Notes from a conversation with Karen. Always great fun.
Dec 10-13 Karen at a camp with a dozen or so AAC users in Umatilla, Fl. Kids work about 5 hours per day, rest of the time they need interesting activities. Teenagers. Similar interests to my class. What could my FYS seminar students do to help?
Ideas: Content for Route 66, maybe Nascar?
Games that are switch accessible, maybe racing?
Maybe some FYS students could go? How does that work?
Coordinate with Software Engineering and maybe a parallel ET class for CS students.
Scratch for interactive content generation?
Karen has a group at Forest View elementary, kids are using computers to make content of various kinds. For example recording themselves reading books for 1st graders. They could be a good group to get interested in content for device users. Visuals + Audio and simple text could be exciting to author and use.
Look at A to Z phonics website, content isn’t that good but reading level is appropriate, see what books should look like.
Check out Dirty Bertie
Take pictures from good book, get object name and descriptors from teacher and generate really simple sentences like “Butterflies can ______” or “Pirates are ______” to make lots of content quickly. Share on a web site. Make it easy to produce and share content. Patterns like “The noun is verbing” and “The adjective noun is verbing”. Generate text for beginning level reader.
Choose a topic, add descriptors, and generate sentences. Makes a “PowerPoint” or whatever for the teacher to use. Pictures from Flickr or somewhere. Teacher provides topic, gets a bunch of pictures, provides descriptors, system fills words into sentence frames. Make adding pictures easy. Site provides text to speech converted to mp3 and embedded. How about sounds for blind kids?
Something like SamiSays for recording “homework” answers from AAC devices that don’t interface to computers. Teacher/parent plugs device into line-in and computer records audio to send to teacher. Kid listens to questions and answers using their device, app sends mp3 to teacher with the results. Enables kid to do homework independently. Email access too. Use a VERY small number of words as controls for the computer by recognizing them in certain contexts. Provide independent computer access. email via mp3.
4 comments
I was thinking more about the book idea we talked about the other day and realized that since this is an e-book we are not limited to still pictures. There is an API for youtube. So one of the pictures on a page in the book could be a video. I’m thinking of a book on a NASCAR driver like Jeff Gordon. Maybe some still pictures and a video at the end. Something like:
Jeff Gordon is talking.
Jeff Gordon is walking.
Jeff Gordon is starting.
Jeff Gordon is passing.
Jeff Gordon is crashing.
Maybe the crashing page has a video of some crash.
it is great. to make it even easier to read we would probably write.
Jeff Gordon can walk.
Jeff Gordon can start.
Jeff Gordon can pass.
Jeff Gordon can crash.
Jeff Gordon can win!
[...] and blog but I hadn’t thought until recently about using it as an application framework. Karen and I talked about a site to enable teachers to quickly build topical beginning readers for people with varied [...]
Karen demo’d Tar Heel Reader for Toronto class of practitioners who work with kids with multiple disabilities. There was a collective hush and then applause for you. (Not to mention a query as to whether or not you are married.) The program is so user-friendly and so needed. Once our field appreciated the importance of literacy for folks with severe communication disorders (roughly 20 years ago), it struggled with how to provide sufficient reading materials of interest to “beginning beginners.” Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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