2012.02.23+Notes

We were Planning to Have Guest Lecturer: Joe Novo - Universal Access IT at EWU
but he had a last-minute emergency and had to cancel/postpone.

Nevertheless, we will stay the course and talk about Reading, Writing, and Study Skills Tools. (Joe would have liked that.)

EWU Accessibility

[|Bookshare] and the DRM Problem

[|Kurzweil 3000] and WYNN

Mongoliad example of the next step for the 'Book'

Jeff Nunokawa, [|Princeton] English Professor, and [|JeffBook]

Windows Speech Recognition and Dragon Naturally Speaking 11.5

Training Dragon Naturally Speaking and Dragon Training demo

Ellis Amdur YouTube captioning demo

Accessible "Virtual School" Project
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" Alan Kay This is a real problem to work on, and there are no answers in the back of the book. Virtual schools, blended learning, flipped classrooms - they are becoming part of our professional lives as educators. Spokane Schools has a virtual high school, and there are many more like it in the US and around the world. As special educators, we have a problem - many of these courses and programs are not accessible for many of our students. We have students with executive function delays, who can't handle the level of self-direction, planning, and problem-solving that the courses require. Some students have difficulty with the sensory and/or motor demands of a curriculum that happens mostly on a computer screen. Your project assignment: Take an element (or several related elements) of an online course or online resource for a blended course. Design it (or redesign existing elements, or add some AT) to make it universally accessible. Write a description of your plan, your course content, and tools that you will use. Include some use cases, showing how students with different abilities can use the course. Your finished document should be about 4-6 pages, with in-line references and links. It doesn't have to be APA style, but it __does__ have to be professional. Just like the first assignments, write as if you are already a professional teacher. Write for other teachers and administrators. Your style can be friendly and informal, but not sloppy. You can turn this in as an email attachment, using .doc, .docx, .rtf, or .pdf file formats.