Media Converters

We all know that it’s a good idea to use multiple means of representation when we present content.  There are several ways to do this including lecture, images, PowerPoint, audio, video, etc… Many times video poses a problem however.  First, it is not always easy to find sites that schools allow us to access.  Then of course, if we do find videos online it isn’t always easy to get them on your computer so that you can insert in a PowerPoint or share when internet (or certain website) access isn’t available.

To help with this, there are two websites I use when I need to grab a video from the web and save it on my computer to include in a presentation.  There’s been countless times when I found the perfect video to share while presenting at a conference only to find out there was no internet service, leaving my links useless.

• Zamzar – www.zamzar.com
• Media Converter – www.mediaconverter.org

Both resources are similar in the way they work.  First, find the youtube or other video you would like to download.  Next, simply visit one of these sites and paste the url of the video in and choose a file format.  If you are using windows, choose .avi or .wmv.  For macs, choose .mov.  Click submit and in no time you will have a copy of the video available for download.

Would love to hear your favorite resources in the comments section below.

The case for mobile learning in schools

I read an article in Fast Company magazine the other day that talked about the rise in popularity of smartphones and other devices that allow kids to access information anywhere.  There are over 6 billion people in the world today and according to the article, it is estimated that there will be 5 billion cell phones by the close of 2010.

To experiment, I downloaded one of the apps (pocketphonics) recommended in the article and turned my 2 year old loose with it (she’s familiar with the iphone already).  In no time she was following along with the program and learning to write letters.

So this got me thinking about the larger picture of mobile devices in classrooms.  There’s the iPhone, iPod touch, and now the iPad from Apple.  Then there are the droid smartphones that Google has a part in, not to mention the growth of affordable netbooks.  A recent survey showed that over 70% of kids already have access to these devices, but unfortunately are not allowed to use them in schools.

Without writing a book, here are a few of the reasons I think that schools should be seriously considering the use of mobile devices in classrooms:

• Cost (Hardware) – A laptop computer runs close to $1000 on most state bid contracts.  An 8 GB iPod touch is under $200.  In fact, you can buy an iPod touch station that comes with 30 touches and a macbook pro for substantially less that it would cost to buy a few laptops.
• Cost (Software) – Software may be more expensive than computers by the time you add up all the software that needs to be on every computer.  Many apps on the other hand cost .99 cents to a few bucks.  And if I’m not mistaken, with iPods, you sync all of the touches up to one computer… So if you buy an app once for .99 cents, you can then load it onto all of your touches.
• Fidelity – Not all classrooms I visit are using research based strategies.  I know that with RTI, “research based” is kind of a buzz phrase right now, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important.  Something is researched based because it works.  Things that aren’t researched based may work, but we don’t know that for sure.  If you download an app that uses a research based strategy, you know that each student is getting that strategy every time he or she uses it.  This isn’t the case in classrooms where lecture is the primary medium used.
• Cost (technology support staff) – I work quite a bit with Assistive Technology.  It can be a pain to install, maintain, troubleshoot, etc… A friend of mine in the software world was just telling me that the cost of supporting software in schools is actually more than the software itself.  With apps, they are downloaded, maintained and updated through a system separate from the school.  Other than a quick how-to tutorial, the technology support team can spend their time on other projects.
• Access – Many kids already have these devices.  They can use them at home, school and anywhere in between.

Having said all of the above, there are still all sorts of things that can cause this to not work.  For one thing, there is a cost involved.  Although computers are more expensive, those are probably already in the district.  Setting up an iPod touch or iPad station would have a significant start up cost.  Then there is figuring out how to go about purchasing apps, letting students check the devices out, etc…

Of course, we can always think of reasons to not do something, but I challenge people to come up with solutions to make it work rather than why it can’t.

There’s more to this from a global perspective than what I am writing here.   I’ll save that for another post.  In the meantime, I am working on a session for a few upcoming national conferences.  Hope to see you at one of them.

Digital Text Resources

Finding sites with digital text (mostly free) is a job in itself.  However, this is one of the most important things overlooked when schools decide to purchase text to speech software.  I remember doing a 2 or 3 hour training on how to use such software, then asking participants where they were going to get their digital text to use with the software.  You would have thought I had asked how to solve a complicated mathematical equation.  Needless to say, I start my trainings off with this question now.  If participants leave thinking that they are going to have to scan in text books from beginning to end, I can pretty much guarantee you the use of the software will be around the same level as it was before you bought it.

I’ve included in this post a few places to check out.  The best thing to do is just CLICK HERE to download the Word document.  I can’t take credit for developing it, but it’s been past around so many times I cannot credit the original author.  I did however remove several out of date links and check the others to ensure accuracy.  This of course doesn’t include every resource out there, so if you can think of something else I encourage you to post it as a comment on this blog post.

Here are a few of the included resources along with descriptions (usually from the site itself).  Note that this is for free/non-copyright text.  Therefore they will not include links to textbooks or other copyrighted literature.  Those types of texts will many times need to be purchased separately or only used with students with specific disabilities.

Bookshare – http://www.bookshare.org

Bookshare offers more than 42,000 digital books, textbooks, teacher-recommended reading, periodicals and assistive technology tools. It is free for all U.S. students with qualifying disabilities.

Project Gutenberg – http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

There are over 27,000 free books in the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog

Bibliomania – http://www.bibliomania.com/

Free Online Literature with more than 2000 Classic Texts

AcademicInfo – http://www.academicinfo.net/

AcademicInfo is an online education resource center with extensive subject guides and distance learning information. Our mission is to provide free, independent and accurate information and resources for prospective and current students (and other researchers).

ReadPrint.com – http://www.readprint.com/

Offers thousands of free books for students, teachers, and the classic enthusiast

Kids Corner – http://wiredforbooks.org/kids.htm

Contains a collection of Beatrix Potter’s books with text available in English, German, Japanese, and French.

WorldWideSchool.org – http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/catalogs/bysubject-top.html

The Intersect – http://intersect.uoregon.edu/

A Library of “Supported Text” books incorporating resources and study strategies that help students learn more from what they read.

Bartleby.com – http://www.bartleby.com/

Alex catalogue of electronic text – http://infomotions.com/alex/

The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a collection of about 14,000 “classic” public domain documents from American and English literature as well as Western philosophy.

Page by Page Books – http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/

Offers hundreds of free classic books with frequent additions to the collection

SchoolLibrary.com – http://www.schoollibrary.com

Offers public access to over 27,000 books and materials (choose public access from menu at top of page to access). Paying a nominal membership fee of $8.95 per year allows access to over 100,000 additional books and materials. Reading lists prepared by the University of Hawaii sort books by grade level.

20-20 – http://www.2020site.org/

Provides free books and other materials covering a wide array of areas. Topics include history, garden, children’s books, how-to books, home repair and decoration and fashion.

Classic Reader – http://www.classicreader.com/

Offers a large collection of free classic books by authors such as Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare and many others. You can read, search and even add your own annotations to any of the classic books. A selection of author biographies and portraits are also available.

Cool Whiteboard Software

Just finished reading about how to integrate whiteboard lessons into online learning environments where the FREE software LectureScribe was mentioned.  LectureScribe is a software developed by Brian Dean, an assistant professor of computer science at Clemson University.

I viewed a demo of the software and found it very well put together.  Although it is recommended that you use a tablet PC or WACOM (input device you for computers that you can use a digitized pen with), you could always use a regular PC with a mouse (just know it may be a bit frustrating).

The software gives you multiple boards so that you don’t have to include your entire lecture on one board.  It also allows you to record audio.  When finished, it saves as a .swf or flash file, which is compatible with almost all web browsers.  From there, you can post it to your site, blog, eLearning course or whatever floats your boat. Currently the software is PC only.

Oh, and did I mention it’s FREE!  Check it out at http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~bcdean/lscribe/.

A UDL resource you will want to bookmark

Many of you may already be aware of the Free Tech Toolkit for UDL, but just in case you haven’t had a chance to visit it, you should do so now.  It’s actually a wiki and the address is http://udltechtoolkit.wikispaces.com/.  For some reason, during the time of this post, I was having trouble getting the homepage to load, but you still view the information by clicking on a category link on the left of the page.  Categories include free text to speech, graphical organizers, writing tools, research tools, reading tools, and much more.

The wiki is maintained by Karen Janowski, who also happens to have a cool blog I read on a normal basis at http://teachingeverystudent.blogspot.com/

Academic Earth makes going to college easy

I ran across one of the best sites I’ve seen recently after reading about it an article.  The site is called Academic Earth and this is how they describe themselves:

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars.  Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

The colleges you can visit include the most pretigous in the United States.   Here’s a list:

• Berkley
• Yale
• Harvard
• MIT
• Princeton
• Stanford

The lectures are great and users can rate the lectures after watching.  I have never been one of the YouTube types that can sit around watching videos on the web all day, but I literally spent an hour (56 minutes to be exact) today listening to Paul Brown at Yale discuss Sigmund Freud.  I learned more in 56 minutes than I can remember from my entire college psych class and found the whole thing very enjoyable.

So in addition to giving you something useful to do during your free time, what else can Academic Earth be used for?  Just think of the opportunities this gives many of our students.  Not all of us are able to go to Yale or MIT, but viewing lectures from some of the worlds greatest professors gives us opportunities we may have never gotten otherwise.  This is just another example of how education is becoming more accessible.  You’ve probably heard of California’s Open Source Textbook Iniative or MIT’s Open Courseware project.  Academic Earth is another one of those great free resources to add to the list.

Text to Speech just got easier

Most of us are probably familiar with products that turn digital text into speech.  Programs like Read&Write Gold and Kurzweil are feature packed applications that will not only read almost any digital text to you, but also provide numerous other supports such as advanced spell check, word prediction and more.  Other programs, like ReadPlease are basic (but free) and allow you to copy and paste any text in and have it read out loud.

The only major downfall to these programs is that a student must be sitting in front of a computer to use them.  Having one computer with text to speech capabilities doesn’t do you much good when 15 kids need it at the same time.

To help remedy this, there are several products out there that allow you to turn text into an audio file (typically an mp3 or wav file).  Once created, students can listen to it on their portable mp3 player, cd player, or even their computer at home.  Granted, this isn’t always as effective as being able to see the text as it’s being read out loud, but it does work for many students.  Surely you’ve seen all of the earbuds hanging out of kids’ ears haven’t you?

Before I list some options, I should mention one concern I consistently get is that not all students have the mp3 players.  This is true, but according to a recent report specializing in tracking the use of digital music and digital music players, over 70% of respondents ages 12-17 already have some type of portable music player.  This is up from 54% last year.  What’s more is that not all portable media players are as expensive as iPods.  A recent search on WalMart.com showed a 2GB video and audio portable media player for under $30!

Now that that’s out of the way, how do we turn text into audio files?  Well, there are really 2 ways: a software application (or one feature of a software application) and a web site.  Let’s look at each…

On the Web:  These websites allow you to paste digital text in and they will automatically create the audio file for you.

• Vozme.com
• HearWho.com (only free for limited amount of text)

Software Applications:

• Read&Write Gold – Contains a “Speech Maker” feature that turns text into a wav or mp3 file
• Text to Speech Maker
• Other options – a website containing several low cost text to audio programs

If you know of any additional programs, especially free programs, be sure to post in the comments section or send me an email.

Free Learning Styles Inventory

One of the first steps in creating a Universally Designed classroom is to complete a learning styles inventory with your students.  This gives you a better understanding of how your students learn best, which in turn should effect the way you deliver content.  My personal favorite free online learning styles inventory comes from Learning-Styles-Online.com.  Not only does it provide information on how you learn best, but if you are an educator it allows you to create an account so that after your students complete the survey it will build a classroom profile for you.  This is much easier than calculating and putting together a profile manually.  

Podcasting and Podcatcher Options

For those that aren’t aware, a podcatcher is a software application used to collect and play podcasts. By far, the most popular podcatcher is iTunes. However, not everyone wants to rely on only one software application. In addition, there are many schools or entire districts that do not allow the use of iTunes. So what exactly is a podcast and are there options for those wanting to subscribe to podcasts other than iTunes? That is what this post hopes to answer.

To start with, a podcast is simply an audio or video file that is syndicated, which means people are able to subscribe to it using a podcatcher. Why would you want to subscribe to a podcast? Let me use an example that I think will help. Imagine there are 5 podcasts that i am really interested in. They are on various topics, maybe Spanish lessons, technology, financial information, music, and math strategies. All of these podcasts contain great information, but it is a time consuming task for me to visit each site every day just to see if a new podcast has been posted. If I find that there is a new post, I then have to download and store it somewhere before I can listen to it on my computer or on a portable media player like an iPod.

Now let’s look at using a podcatcher, such as iTunes, to make this process more efficient. Instead of visiting each site everyday, I only visit it once. While there, I find the feed information for that podcast (usually by clicking on a link that says “subscribe to this podcast”). I take that link and copy and paste it into my podcatcher (if using iTunes go to Advanced – Subscribe to Podcast) and viola, I am now subscribed to that podcast. I do the same with the other four sites and now every time I open my podcatcher it searches to see if any new posts have been made. If so, it automatically downloads and organizes them for me. Is that cool or what! iTunes also offers an extensive list of podcasts you can search and subscribe to without ever leaving the application.

So moving on, are there other podcatcher options than iTunes? The answer to this is yes, but you may need to spend some time exploring the options to find which works for you. Below is a list of a few options you may want to try:

• Doppler
• gPodder
• Juice
• MediaFly
• myPodder
• NewsFire (mac only)
• NIMIQ
• PrimeTimePodcast
• QuickNews (for PalmOS)
• RSSRadio
• SmartFeed (for Windows Mobile)
• ZiePod
• Zune (Microsoft’s Version of iTunes)

I figure this list will do you for awhile. I personally use iTunes, but if I didn’t I would probably give Juice, MediaFly or ZiePod a try.  If you have tried one of the options above feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Using Jott as a Writing Tool

I know that I am not the first, and will surely not be the last to do a post on Jott, a free web based tool to convert speech into text, but I still feel the need to mention it here for my readers.

So what exactly is Jott, and how can it be used in your toolkit of Universally Designed activities for students? Well, to access Jott all you need to do is go to www.jott.com and setup an account. Once setup you will receive a verification code to use when you call 866-JOTT-123. After dialing the number and entering the code, you can choose to Jott yourself or someone in your contact list (which you can create after signing up for an account). To Jott is simply to speak a message. Once spoken, you can set up a reminder to go along with it if you wish. When finished, Jott will sent you an email or text message with the text of that voice note. How cool is that! You can use Jott to send yourself reminders while driving in the car, create lists, and even add dates to your Google calendar or make a blog post.

So how can this be used in Education? It just so happens that a colleague and I did a session titled “Ugh, I Hate to Write!: Innovative Ways to Use Technology to Motivate Reluctant and Struggling Writers” yesterday. A major component of it was using services like Jott to motivate writers. For example, one critical part of writing that is seldom done these days is writing to learn. These are the kind of things students do to help digest information. They are not graded, and the main audience are the students themselves. Activities typically seen in writing to learn activities include writing breaks (stop talking for 2 minutes and let students write what is on their mind), exit and admit slips, brainstorming or clustering, drawing and illustrations, write arounds and much more. So imagine next time you want your students to participate in a writing break you allow them to call Jott and speak what’s on their mind! This not only increases engagement, but is also much more accessible for students who may struggle with writing due to cognitive or physical disabilities.

The above is of course only one example. I can see students using Jott as an organization tool, a method for delivering admit and/or exit slips to teachers (remember that students can Jott to teachers and other students, not just themselves), brainstorming, and to take notes among many other things. Have an idea for using Jott? Write it in the comments section below.