Website offers text to speech services!

I love new applications of technology...especially when they are free. In my surfing over lunch, I discovered a new web service that enables users to access text to speech support for a variety of documents. The web service is readthewords.com.

Basically, the web service allows a person to take written text, a word document, a pdf document, a web page or an RSS feed and have it converted, using a text to speech engine, into an audio format. There are 14 different voices from which to choose including those that support English, Spanish and French. A person can control the rate and pitch of the voice being used. The voices available are of good quality which is unusual for a free product. Once the audio format is generated (which is relatively quick), a person can add it to his or her mp3 player, put it into Itunes, listen to it on the computer or even post the file to a web page or blog.

What a fabulous resource!

Pocket-able Math Supports

I love aimless surfing! It always seems to result in finding something that I never expected to come across...

In this episode of aimless surfing, I came across the website "Fantastic Flexible Foldables" by Carol DeFreese. This site contains seven different foldable activities for math. The one that I had a chance to explore in depth was the Fraction Mini Book which provides a number of hints and rules for working with fractions and mixed numbers. The ingenious part of this is that it literally allows a students to have all of these rules at their fingertips. Just print out the PDF or Word file, follow the directions cutting and folding it and then VOILA!, an instant resource on fractions.

The site also contains Factors and Multiples Mini Book, Fortune Teller Game, Geometry Tetfraflexagon, Integer Infinity Square, Fraction Flipper/Decimal Flipper/Music Flipper, and Lines Trihexaflexagon. While some of these are resources like the Fractions Mini Book, others are designed to be used to help teach various mathematical concepts.

The Fraction Mini Book reminds me of a concept I heard a long time ago as I was listening to a presentation from Dave Edyburn called Cognitive Credit Cards. A Cognitive Credit Card is an intervention that involved having a credit card sized laminated card that contains different cues for a specific topic. The intervention was received by students, teachers, and parents.

I bet one can do something similiar using PocketMod as well.

21st Century Tools

Find more videos like this on Illinois Technology Conference For Educators


I just came across this video and thought I'd share...

I have to say the video makes an important point. There has been much discussion on issues of differentiated instruction, 21st Century Skills, and Response to Intervention...all of which are important. However, each of these requires our schools to have the necessary infrastructure to realize these initiatives...

Bookshare.org goes free of charge!

According to their website, Bookshare.org, which is a repository and supplier of digital texts for individuals with print disabilities will no longer be charging schools for access to its repository. A Department of Education grant in the ballpark of 32 million dollars over a 5 year period allows for this to occur. This funding will support all students in K-12 schools that qualify as having a print disability.

This has tremendous implications for students in K-12. Bookshare.org has traditionally taken a liberal stance on print disability eligibility. Some other alternate text organizations have viewed the requirement for a 'qualified individual' that can determine whether or not a person has a print disability as being a member of the medical profession. As stated on their website, Bookshare.org accepts different proof of a print disability from different professionals, based on the nature of the disability.

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