I developed a Toolkit with CITEd which allows educators access to 11 different resources regarding teaching a community of diverse learners (that is, students of varied abilities and backgrounds and students with special needs).  After I populated the list, I removed several so that it would be under a dozen as to not look overwhelming (as the original list of ALL resources looks on CITEd).

Some of the resources are general and cover a wide range of topics or are an introduction to Assistive Technology tools, such as "Getting Started with Assistive Technology" and "A Parent's Guide to Assistive Technology".  Others are very specific and cover a wide range of topics such as autism and science.  "Signing Science" is my favorite.  It's a very brief PDF, but the concept of signing science is pretty interesting, at least if you're already interested in both science and signing, as I am.


Assistive Technology for Educators

Steven Emerson

Software and applications to assist educators with teaching a community of diverse learners.

A Parent’s Guide to Assistive Technology

This guide contains an overview of assistive technology, a summary of how AT can address the needs of students with learning disabilities, suggestions for finding the right technology fit, a worksheet for selecting AT tools and tips for evaluating assistive technology products.

Access eLearning

A free, online ten-module tutorial that offers information, instructional techniques, and practice labs on how to make the most common needs in distance education accessible for individuals with disabilities, and enhance the usability of online materials for all students.

Accessibility Resources

This is an extensive list of resources linking to information on making computers and software more accessible to persons with disabilities.

Accessify

Accessify is dedicated to furthering the cause of web accessibility by offering free tools and other useful resources. The website includes web accessibility news, accessibility tools and wizards, an archive of features, and links to useful accessibility resources.

All Students Being Equal

This article presents an overview of available technologies for special education needs. The article organizes software recommendations around several categories: literacy support, communication aids, mobility tools, vision support, and auditory assistance. Access to Techlearning.com requires free registration.

Alternate Formats and Learning Materials

People with print disabilities may find the references in this resource helpful as they attempt to locate sources of digital content. This resource highlights accessible options for obtaining both digital electronic text and digital audio. Some resources focus specifically on serving individuals with print reading disabilities while others offer content more widely.

Assistive Technology 101

This resource includes information for parents and teachers on the basics of assistive technology (AT) and how to choose AT devices. 

Assistive Technology for Children with Autism

This article provides strategies and examples for determining the best visual representation system for students with autism. Includes suggestions for low, mid and high tech tools.

Assistive Technology Ideas for Writing, Reading, Math, Studying, and Organizing - pdf

This document provides strategies and modifications for using assistive technology. Low-tech and high-tech ideas are given for writing, reading, math, studying, and organizing.

Getting Started With Assistive Technology - pdf

Learning disabilities persist into adulthood and continue to challenge learners and educators alike. Learn more about what adult education and community college teachers are doing to understand students with LD, integrate assistive technology into instruction, and untangle English language learning difficulties from possible learning disabilities.

Signing Science (PDF) - pdf

This article discusses the uses of the EnViSci Network and how it benefits students with hearing impairments. The EnViSci Network offers curriculum units to teach students the basics of science.

Video Text and Storyboarding

It took Microsoft Encoder, Microsoft Movie Maker, a trip to the Philadelphia Zoo, and some help by Carl Orff, but three hours later: EPIC SNOW LEOPARD CUB BATTLE!

The original video was completed in 1080P HD, but thanks to large file sizes, a lower-quality video was uploaded.

Recommended to turn the volume WAY UP for full effect :)  Enjoy!

Secondly, below are my storyboards for my Multimedia Montage Project on a bioremediation research assignment wiki project.  If you are interested in the details about them, please see my screencast on Thinkfinity in which I talk about them at length.

Graphic Design, Part 3

I revisited some of the photos I've taken on past vacations this week and cropped them to highlight various aspects of each image to give each a different feel.
  

This image is taken from the road on the side of a mountain.

In this first cropping, I removed the cars parked on the road so that it looks more relaxing.

In this image, I only included specific objects in the foreground.  Here you can see the contrast between the bright red vehicles hidden behind the natural green.

This image shows a mountain behind a town built near a port.

Here, the mountain is removed to show just the tightly compact town.

Zoomed in further, you can now see people working on the dock, as if there is no town in sight.

Removing the town and dock from the photo shows a few houses sporadically strewn along the mountainside.

This image was taken at sunrise over a lake.

Here, the boats floating in the dawn lake become the focus of the photo.

The darker clouds were removed from this photo and the right side cropped to bring the sun into the center of the screen and allow for only the brightest of colors in the sky.

Zooming further to remove the water, now the bright clouds are the focus of the image.

In the next pair of photos, I have added borders to match the feel of the original image.  Unfortunately, the borders do not look the same after posting to this site for some reason.  Regardless, I had a lot of trouble with this activity because I knew what I wanted to do, but could not find proper software that could add fancy borders (a seemingly simple tool, I thought).

In the next pair of photos, I used colors already existing in the image to add words and background color.  I originally thought to use a vector-based graphics system to make it look fancy, but I then decided I liked the look of the background painted around the tree in the pixel-based software.  Both images are rather simple, and I think that reinforces the harmony that a simple tree represents.

Graphic Design, Part 2!

I engaged in two more graphic design projects.  In the first one, I used simple shapes to overlap each other to create my own shapes that may now be used for other projects, such as logos or aesthetic appeal.  This project comes from the Design Basics Index, page 131 ("Shape-Building Practice").  There was no particular shape I was trying to develop, so they all seem a bit random.  I had the most fun with circles, triangles, and stars.  I completed these objects in PowerPoint, as I needed vector-based program to create these images (as per the instructions).  The benefit of this is that I can resize these images however I like and not lose pixel resolution.  Also, I found it easiest to "group" the sub-images together so that I could reposition them on the page without distorting/altering them.

Next, I completed the "Word Portraits" exercise on page 241 of the Design Basics Index.  For this task, I chose a dozen fonts and picked words that I could easily associate with them, along with one word that seemed to be in contradiction to the font.  This was a worthwhile task because it required me to run through my list of available fonts; next time I need a particular font, I know just where to find it.  Interestingly, for some fonts I chose the font first and then decided what words would with it, but for others I thought of a word/emotion first and then attempted to find a matching font.  The latter is clearly the more feasible situation for conducting this exercise in a real-world scenario.  I used the "Snipping Tool" with Windows 7 to upload a screenshot of my MS Word document, so if the words are difficult to read, just click on the embedded image and a full size image will appear.  It would be nice if I could upload the original MS Word document to this blog as a file attachment; anyone know how to go about that?

Graphic Design

Before engaging in my own practice graphic design projects, I sought out a website with poor graphic design so that I would have an idea of what the fatal errors (or "sins") discussed by Golombisky & Hagen look like.  I didn't have to search long.  Most websites I visited had at least two no-no's somewhere on the site, but some were quite horrendous.  One such site is for Video Sonic, which specializes in video and audio equipment repair (although I did have to stare at their homepage for quite a while to figure that out, let alone what the same of their company even is).

Where to begin on this?  First, the company's name is so tiny in the corner that, like I said, I couldn't figure out who they were at all.  The next thing that jumps out at you is the enormous amount of negative space dead center in the screen.  I waited for a while thinking that the page just hadn't fully loaded.  If they're wondering what to put there, I would suggest to relocate their company name to that spot.  Next, the navigation is very sporadic (and some of those boxes aren't links at all).  The next "sin" is that they centered everything, which gives the page a horrible look.  Some things can be centered, but the navigation should be a list and there shouldn't be one credit card logo hanging out below the rest.  While we're on that, why is the credit card info smack between the links to their individual locations' websites? - And if you're now thinking that the individual websites look better than this simple portal, you're quite mistaken.  Next issue: they've decided to go with dark colors for the foreground and the background, which means you need to strain to see the words.  Of course those ugly white boxes randomly spewed on the page do assist slightly.  The one set of boxes that do pop out are their coupons, which they have decided to paint the brightest colors they could find, leaving the color scheme very unbalanced.  They also need to fix some of their links; if you click the chatroom, you'll be the only one there.  I could probably go on for a while, so I'll call it quits here.



Then I began some practice graphics of my own.  Both are activities from Krause's Design Basics Index.  The first is a Mini Compositions exercise which was relaxing to play around with.  Basically, each rectangle is supposed to include geometric shapes.  Some I used the computer to draw straight lines and others I free-drew (I'm sure you can't tell which ones I carefully drew without computer aid...).

The second activity was to develop three ads displaying a form of repetition in each.  Each ad has some good qualities, and I admit that I can see areas in each that can use improvement as well.  I won't bias you, though, so I'll let you comment on good/bad qualities at will.

Please leave comments on what you think about my first art since high school.  Like I stated above, there are pros and cons with each one; feel free to point out areas that are in need of improvement!

Multimedia Montage Project Communities

In preparation for developing a Multimedia Montage Project, I joined a few communities on Thinkfinity.  Since the project is only in the initial phase, I'm not quite sure where it needs to go - so I figured joined a few different sites with different foci.  "Online Tools for Educators" has a lot of different ideas for incorporating technology in the classroom, so I think it will be one of the biggest contributors to my project's success.  I also joined "Mobile Learning", which has members submit ideas regarding how to best incorporate mobile devices into the classroom.  I think mobile phones being used in the classroom is the next natural step, so I am sure to learn invaluable skills through this group, regardless of whether it is useful in my current academic endeavors.  I have no doubt that all students within the next several years will have access to smart phones, or at least a hand-held device with similar capabilities.  And in the meantime, there's no reason why students with these devices should be banned from making use of them simply because "not all students have them".

Rune Pettersson's "Visual Literacy and Message Design" explains key aspects of utilization of pictures and images, so I was hoping to find a great group that focuses on this topic ... so far I've found nothing noteworthy.  --Any leads would be greatly appreciated!--  Blending auditory and visual stimulation (along with others, if possible) at the same time is key to teaching/learning since it increases greatly the amount of information sent to long term memory.  Embedding images strategically around text will also encourage exploration of digital documents such as a website, so people will want to experience more of the information presented.

Lastly, I found an "All About Science" group that may not assist me at all during the course of this project, but you can never be exposed to too much science (I suppose the Hulk may be one exception).  With my background in biology, the information posted to this site is already posing to be of interest to me, and I am sure I can make some valuable contributions of my own as well.

If anyone has any other great Communities to join, within or outside of Thinkfinity, please share!

Google Docs

Google Docs is an amazing resource for collaboratively developing documents.  Although, it's a great site to use on your own as well.  It used to be that if I wanted to open a document in more than one location, I needed to email it to myself.  This isn't the worst approach, but you can't edit it without having to delete the old one and uploading the new one.  You also get two versions of the document in your mailbox if you save all of your sent mail, which can eat away at your quote (which I suppose doesn't matter as much now that quotas are roughly the size of one cazillion times my the hard drive of my family's first computer).  I did solve this my saving files to my drafts instead, but they make it really easy to accidentally delete drafts.  Anyway, saving files to Google Docs allows me to open and edit one file in any location with an internet connection (which is very important at my work, in which computers are not networked, yet I work on about 3 every day).

Aside from selfish reasons, Google Docs is great to be used by collaboratively-working teachers.  In my last school, all curricula, tests, and even many PowerPoints were collaboratively developed.  We held several professional development meetings in which we worked on these documents together.  During the first, we all simply shouted out changes we wanted done to each document as the designee with the mouse and keyboard scrambled to keep up.  After that disaster, we all began to use Google Docs, which allowed us to all work on the same document at the same time.  This sounds like it would be a disaster as well, but since we all worked in a different color (assigned by out Google Overlords) we were able to productive and work off of each other's contributions.

After seeing how effectively teachers could develop documents together, I began reading about suggestions for students to use Google Docs in the classroom.  Google itself has many ideas about how this can be accomplished as well.  For one, students can develop journals that include timestamped entries that can be seen by either the entire class or just the teacher.  Teachers (and perhaps other students) can leave responses in the comments section.  Developing this type of journal format may be easier than requiring students to develop blogs, depending on the specific type of assignment (some parents may find this more comforting too, as it has the "feel" of more security than a blog).  Another suggestion is to have students work on documents together in class.  Many times I have given 2-4 students a computer task but only one computer to get the job done (which means that one person ends up working while the others end up texting).  However, given that there are enough laptops or classroom computers to go around, students can use Google Docs to develop assignments together at the same time.  What I really like about this idea is that I am able to see what each student contributed to the document so I can make sure everyone is putting in their share of the work.

Please share if you have any other valuable uses for Google Docs!

iSchool

Smart phones are becoming quite an issue in the classroom.  But what is the issue?  Is it that students are constantly using their phones in class, or is it that teachers aren't allowing students to constantly use their phones in class?  Having the internet literally at your fingertips is an amazing resource that is underutilized every day in schools.  The problem is that the "power" of the iPhone is too much for students to know how to wield without abusing (this is true for teachers as well, whom I've seen texting the entire length of their hall duty shifts as well as in classes that they're teaching[?] - I'm sure "students" is not the only reason facebook is blocked in many schools, but I digress...).  Usage of phones in the classroom by students has prompted many schools to not allow cell phones in the schools at all, let alone in the classroom.  It used to be that it was easy to catch students using their phones; it was very clear why girls chose to keep their purses on their desks, with one hand inside, with a blue glow on their faces.  Now the problem is so widespread that it is almost impossible to combat; every student in every academic level, it seems, is not immune to falling prey to the poison apple phone.  The games are a problem too, but it's really the texting that's the issue.  Playing games has been easy to do in class since the TI-83 days (for some reason, not even my English teachers didn't stop me from being on my calculator throughout the entire class).  "Texting" (which is ALWAYS from their mom or dad, which I didn't believe any would do in the middle of class until several students proved it to me) is just a phenomenon that cannot be stopped with any of our current technology or scientific knowledge, it's just seems too powerful.

However, getting rid of the phones is not the solution; they need to be utilized!  In my biology classroom, phones are a great as stopwatches during labs and taking photos of experiments.  The internet has unlimited uses, the best of which simply looking things up that fellow students ask during class discussions.  Students can also pull up google images (my best friend in class) of organisms and molecules we discuss - a very common question in biology classrooms is, "What does that look like?" -- and unless it's an amoeba, I'm not going to do the picture justice with dry erase markers.  Phones in the classroom allow students to set up synced calendars for groupwork, or to create digital memos for themselves on a calendar to keep track of homework and test dates.  Still not a fan?  Texting isn't all evil, check out polleverywhere.com; this site allows teachers to set up questions in a poll format that students can text their replies into.  This is great if your classroom does not have access to student personal response devices.


iTechnology is wonderful; we just need to figure out how to stop people (not just students) from abusing it.

Web 2.0: Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a wonderful resource. It's also the death of student learning. I teach my students that it's a wonderful site as a place to begin their research, but to ALWAYS double-check their findings with another site. Wikipedia is definitely a few steps above getting their answers from a forum (I looked up "Does water have calories" and got back "NO! Water's pure and natural!" ... that made me sad). But students still need to be wary over what they read there because in the end, anyone can go edit pages; yes, it's peer-reviewed, but what about before someone "fixes" it? Also, I've read many "scientific" Wikipedia pages that were so technical that only an expert realizes that it's all wrong. Even the person writing it thought that everything they said was fact. So that's an example of one that's difficult to peer-review, but what about a page I found that should have been fixed quickly: "Rolly Polly" was written to be a blood sucking demon which attacks children in their sleep and drags them off to a land without sun (no joke, I printed it out and it's my example for high school students as to why they can't use Wikipedia as their only resource).

Wikipedia is truly a wonderful resource, and I encourage students to utilize its vast wonders... but like I said, they need to always check their findings with a credible source. This is why it should never be listed in their "works cited" on a research paper. Instead, "real" peer-reviewed cites should be listed.  What's a shame is that students do not seem to be taught how to conduct research anymore (at least that's what I observed in my high school biology classroom).  It's baffling because one (at least I) would think that in a world where the internet was literally at our fingertips and in our pockets, students would be researching all day.  You'd better believe that every time I have a question about anything I immediately whip out the smart phone.  Teachers should be encouraging this is class; "I don't know the answer to that.  Extra credit to whoever finds the answer first: pull out your smart phones and GO!"  Of course this means that schools will have to figure out what to do about this cell phone phenomenon instead of throwing their hands in the air and saying, "Uh... no phones in schools! That'll fix that."

Blogs vs. Wikis

So far in my high school life science classrooms I have not used blogs to enhance student course material.  Instead, I have relied upon wikis exclusively.  However, I am seeing now that blogs and wikis are both invaluable tools, but should be used for different purposes.  In the past, I've assigned wikis to groups of students to post information and revise each other's work as part of research projects.  An example of this is my first "wiki experience", a bioremediation project assigned to my 12th grade biotechnology students during my student-teaching (feel free to check it out).

While wikis are great for this type of group research assignment, blogs seem more suited for individual reflection of learning and for students to reflect and comment upon other students' thoughts and ideas.  Honestly, I haven't even thought much about the value of "weblogs" until I read the information presented in the Richardson text, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms.  The first benefit that popped into my mind was that this could be very useful to incorporate literacy into my science classroom.  This is something I focused on during a course I took on expanding students' literacy skills a few semesters ago.

The idea is to have students read non-fiction science novels (age-appropriate, of course, and hopefully not too dry as to not turn them off science) and complete reflections on their reading.  However, it wasn't until I read Richardson that I realized the amazing benefits of having students post their reflections as blogs.  First, now other students can read their reflections and post responses, not just me.  Second, students can see all of their previous blogs (i.e. reflections) before they post their new ideas.  And third, students are able to go back and comment on their own reflections as their ideas change as they move through the text.

Wikis are a great place for students to edit and expand upon each other's ideas and material, but blogs are useful for students to practice some reflection about the concepts they are learning.  Using blogs, students can also post links to articles that relate to the concepts they are learning.  They can also post reflections on how the content they are reading relates to content learned in class or from their own experiences.