Geeks making the world a bit better.

Entries from April 2008

Gretchen ideas on reading aids

Take pictures of the book during group reading (teacher is displaying it to the rest of the class using a projector say). Make it available for self selected reading later. Perhaps create PowerPoint presentation with the pictures and easily recorded audio of someone reading the text for each page. Enable typing in the text so it can be read using TTS either continuously or one word at a time. Make it easy to share these on some closed site. What about the copyright provisions related to people with disabilities? Public Law 104-197 would allow us to do this in a “specialized format”. That says to me it couldn’t be PowerPoint but that is not problem, we’d just have a specialized player. Very simple to show pictures and play speech. Might even be browser based. Could the whole thing be easily made browser based? Should it be?

Releasing the music in your head

Thanks to Martha for pointing out this video: TED | Talks | Tod Machover, Dan Ellsey: Releasing the music in your head (video). Very interesting. I’d love to do something like this for kids. Machover talks about Hyperscore.

Tools for classification

Links I found related to classification.

Web site updates

I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 and switched to a new theme based on the copyblogger theme. Please point out any bugs you see.

Marking Up a Tag Cloud

24 ways: Marking Up a Tag Cloud is an excellent discussion of how to implement a cloud using CSS. I hadn’t realized that most ways of doing it are inaccessible. I used his approach to construct my query cloud page.