TechSmith's New Video App: More than Meets the Eye

Cough, cough. Excuse me... I was just blowing the dust off this blog. It's been almost 6 months since the last post, and I'm sorry for leaving you high and dry for so long. I'm going to try to post at least twice a month if I can from now on. I've been procrastinating getting back on the wagon but couldn't resist any longer after finding this cool new app.
Like other users of Jing, I got an email promoting TechSmith's new iOS app, Coach's Eye. Touted as "The Ultimate Coaching App," Coach's Eye allows you to record or import video on your iOS device and do "John Madden style review" of the footage, including slow-mo, jog wheel, and markup.
If you visit the website for Coach's Eye, it's clear they're marketing the app towards athletes and coaches, but there's so much you can do in Special Education with this app. Video modelling is a great way to teach any kind of skill, especially to students with certain special needs. I can envision using this app to teach behaviour, communication, and social skills to students with Autism Spectrum Disorders, or even pragmatic tasks like tying shoes.
Coach's Eye is currently $0.99 in the iTunes store... That's a limited-time introductory price.
This is TechSmith's second home run for iOS. Their whiteboard + screen recorder app for iPad, ScreenChomp, is another excellent addition to any app collection, and the best thing about this one is that it's free.

TAP-it: Accessible Dream Machine?

Although it was unveiled over a year ago, I've just discovered it now: the TAP-it. It's an amazing touch-screen interface for PC or Mac with everything I could ever dream of in terms of features: nice big size (but not too big), runs off a regular laptop or desktop, height and slant adjustable, stable and durable, and most interestingly: it claims to be able to discriminate between intended and unintended touch. I'd love to see one in person and try it out, but it may be months before I get a chance. If you've tried one, I'd love to get some unbiased opinions before I convince my superintendent we should drop $10,000 for one of these. Leave your comments below.

Math Assistive Technology for All Students

Recently I presented at the Association for Special Education Technology - Ontario Spring 2011 Conference about Assistive Technology for Math, with a focus on tools that are available for free to Ontario educators. I often get asked about what AT tools we can provide for our students who struggle with Mathematics. Unfortunately, there's no ONE tool that can do everything, so I've put together a collection of various tools and have indicated what strengths and needs match each tool. You can download my presentation slideshow and a handy reference chart that lists the tools by area of need. More related resources coming soon, so stay tuned. If you have your own favourite AT tools for Math, please share them in the comments.

UPDATE: A colleague just shared this site with me to add to the collection of virtual manipulatives sites. It's also free, and it's quite different from the others. It's one of the features in MathPlayground.com, called Thinking Blocks.

Apps For Children With Special Needs

Dear reader, please don't take it the wrong way. When I introduce you to other blogs on Special Ed technology, it's not that I'm trying to get rid of you. I really appreciate you stopping by here. I simply want to help. Here's a great blog called Apps For Children With Special Needs (http://a4cwsn.com/). Not only do they write about iOS apps, they create video reviews, where you can see the app in action. In their own words:

Our videos are produced from the user’s point of view so perspective users and purchasers can see and understand how each particular APP could help them.

You can really get a good idea of whether or not you want to buy an app by seeing it demonstrated on video: a tremendous service to the special education community. So go check it out.

But remember to come back here, OK?

CyberSERT Live @ ASET-Ontario 2011 Spring Conference

I'm looking forward to presenting at the Association for Special Education Technology (ASET) - Ontario 2011 Spring Conference in Niaraga Falls, Ontario on May 13, 2011. I'll be sharing a bunch of (mostly free) AT resources for mathematics, including several I haven't shared on this site yet. If you're in the area, be sure to attend, because there's lots of great stuff going on besides my little talk, including keynote speaker Alec Couros. If you want the math resources but can't make it to my workshop, don't worry; I'll be sure to post a summary on the Blog at some point afterward.

What are your favourite AT strategies for mathematics? Feel free to share them in the comments.

The Future of AT: Brain-Controlled Devices

A while back, I heard about the Emotiv EPOC, a $300 device that promised to allow the user to use thoughts and emotions to control a video game. At the time, it had not been released yet. I saw a reference to it in another blog today, and so now that it's been out for a few months, I thought I'd check in on this amazing invention, and particularly see whether this technology could be used for more than just gaming; it certainly has the potential for opening up new possibilites for persons with disabilities.

The product's "Community" page has a couple of discussion forum entries that address the use of the EPOC for persons with disabilites. On the topic of whether it can be used to control a wheelchair, Emotiv's Research Manager had this to say:

All mental detection systems suffer from a finite rate of false positive and false negative detections. In other words, sometimes a detection can occur without the user's deliberate intention, and sometimes a deliberate attempt to make an action occur may fail or select a different output. This is as much to do with the user's level of training and state of mind as it is to do with the detection systems - it is unavoidable in any BCI system. Any critical function controlled by the EPOC must have an independent kill operation which the user can reliably invoke, and must put the system in a safe state.

Regarding using the device for typing, he said, "Mental typing is definitely achievable."

But what I found very interesting was at the end of his post. I was really only looking for very practical applications of the technology, like communication, mobility, or environmental control, but his comment made me rethink the importance of this technology in the realm of its intended use -- gaming -- for disabled persons.
He writes:

I have seen some very heartening things already. People who have been severely injured and have basically lost interest in life, upon using the EPOC for simple mental gameplay, rapidly develop a passionate interest in playing with the EPOC and achieve radical improvements in their mental state and also in some cases their physical state. Users may inherently exercise neck muscles to control the gyro or to watch the game better, or they can gradually restore some control to facial expressions through repeated use as in-game commands. 
The EPOC can also put paralysed users on an equal footing with able-bodied gamers in some settings, such as games based on mental duels and so on. 
Most of all, EPOC is fun to use and very engaging to learn, and everyone should have some fun in their lives. As time rolls by there will be more and more applications such as neurofeedback and meditation training, where users can learn new skills.

If you're interested in digging deeper into the discussion, I would recommend you first read about the different Emotiv modules used in the software, Expressiv, Affectiv, and Cognitiv, by clicking here; then you can better follow the full discussion in the disabilities thread and read about a customer's experience using the EPOC with his cousin who suffers from CP. How do you envision this technology being used for persons with physical or communication disabilities? Leave your thoughts in the Comments.

Text to Speech in MS Word for Mac OS X

Text-to-speech, as you surely know, is an excellent way to help writers proof read their work, and to help struggling readers read a portion of text. Mac computers these days come standard with a high-quality TTS voice named Alex. It's really easy to enable TTS playback in Apple-based products like Preview (for reading PDFs aloud), Safari (for reading Web content aloud), or TextEdit and Pages (for proof reading your writing). However, if you prefer other software products, like Microsoft Word for Mac, for instance, you can still get TTS by enabling a keyboard shortcut. I demonstrate both methods of using TTS with a Mac in the video below.

A Blog That is Music to My Ears

It's great how blogging has made it easy to publish and find resources on specialty topics like Assistive Technology ... and all for free! One blog that I subscribe to is Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs by  educator Kate Ahern. Kate's blog touches on the subject from a number of angles, and a recent post on AT & AAC for Music is superb. It's a slideshow for a presentation Kate gave to aspiring music therapists, and besides having numerous tips on integrating low- and high-tech AT in music education, it has a lot of general AT & AAC information, from very basic introductions to basic concepts to remarkably clever adaptations of objects and materials to promote accessibility. While you're there, check out Kate's recent posts where she's compiled and curated links for sources of Boardmaker resources, free online switch-accessible activities, and visual recipes.

My Frankenkurzweil 3000

I love Kurzweil 3000.
Except when I hate it. Which is far too often.

It's software that can do so much, but it costs an arm and a leg, and although it has feature upon feature for helping students with all kinds of needs, it's also got more than its fair share of shortcomings and quirks.

If you've read any of my blog entries before, you know my favourite type of software: free. And although Kurzweil 3000 has plenty of competitors out there which cost less than it, they all cost more than free. So it's been a kind of holy grail for me to find software that can do what Kurzweil does, and do it gratis.

Recently, I've managed to piece together some software that comes close. Well, close enough, considering the $0 price tag.

Adobe Reader fits my non-existent budget and will allow you to view digital texts, like Kurzweil. It will even read out loud (under the View menu... yes, I said View... click Read Out Loud), although it doesn't do a great job, I will admit. But if you want to be able to fill out a worksheet or test and highlight key information, you need Adobe Acrobat, which puts us in the >$0.01 category. Unacceptable. So where do we turn?

CutePDF Writer will do a virtual print of just about any document into PDF (but beware when installing: you probably don't want the ask.com toolbar that tries to tag along; just uncheck the box for that during installation). Then PDF-XChange Viewer  lets you do the typewriter text boxes like Adobe Acrobat (text boxes for annotating text and filling in blanks). It also has sticky notes and can highlight text. Unfortunately, it won't extract the highlights for you like Kurzweil. Too bad, that's a killer feature.

The final piece is WordQ. Now, WordQ isn't free for most of you, but it is for me and thousands of teachers and hundreds of thousands of students in Ontario, Canada, where the Ministry of Education has licensed this software for use by its educational community. WordQ version 3 will  perform Text-to-Speech and word prediction within PDF-Xchange Viewer.

Put them all together and you've got a sort of Frankenkurzweil. Sure, it would be nice having all the functions in one package, but did I mention it didn't cost anything?

If you know of a tool that can extract highlighted text from a PDF, a free screen reader that will also work within PDF-Xchange Viewer... or any other solution for getting Kurzweil 3000 functionality without the sticker shock, let me know in the comments.

Meanwhile, come, Igor, back to the laboratory!

P.S.
Almost forgot: Mac users have it a bit easier. OS X's built-in Preview software opens PDFs, provides text-to-speech (under the Edit menu... yes, I said Edit ...choose Speech), and allows you to highlight and annotate text (under Tools).

Microsoft Mathematics 4.0 = Free

Microsoft Mathematics came out a few years ago as a homework helping tool. Originally it had to purchased, but now version 4.0 is available for free. It features a graphing calculator, equation solver, and many other tools.

Windows Media Player Overlay for Intellikeys

I got a request a little while ago to create an Intellikeys overlay for Windows Media Player. Nothing fancy: it can play/pause, stop, go to previous, go to next. If you'd like a copy, feel free to download it.