The Freedom Stick - UDL at its best!

UDL Toolbelt
Last summer, my first blog post was about my favorite UDL tools developed by RSC, the Regional Support Center Scotland North and East. (Click here to read about RSC in my blog). 

Recently, I was thinking about revisiting the site to see if there have been any new developments to report. So it was providence that I spotted a tweet in my feed today about the Freedom Stick. When I clicked upon the link I was happily surprised to see that the Freedom Stick is the result of a beautiful partnership between RSC and MITs - Michigan's Integrated Technology Supports. The Freedom Stick has an unbelievable assortment of free UDL apps, and are too numerous to list here. Download it today to provide the best accessibility tools for your students. Accessibility = unlimited opportunity.

Symbaloo vs Educlipper update
I promised an update on my travails with Symbaloo and Educlipper, and already have a clear preference between the two visual bookmarking apps. The winner for me? Symbaloo because of its easy-to-use format. 

Feel free to comment, or if there are some UDL apps you would like to have tested, let me know!

ClassDojo

This fall, I will be a first year teacher...again. Up until now, with the exception of some students I only saw for math, I have taught 7th and 8th grade students exclusively.  I love 8th graders, I love 7th graders too. They get my humor, I get their humor, I understand their developmental capabilities as well as their mercurial, hormone-influenced temperaments. This fall, I will be moving down to the 6th grade, with a 6th grade special education caseload in addition to my specialized math classes. This is to be a one year gig: I will be looping back to the 7th grade after next year. 

After learning of this grade change, I started having nightmares about classrooms full of toddlers and misbehaving babies. It took me a night or two of these dreams to realize that I was a little stressed about my grade change and how developmentally different 6th graders are from their upper-middle school counterparts. While this doesn't sound like such a big change, it really is. 11 year olds versus 13 and 14 year olds. Incoming elementary students versus students ready for high school. I am used to getting students who have already been "broken in" with regards to the middle school environment. This fall, it is my job to get these students comfortable with that big step from elementary to middle school.

So...I have spent my summer trying to get myself and my classroom prepared for this big change.

Enter ClassDojo

First item on list:  find a workable method of enforcing, tracking and rewarding classroom behavior for my incoming students. Check! 

ClassDojo is an on-line behavior management tool for the classroom. According to its website, it improves "student behavior and engagement by awarding and recording real-time feedback". This is a FREE web tool. ClassDojo allows teachers to track both negative and positive behavior with a click, and provides feedback to students immediately. Instead of a check on the white board, ClassDojo allows you to itemize positive and negative behavior attributes, and print behavior report cards to promote student accountability. 

With ClassDojo, teachers can set up individual classes and enter their student rosters to track behavior on a student by student basis. Attributes can be customized within each class by the teacher, and are entered and tracked by date. To encourage student investment in this process, each student can select a cartoon "avatar" and be assigned a "secret code" to view their behavior over time. 

I set up my account and class lists in less than 15 minutes. Deciding on my positive and negative attribute trackers took more time as I personalized them according to class type. With a click, my class lists and attributes were saved and the Dojo was ready to go. 

Here is an example of some class avatars and class attributes:

To track behavior, open a class list, click on a student and click on the behavior attribute.

Students can gauge their behavior by their avatar:

I give the Dojo two very enthusiastic "thumbs up" for simplicity and ease. I will be using this daily in all my classes. Just a note: ClassDojo is free to teachers while it is in its Beta stage...so get in on the goodness while it lasts! 

Symbaloo versus EduClipper...so many choices

Yesterday while I was distracting myself with various webapps, I found many new (to me) websites to explore. I was busily adding new bookmarks to my Diigo, (which appeals to my OCD nature to organize things into a tidy and accessible "categories"), when I stumbled upon two similar webapps. Due to my inability to rein myself in, my Diigo is becoming more unwieldy by the day as more and more webapps are added out in cyberland, and as I add more and more of them to my library. Perhaps it was kismet that I found them...

A Melding of Visuals and Databases

As my students can attest, I love to organize things via color-coding. All notes pertaining to a certain unit might be purple, all reference sheets might be florescent, the red section is for quizzes and tests and on and on and on... I think that color might be the most under-utilized resource for special learners. Enter Symbaloo...

Symbaloo is a visual social bookmarking website. While Delicious and Diigo both are formatted like typical "database" websites, allowing you to assign each website multiple tags, across different searchable categories. Symbaloo does not have this capability per se. Symbaloo's "webmixes" are akin to Diigo or Delicious "tags", with out the cross-referencing capabilities. Symbaloo is all "look and click". As one who prefers visual formats, I think I might be able to live with this.

So...I set up both symbaloo and symbalooEDU accounts (why not? They are free!). Both apps have pre-set "web-mixes" that you can add to your account. Adding one of these mixes is easy, and symbaloo has step by step, simple to follow directions. I added the K-5 MathLinks to my pages with one click:

I also was able to set up my own "Math Toolz" webmix, creating my own tiles and bookmarks fairly easily. I could color code the tiles to represent different things; blue for apps, pink for worksheets etc..:

The only downside on symbaloo is that each webmix page limits me to 100 tile tags, but I think that is something I can live with too, given that I can create as many webmix pages as I want. I will give an update on my symbaloo travails in my next blog.

I have to say that I really liked the look of educlipper and the eduteacher website. Along with my social bookmarking "clipboards", I was able to set up a blog and a my profile easily. Here is the main page layout:

I like how the eduTeacher website allows you to access all the functions of the webapp via a "backpack". I didn't like how clunky it is to load, edit and update. Clipping and posting to my clipboards was also a cumbersome task, but once I loaded the educlipit toolbar button, the process went more smoothy. I am hoping that eduTeacher is working the kinks out of the program, because I do really like the setup (and it is free)!

How this can help special learners

This type of visual formatting is great for several types of learners: those who prefer "seeing" representations rather than words, students with print difficulties, students on the spectrum. Each student could create their own specialized "toolbox" and be able to access it from anywhere. Students with print issues could have buttons for text readers, web readers and speech to text apps or mp3 files. Students with written expression difficulties could have buttons for webspiration, their favorite organizational templates in document or pdf format, transition word lists and editing checklists. Endless accessibility = endless potential for our students.

Google Chome Goodies

Today my web wanderings took me to two interesting websites that are Google Chrome friendly and promote accessibility.

The first website I found was soundgecko by 121Cast, a free text-to-audio web service. This handy webapp allows you to have any web article text transcribed to audio format (mp3 and Google Chome extension). Since the audio file is in a friendly format, it can be played on just about any device. 

I decided to test it out myself, so I tagged an article from Yahoo and sent it away...and received it back within 5 minutes. I pressed the "listen" button and heard my article.
Here is a link to the article I selected:   Raisman Article


Not too bad for a free conversion. How can you access this?

The steps are easy! 
1. Find your article
2. Email the article URL to go@soundgecko.com
3. The article is sent to your email in mp3 format

Other ways to enjoy Soundgecko? You can download the Soundgecko iphone app from the iTunes store (it is free!), or get the Google Chrome Extension to tag articles. Soundgecko allows you to send the files to your Dropbox or other cloud storage site.

On to the next app...

TalkTyper is only available through the Google Chrome browser. It is free and easy to use. Basically all you have to do is click on the microphone icon and begin speaking. 

Your translated words will appear in a dialog box for you to see. I had fun testing the limits of the speech recognition software, and found that in order to improve accuracy, I had to speak at a slower rate than usual and enunciate, particularly with the softer letters and blends (p, th etc..). Fortunately, you can edit the text before cutting and pasting into your document. Try it out!