthy of serious consideration.  This was reinforced by one of the keynote speakers who gave a special education law update.  One of the letters quoted (OSEP 2008) specifically addressed this issue of underachievement vs. lack of appropriate instruction! Of course, part of appropriate instruction, to me, would also include the intenstive and systematic implementation of various assistive technologies, methods/materials that are 21st Century compatible and obviously a Universally Designed environment and curriculum to begin with.

Immersive Environments/Virtual Worlds Continued: Only 3 more days till the PATINS State Conference!  I’m getting really excited to introduce those of you coming to my first session there to Second Life!  This morning I came across a website called Virtual Worlds Review that I think could be a great resource for many of you as you begin considering the potential this awesome technology offers to education.  This site has been around since April of 2003.  The creator of the site is no longer updating it, but it does offer some nice definitions and a good review of many virtual worlds between the years of 2003-2006.

Many of those I’ve suggested the past couple of weeks have been intended for younger childrean.  Here are a couple more good ones I’d like to share for our older students:

There! Unfortunately, “There” is only available for PC.  I couldn’t find any info on if/when a Mac version of the software might be available.  “There” is an online virtual environment for teens 13-18 years of age primarily.  Basic membership and participation is free.  “There” basic membership doesn’t quite offer everything that the free membership in Second Life offers.  However, “There” has some other nice features that include a profanity filter and  strict “PG-13″ content enforcement.  www.there.com

Pirates of the Carribean Online: Mac/PC compatible.  Here, students create an avatar like in most virtual worlds.  Then they build a ship, chart a course and interact with other players from around the world in this free online multi-user environment.  Suggested for children 10 and older.  http://apps.pirates.go.com/pirates/v3/#/game_info/about.html

Have a great weekend everybody and hopefully I’ll be seeing many of you at the PATINS STATE CONFERENCE in just a few more days!   Remember if you couldn’t make it this year, start thinking now about coming next year!

More Text to Speech for Mac:
You definitely need to check out GhostReader for your Mac if you are looking for a great text to speech program. This will read text anywhere on your Mac and highlight as it reads…AND will allow you to create iTunes tracks and Podcasts!!! It is not free, but it’s only about$40 for a single lic/single language. Bilingual/Trilingual licenses are also available and slightly more expensive, but still relatively affordable. You can download a time-limited full working version as a trial.

Digital Recorders: I’ve blogged in the past about the many instructional benefits of podcasting in your schools and mobile podcasting with cell phones or with hand-held recorders. This week, I came across this Handheld Digital Audio Recorders Buyers Guide, from B&H Photo Video. Not all of it applies to instructional/classroom uses, but it is a nice little guide/intro to handheld recorders if you are just starting to think that you might want one and not sure where to begin and what features to look for.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/find/newsLetter/Digital-Audio-Recorders-Buyers-Guide.jsp

UDL Guildelines 1.0: I’ve been talking to many groups all over the region this month and last month about UDL, NIMAS and RTI. I was a little surprised by the number of people who were hearing about UDL (Universal Design for Learning) for the very first time. Recently CAST (Center for Applied Special Technologies) released UDL Guildelines V.1.0 for Teachers, Publishers and Curriculum Developers.

These guidelines are available to view and move through right in your browser OR as a MS Word document download here, and are certainly worth spending a little time looking through: http://www.cast.org/publications/UDLguidelines/version1.html

WATCH for UDL Pilot Project Applications to be available in the Fall! Contact your PATINS Site Coordinator with questions and keep an eye on this site for applications: http://www.patinsproject.com/udl.html

As most of the PATINS Site offices start to close up shop for the summer, I do want to let everyone know that I will continue blogging every Friday. Keep any eye on the blog for info and quick tips and tricks over the summer that you might want to implement when you return again in August!

Call For Papers

CLOSES in 7 Days!

Did you know that General Session Presenters get into the PATINS State Conference free of charge? We are seeking school staff or administration doing exciting things with your students to make the curriculum more accessible and improving student achievement. Submit your CFP online in just a few quick steps

Online CFP Form is Here

2008 PATINS State Conference
November 10th & 11th, 2008
Crowne Plaza Hotel and Conference Center
Keynote Speaker: Jim Fruchterman
Benetech President and CEO

PATINS State Conference 2008!!!

• The Call For Papers for General Sessions can be submitted online by filling out the form here:
  http://www.patinsproject.com/callforpapers.htm
• This year’s conference will be held at the Crowne Plaza (same as last year) on November 10th, 11th. So, get those dates on the calendar and into the budget now.

PATINS ‘08 Tech Expo: The 2008 PATINS Tech Expo was a big success! Attendees that I talked with seemed to be very excited about new ideas they had for all the new technology they were seeing and hearing about. I got very excited about several new things I saw as well! Something I’ll likely be doing a workshop on in the Fall will be placing tests or other pieces of digital reading material onto portable devices like iPods w/out a teacher ever having to read the test and the student being able to hear and see the text highlighted as it’s read by the iPod or other device.
Click Here for Photos from the Tech Expo!

A couple more from the iPod 100 page:

• iPod Lessons and General iPod How-To:Learning In Hand, iPods in Education from Tony Vincent… A true EXPERT when it comes to iPods and PDAs in classrooms! Everyone, whether or not you love portable content, should visit and become familiar with Tony’s work. Here’s a quick screenshot of the site, which should be enticing enough! Particularly interesting to me at the moment is using iQuiz quizzes on iPods coupled with my Self-Operated iPod Prompting system:
  

• Gabcast again: What a cool tool! I posted briefly about Gabcast as a free way to podcast from your phone (land or cell) back on 3/7/08 (HERE) and have since started really using it myself. I’ve created a free account for myself and the first couple episodes are just Sandy and I testing it out. The third episode is a very short (24 seconds) interview of yesterday’s Skype, Wikis & Blog workshop here in Columbia City. Basically, once your Gabcast account is set up, podcasting really couldn’t be any easier! I simply call a 1-800 number and then punch in my podcast code and then I start talking! As soon as I’m done, I simply push the #2 on my phone which immediately publishes the podcast to the public RSS feed! In other words, within 10 seconds of me publishing by pushing the #2 on my phone, anyone in the world could be listening to that podcast episode! That’s powerful! HOW COOL, for a teacher to podcast a 2 minute note to parents at the end of the day in this way, or for students to do this while on a field trip, or while interviewing other people (which hits a lot of state standards), etc! Obviously there really isn’t any editing or fancy intro/outro music when podcasting this way, but it’s so easy and with most phones, the quality is really quite acceptable, even for an audiophile like myself! If you are interested in subscribing to my Gabcast, here is the RSS feed: www.gabcast.com/casts/19096/rss/rss.xml In iTunes, subscribe by clicking Advanced and the Subscribe to Podcast and then paste the above URL into the text box, like this:

~EduChallenge #5~

Ok, this is pretty simple. I raved for a couple weeks there (3/21 and 3/28) about the Firefox Add-On called Hyperwords, to “make every word on the internet interactive.” I am still absolutely loving this FF Add-On and I think it’s quite possibly the easiest, quickest and most effective way to instantly give students at both ends of the achievement spectrum a very beneficial tool for almost every aspect of the general education curriculum! The challenge this week is to:

1. Get or make sure you have Firefox on your computer. (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/)
2. Go get and install the Hyperwords Add-On. (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1941)

And that’s it! I’ve given direct links to both places you’ll need to go, so it’s just a matter of clicking! Next week we’ll build on using Hyperwords in your classrooms, so get it installed this week!

..and submit a Call For Papers!
http://www.patinsproject.com/htm/trainop.html

So, Boston is cool, windy and mostly sunny. The 2008 CEC Conference has been a great experience and it was nice to do some networking and learning from so many great special education teachers and directors and to hear about some great research that is going on. My presentation this morning on creating self-operated prompting systems with the video iPod or Zune Devices went really well. I’m sorry for being a day late with this week’s blog. I wanted to wait till after the presentation.

RTI and UDL: By now, you are probably aware that RTI (Response to Intervention) is now referred to as IFS (Integrated Focused System) in Indiana. However, a major theme/focus of this year’s CEC Conference was RTI and UDL. So, I will likely refer to the term, “RTI” during this blog posting and in upcoming weeks for the purpose of staying consistent with the content presented to me at CEC. So, just keep in mind that Indiana’s state version of the RTI concept is IFS. I am really starting to see how RTI (IFS) will intersect with UDL and on May 5th, I’ll be offering a 1/2-day workshop at the NE Site on UDL and RTI. Visit the PATINS website or call the NE office to register. Registration is free, but space is limited.

100 iPod Tools: You may remember the,”100 Educational Uses for Your iPod” link I posted last week that Jim found. This last week, I thought it was appropriate that I check into #15 on the list of 100: Pod City Guides. This is a cool tool! Only major cities are included at this point, but It allows you to download city information, like directions, events, restaurants, local attractions, hours of local business operation and more! It just puts the information for the city you select under the notes section on your iPod as text. And it’s free! It’s great if you are visiting a city, but could also be a wonderful tool to incorporate into a lesson or unit on a particular place in the world! Check into this one for sure. Let me know if you need help with it! It has become a new favorite of mine, for sure http://www.podcityguides.com/

I’ve posted in the past about a program called Anapod as a method of transfering content to/from your ipod w/out using iTunes. Well, I also had the opportunity to really spend some time with Anapod as I needed to do some transferring of content to/from my iPod while in Boston. Anapod is #39 on the list of 100. Anapod offers a free trial, but the full version is around $20-$25. It works well, BUT a word of caution! I’ve had this happen twice now; when using Anapod to transfer videos from my PC to an iPod, once ejected, the iPod no longer recognizes anything that is on the iPod! If this happens, the iPod has to be restored to factory condition and then all content put back on which is a pain. I have yet to figure out why this happens sometimes with Anapod and not other times. Check out Anapod, but be aware of this potential issue.

Pix-Yu: I posted back on January 8, 2008 about pix-yu as a cool and engaging way to motivate some students to write! Today I got an email from them notifying me that they have now included a way for users to include a long description (text) with their images and in this way the text can easily be read aloud with speech synthesizers or braille displays. Check out this new feature and let me know how/if it is working for you and your students! http://www.pix-yu.com/