Daniels Brussels Sprouts

As you’ve  likely noticed, I failed miserably to follow through on my intentions to post every Friday over the Summer to this blog.   My intentions were honest.  My inspiration over the summer was lacking.  I realized tonight that this is entirely my own fault and I’m embarrassed and apologetic.  For 3 days this week, I’ve been participating in daytime activities that have been rather trying of my abilities, followed by evenings full of several of my most favorite activities in the world.  Tonight, 3 days into this process of rigor followed by revitalizing evening therapy, with another day to follow in the morning, I realized I had no time to even think about making dinner.  Long story short, I quickly steamed a handful of Brussels Sprouts at 10pm in my effort to avoid starvation.  As I enjoyed my sprouts, two things happened;  I began to relate them to other aspects of life currently (no, I don’t often do this with vegetables).   Also, conversation with a friend while consuming my sprouts reminded me that many people not only have an expressed disgust for Brussels Sprouts, but also that many have never even tried them!

Let me tell you a few things about Brussels Sprouts before I go on.  They grow in cooler, milder temperatures.  They start as seeds in green houses and are eventually transplanted to growing fields.  They tend to take about 180 days to be ready for harvest and are said to be sweetest when harvested right after a stiff frost.  With those facts in mind, I continue…

During conversation, my friend mentioned that Brussels Sprouts would in fact be going on the next grocery shopping list regardless of preconceived opinions of them.   This inspired me.  All it took was me conveying that I was eating them for dinner and my friend decided there was little point in continuing to avoid them and only experience to be gained by looking for them next week in the store, regardless of whether or not the taste would ever be described as pleasing.  The final product/taste was less important to my friend even given any assumptions already in existence.  Rather it was the PROCESS of accepting the potentially uncomfortable in hopes of learning along the way that seemed to be more important.  I liked this a lot about my friend.

Immediately, this reminded me of the one slide I include in almost every workshop or presentation I give.   It reads, “Greatness Rarely Happens When You’re Comfortable.”  “Go With The Choice That Scares You Most.”  While this may seem a little extreme, I think it’s important, especially for educators to grasp.   Even though I include this slide in so many of my own presentations, I think I may have partially lost grasp of it’s real meaning for myself in recent weeks.

So, as we begin this new 2009-2010 school year, hopefully refreshed and ready, I’d like to  encourage you to put “Brussels Sprouts on your shopping list.” Including every student in every aspect of your curriculum and assessment is a task more demanding than most people really understand.  Yet, you return year after year to tackle it.  Universal Design for Learning concepts and assistive technology tools have a tendency to make many of us uncomfortable.  They are constantly evolving and incorporating new terminology like, Glog, Blog Wiki, and digital rights manager!   Our students tend to have an earlier understanding of these types of tools than we do.  Many of these tools and concepts might require funds we do not have and present a large learning curve.  They are not comfort foods! Use the PATINS staff when your discomfort starts feeling more like pain!  We’re already eating our sprouts and would love to assist you!  Keep in mind that the process can often matter more than the final product.  Strive not to get there, but rather to absorb, rebuild, and pass on everything along the way.  An epic ride doesn’t always have to be made up of 1000 miles far from home in a breath taking environment.   Sometimes, the epic nature of the ride has more to do with having the courage to take a deep breath and saddle a horse that looks too big, too wild, or too new, even if the two of you never make it out of the barn.

PATINS-Project Assistive Technology Overview Course Fall 2009: As always, this course is free, provided by the PATINS Project and will run from 9/28 through 11/6.  More info here:
2009 AT Overview Coarse FAQ
2009 AT Overview Course REGISTRATION FORM

UDL Training:
See here for a unique FREE professional development opportunity about Universal Design for Learning (UDL):
BCSC UDL Flyer

Next Week: A Great Indiana Teacher Featured, LOTS of Tips & Tricks and more!

• 8 current UDL Pilot Teams are successfully exiting the program this Spring, which means new teams will be selected in the Fall!  Watch our website for UDL Pilot Site Applications to be available in August, and likely due the first part of October.  I highly recommend thinking and planning a little now, if you hope to submit an application in the Fall.  Please feel free to contact us to find out more about this incredible opportunity to have the PATINS-Project assist you with incorporating Universal Design for Learning into your school building.  Learn more here: www.patinsproject.com/udl.html
• Keep in mind that we’ll be doing some professional development online next year in Second Life and other applications.
• If you still have any lending library items please contact your Site Coordinator as soon as possible to make arrangements to get those back as soon as possible.
• For those interested, I plan to continue blogging on Fridays as possible over the summer.

Newsletter Accessibility? Is your school’s weekly or monthly newsletter accessible? I had nice discussion this week with a lady by the name of Lori who brought up several ready good points about accessibility and also introduced me to several new tools.  One thing we discussed was school newsletters.  As a parent myself, I know how valuable the information in the weekly and monthly newsletter can be as we are trying plan and organize our weeks!  Something I took for granted however, (even doing what I do for a living) is that I can visually see the paper newsletter and read the information on it.  Lori is blind, so her plan was to take her child’s newsletter home, scan it into her computer and perform an OCR on it to have it read (text to speech) to her.  HOWEVER, because the school used very fancy fonts and odd formatting of boxes and spacing on the paper newsletter, her OCR software was unable to recognize it.  My initial thought was that the school probably thought it looked very pretty and likely never even considered the accessibility of their paper newsletter for parents.  I thought this to be worth mentioning here on the blog not only for the purpose of paying attention to the fonts, spacing, and placement of text boxes on your communications for parents and the general public, but also in hopes that schools will begin to think about alternate (more efficient) ways of distributing your newsletters and public communications including, blogs, podcasts, and wiki’s.  Ideally, your newsletter would be distributed in multiple formats for ultimate accessibility.   (Thanks Lori).

System Access To Go: The other thing Lori introduced me to was System Access To Go.  A screen reading application that has some free options, but is based online, which means no need to carry your software with you!  www.satogo.com

Search The NIMAC Yourself: Did you know that you can search the NIMAC for yourself to see if a particular textbook is in there before submitting a request to the ICAM? http://nimac.privatereserve.com/Inventory-Search.asp

Have a safe holiday weekend everyone!

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:

1. www.harbornecomputers.co.uk/~teachertraining/second1/index.html
2. 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/

Jumpstart World Video: CLICK HERE

…that video look familiar at all?   Quite like a kid’s Second Life isn’t it!

To me, the fact that we have children as young as 3 playing and learning in 3D worlds should be a very clear indication that as educators, we absolutely have to be aware of 3D Immersive Environments.  …and with Jumpstart World, we’re not talking about some obscure program, we’re talking about a mainstream piece of software that anyone can purchase online or at their local WalMart!

If you’re still one who thinks of online, interactive, 3D spaces as a passing phase or as simply a game,  you might want to reconsider.  Have you seen the new Safari Web Browser?  Below is a screen shot. 

And if that’s not convincing enough for you that we are moving rapidly toward an entirely 3-dimensional online experience and away from the 2D static webpages we might be used to, check this out!

EXIT Reality:  The Entire Web In 3D! That’s right, this is what you think it is.  The entire web, ANY website that you are currently used to visiting in a flat 2D format, you can now visit in a transformed 3D version of that same site!  Here are a couple shots of me visiting our PATINS-Project website simply by typing in the URL (www.patinsproject.com) into the EXIT Reality Web Browser’s address bar!   I haven’t done anything to the website, I’ve simply allowed the EXIT Reality Software to render the content on our website in 3 dimensions!  …mind blowing?  This is the world we live in!  In 5 years or less, I’m willing to say that the majority of the web could be a 3 dimensional environment in which we move through and interact with others in ways we have yet to even think about.  You can meet up with other avatars who are visiting the same website at the same time and talk or text-chat with them!  What are the implications there for collaboration, networking and teaching appropriate and safe online communication to our students now?

What does this mean for education?  What are we doing RIGHT NOW to prepare our students to be employable to work in a world where their company’s products are bought and sold in an online 3D space, to build 3D spaces online, to navigate and use 3D spaces online for research, networking, and organization?  How are we preparing our students to build professional and social networks and interact appropriately and safely with other people’s avatars they come into contact with simply by visiting a website?  Have you even thought about this yet in your classroom?  In your building?  In your district?  Attempting to avoid these issues = failing to prepare our students to be competitive, safe and productive citizens in the world they live in outside of the school building.

…And, if you now needs a little something to bring you BACK to more concrete and familiar topics, here’s a couple of FREE head tracking software pieces to use with your students who cannot use a mouse, joystick, etc., but who might have enough head control to access their computer in that way.  You simply need a cheap webcam and this FREE software!   The first one below is something I’ve blogged about several times before  I believe, but the second one Sandy found last week, which was new to me.  If you do try them both (and why not, they’re free) and like one better, please post comments and let us know your thoughts and opinions!

EFmer Track: http://www.efmer.eu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=30

Camera Mouse: http://www.cameramouse.org/

“Design Science announces that MathDaisy 1.0 is Now Shipping. This add-on enhances the Microsoft Save as Daisy plug-in for Word and allows schools to easily create accessible math from Word documents.”
http://www.dessci.com/en/company/press/releases/090413.htm

Use a phone camera and this software to read bar codes: http://www.snappr.net/

New concept of a Braille e-book:
http://i.gizmodo.com/5219669/braille-e+reader-concept-raises-dots-with-e+ink

Have a Mac and spending too much time distracted by the internet? http://macfreedom.com/

Video Capture: I’ve been asked recently and also had interest myself, in finding screen capture software that would allow me to capture videos of teaching and learning in immersive worlds.  Here’s some information from the Second Life Wiki on that topic that I thought was worth sharing:

Multi-platform Free

• Jing Project (PC & Mac) – Captures SL but at very slow framerates; limited by only exportng to SWF.

Windows Free

• CamStudio
• Taksi – Sometimes cited as an open source alternative to FRAPS.
• WeGame.com – Relative newcomer that includes both the software and a site to host the videos on. Very easy encoding and uploading process.

Commercial

• Camtasia (US$299) – On the expensive side, but its strength is it can record both Second Life and standard Windows applications. It has a great lossless codec which is useful for recording relatively static content with lots of flat color — for capturing inworld footage, use a codec like DivX instead.
• Game Cam (US$24.95, Lite version is US$9.95) -
• Game Recorder (US$39)
• Fraps (US$37) – This is possibly the most popular video capture utility.

Mac Free

• Capture Me – Originally a screen capture program for still images, now can also record MPEG-4 videos (no sound) up to 60 seconds.

Commercial

• iShowU (US$20)
• Screenflow (US$100) – Has some very nice features, like an easy picture-in-picture mode for your iSight or other webcam, but only runs on Leopard (10.5) and lacks more advanced editing capabilities.
• Snapz Pro X (US$69) – Generally regarded as the Mac equivalent of Fraps in terms of its popularity with Residents, it’s a tad on the pricey side but very elegantly-designed.

Linux Free

• glc – An ALSA & OpenGL capture tool for Linux.
• Xvidcap – Known to work for SL machinima on Linux.
• RecordMyDesktop – audio and video capture to full quality Theora –Allen Kerensky 13:15, 22 May 2008 (PDT)
• Instanbul – nice stop start button, easy to work, low quality Theora –Allen Kerensky 13:15, 22 May 2008 (PDT)
• Yukon – a front-end to seom –Allen Kerensky 13:15, 22 May 2008 (PDT)

Gotta Run! So, now I’m off to Indy to go check in for tomorrow morning’s start of the Indy Mini-Marathon.  I thought I’d mention this as this will be the first year of the race for some new timing/tracking equipment.  Basically, I’ll wear a disposable RF tag on my shoe that will track my start and stop time as well as allow people to track progress online at 500festival.com.  Then, at the end of the race I simply discard the RF tag.  Pretty cool technology and I’m anxious to see how it works!  My main reason for mentioning it here is the recent increase in discussion about HOW to keep the expensive technology a school owns, in the school and out of student pockets/backpacks.   A cheap (disposable) RF tag might be one solution to tracking your equipment and knowing when it’s walking out the front door!  Of course, you’d need an RF receiver as well, which likely isn’t as cheap (disposable).  Still, this seems like really cool technology that could be worth keeping an eye on!

]]> http://nepatins.edublogs.org/2009/05/01/512009-free-audio-lit-ibarcodes-new-braille-mac-self-control-video-capture-and-gotta-run/feed/ 0 http://nepatins.edublogs.org/2009/04/20/4202009-apology-tech-expo-sandys-web-reader-links-20-timeline-tools-purdue-tlt-conference/ http://nepatins.edublogs.org/2009/04/20/4202009-apology-tech-expo-sandys-web-reader-links-20-timeline-tools-purdue-tlt-conference/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:56:06 +0000 danielgmcnulty http://nepatins.edublogs.org/?p=233 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!

Getting Started in Second Life: This week, I’ve introduced several new people around my office and around the state to Second Life and helped them to get oriented to using it.  I made several mental notes while doing this about some of the comments my learners made, the troubles they had and the misconceptions they held.  I thought it might be beneficial to share.

• First, Second Life is free for the most part.  Sure, you can spend real money if you’d like, but you certainly do not have to spend a dime or even put your credit card info into your profile.  Unless you want to own land or purchase fancy clothes, etc., you don’t need to spend any money at all.
• When you’re first “born” into Second Life, you end up in this place called “Help Island,” which is just not the best place to start out in my opinion.  There’s lots of good information there, but there are also other avatars from around the world, all who are likely new and have no personal stake in their Second Life experience or obligations to uphold.  So, in my opinion, as an educator the best thing you can do to improve your initial Second Life experience is to immediately teleport somewhere other than “Help Island” as soon as you’re “born!”  So, I’ve listed a few great places to immediately teleport to, when you enter Second Life:

1. ISTE in Second Life currently has about 4500 members and 123 Volunteers helping to run the professional development on the island, greet new educators to the island and help keep the island safe and secure.  They also have an orientation walk-through, which is great for newbies! The slurl to teleport here is: http://slurl.com/secondlife/ISTE%20Island/100/74/30
2. NMC (New Media Consortium) is considered by many to be one of the very best orientations to Second Life. http://slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Orientation/109/113/39
3. Discovery Educators Network: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Eduisland%20II/73/101/22
   
4. Scilands: …is another great orientation spot to learn about Second Life. http://slurl.com/secondlife/SciLands/196/17/23

So, I would highly recommend you pick one or more of the above slurls and teleport directly there when you first create your avatar rather than remaining on the “Help Island.”  Also, contact me when you have an avatar created and I’ll be happy to show you around!

Virtual Worlds in HS Education: Additionally, I came across this article recently about Virtual Worlds in High School Education.  It’s an undergraduate paper and not a peer-reviewed journal piece, but I think it offers some very beneficial information nonetheless.  I also think we’ll see a flood of articles on similar topics very soon: http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/worlds/articles/trinity.manny.alvarez.pdf

Limitations of Textbooks (Funny Video):

Blooms Taxonomy in the Digital Age: This idea is certainly not a new one, but I was reminded of these models this week and thought I’d share:

On Discovery Educator’s Network Island in Second Life is a 3D model:

Additionally: Check out the Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy on the Educational Origami Wiki: http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom%27s+Digital+Taxonomy.   You can also download here as a pdf file among MANY other great resources on this wiki.

There are some autism-related events coming up that you should certainly know about especially if you are in the mid to northeast regions of Indiana:

• Autism Fair: The Grant County Autism Family Support Group is hosting a vendor fair.  This will be a unique opportunity for vendors to explains the services they provide for families living with autism.  April 9, 5:30-7:30pm, Mississinewa Community Schools.
• All Star Saturdays Movie! April 25, 10:00am.  Kerasotes Theaters and Grant County Autism Family Support Group have teamed up to bring families affected by autism a special opportunity to enjoy their favorite films in a safe and accepting environment. Kerasotes Showplace 12 Marion will be showing a sensory friendly family film. The film will be made sensory friendly by bringing up the lights in the theater
  and bringing down the sound. In addition, the sensory friendly showing will allow for loud outbursts or behaviors that can be common in autistic children who do not understand theater etiquette.

• Please contact me for more information and flyers on either of these two events.  I’ll be happy to put you in touch with the events organizers.

Why Let Our Students Blog: Cool little video. I’m planning to talk more about young students blogging in the next few weeks and thought this was a nice intro to the topic!

Creating Blogs Using Edublogs (slideshare tutorial):

Uploaded on authorSTREAM by Travis

Mac Screen-Shots: I received a couple of questions last week on how to do screen-shots with a Mac, which is interesting because it’s actually a little easier than on a PC.  Of course, you can also use my favorite tool JING (www.jingproject.com) on Mac or PC, but there are several keyboard commands for doing screenshots built right into the Mac OS.  Check these out:

Additionally, if you don’t already know, you can create your OWN keyboard shortcuts on the Mac:  See here for an explanation of how easy it is to do this: http://www.apple.com/pro/tips/keyboard.html .  What a great tool, not only for increased productivity, but also for individuals we are working with who might have trouble using a mouse, viewing the screen, navigating/reading menus, etc.

Want to Learn Spanish? VEI is proud to sponsor a conversational Spanish class in Second Life, which is forming now.  The class will focus on the practice of conversational Spanish led by an experienced teacher, Tek Galicia, fluent in typing chat and voice Spanish.  You should have some knowledge of the Spanish language and have a strong desire to improve your skill level while having fun in an interactive class setting.   This class is not for the beginning Spanish student.  To maximize your learning, you should be voice enabled and have a good graphic card in  your computer.

This class has 16 slots open for the first come, first serve.  Please contact me if you’re interested and I’ll gladly put you in touch with the folks hosting this class.

VWBPE: As you know from last week’s blog post, I’m attending the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education 3-day conference today, tomorrow and Sunday.  So far, it’s been really informative and well worth my time.  Check out the schedule and consider coming to one or two sessions this weekend: http://wiki.vwbpe.org/index.php?title=Main_Page􀀀

Register for the PATINS Tech Expo if you haven’t yet! New presentation schedule is now available here: www.patinsproject.com/training.html

Back to the VWBPE Conference for me!

TRLD Conference 2009:

Lots of good stuff at the conference!  My session went really well this evening and was well attended.  A recurring theme at the conference and general buzz amongst people seemed to be that of professional development and how it seems that so many teachers are ready for it to be, at least in part, an online experience.  This is interesting to me and goes right along with my recent blogging about Second Life and other immersive environments as I believe this sort of 3D virtual world is where we are headed with a lot of professional development.

Some quick tips and things to try:

Zoho: Zoho is sort of like Google Apps on steroids.  Try this out as a great way to collaborate on documents!   It’s FREE.  www.zoho.com

Twidla: Twidla is a FREE interactive whiteboard that multiple people can use and colloaborate on at once.  It’s fairly basic, but it works really well and it’s free!  www.twidla.com

TagCrowd: A free, simple way to take a body of text and focus down to the most frequently used words in that text.  Very Powerful Tool in my opinion!  www.tagcrowd.com

UDL Editions: http://udleditions.cast.org/

Book Builder: http://bookbuilder.cast.org

CAST Curriculum Self-Check: http://udlselfcheck.cast.org/

CAST UDL Lesson Builder: http://lessonbuilder.cast.org

PATINS Project Tech Expo

April 16, 2009

Junior Achievement Building of Central IN, Inc.

7435 North Keystone Ave.

Indianapolis, IN  46240

• No cost to you.
• Varied Presentations nd Vendor Booths.
• Door Prizes and Giveaways!

• Register for the Tech Expo By Clicking HERE

NIMAS Digital Rights Managers Update:

• There are currently a little over 600 DRMs registered statewide.
• New DRMs can now be registered through the ICAM right on their website.
• There will be DRM Webinar Trainings from the ICAM almost every week, on Tuesdays.

Pixies Online: It’s been a few weeks since I’ve talked about immersive environments such as Second Life and I wanted to mention a couple of things.  First, we now have a PATINS-Project SL Group in Second Life.  If you create an avatar (which is free) in Second Life, do a search for PATINS and join our group!

These last few weeks, my daughters have been completely immersed in Disney’s Pixie Hollow, which is a free, online virtual world.  Unlike Second Life it is highly controlled and I feel, quite safe.  My daughters each have created multiple fairies (avatars), know how to fly them around, how to chat with other fairies, how to collect ingredients such as leaves and spider webs and how to decorate their fairy homes!   My daughters are 5 and 7 years old.  I’ve given them relatively little instruction or help once I helped them set up their accounts.  This is just incredible to me and it really goes to show that this sort of 3D virtual or immersive world is what our students are growing up with.  They understand it, it’s not “wierd” to them like I hear from many teachers and they are quickly able to learn with it, from it and contribute to their worlds.  I think we have an obligation to pay some close attention to what’s coming!

Congratulations Frontier Elementary School! Last Friday morning I visited Brookston, Indiana.  Frontier Elementary is the school I taught at and helped to plant the Universal Design for Learning seed prior to working with the PATINS-Project.   Having successfully completed the 3-year UDL Pilot Project with PATINS, the dedicated Frontier Elementary staff enlisted the help of the community of Brookston in order to continue funding technology (mainly SMART-Boards) to continue making the instructional environment of FES more universally accessible to students.  Friday morning, FES hosted a special ceremony to express their gratitude to all the donors and to the staff who put in a lot of extra work to make possible the purchase of 13 additional SMART-Boards at around $42,000!!!  It was an honor to return to Frontier on Friday and to be a part of the ceremony.  I’m certainly proud to be able to say I taught at FES and proud to be able to recommend FES to other schools looking for a model of how to scale up the UDL efforts in their buildings.  The dedication, hard work and teamwork of FES teachers and administration demonstrates that even in the current economic situation, funds do exist!  Check out the News Channel 18 (WLFI) coverage: www.wlfi.com/dpp/news/local_wlfi_smartboards_01092008

Welcome New UDL Teams! Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, the 8 new schools selected this past October to particpate in the PATINS UDL Pilot Program met in Indianapolis for two intense days of training with Dave Edyburn and the PATINS staff.  Check out photos from the training here: www.patinsproject.com/PhotoGalleries/UDLTeamTrain2009

NIMAS Sample Contract Language: As many districts begin planning for textbooks and are talking with publishers, it’s important to remember to include language in your textbook contracts regarding the deposit of the NIMAS File Sets into the NIMAC.  PATINS and the ICAM have some sample contract language you can use here: www.icam.k12.in.us/generalinfo.php

MOBCASTING CONTINUED: So, hopefully last week you were able to set up your mobcast.  If you missed it, check out the easy step-by-step instructions.

Once you do have your free account set up and at least one episode recorded, you can login to your gabcast account (www.gabcast.com) to listen to your recordings online, download them individually OR you might consider submitting your gabcast mobcast to iTunes as a podcast (if you don’t mind it being public) OR you can simply share your mobcast RSS feed with the people you’d like to have access to the audio.

Submitting to iTunes:

1. Login to you gabcast account
2. Click on the My Channels Tab:

3. Click on the Title of your Channel:

4. Click the “CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE” orange button:

5. Click the RSS icon as the very first option on the page:

6. Copy (ctrl+C) the url in the address bar of the browser that opens up.

7. Open iTunes and go to the iTunes Store.  Once there, click on “Podcasts” in the upper left area of the iTunes Store.  You should then see an icon right in the middle of the store that looks like this:

8. When you click that “Submit a Podcast” button, you have the opportunity to Paste (ctrl+V) the address of your mobcast’s RSS Feed (from step 6 above).  This submits your mobcast to the iTunes Podcast directory for review.  It might take 2-4 days for iTunes staff to approve your podcast (verify that it contains what you state that it contains) before it will be public.

…AND THAT’S ALL THERE IS TO IT!