Assistive Technology

My daughter is a Special Educator at Gorman School in Dayton, Ohio. Her students all have multiple disabilities/handicaps. She is very familiar with the ways technology can help special needs students adapt and learn. Here are some sites she recommends for those helping patrons/students with special needs.

Ohio Coalition for the Education of Children with Disabilities
Rehabtool
Teacher Tap
Assistive Technology list

Inspired

I have been talking with my daughter Cassi about this whole Learning 2.0 experience and creating my blog. She in turn bookmarked my blog and checked it regularly to see what was new. Now, inspired by me, she has created her own blog. You can see it here.

Doing It My Way

Well, I find it hard to believe that we are finally done. I am not ready for this experiment to be over. There are so many more things to learn. It has taught me to be more aware of all the hundreds of thousands of "things" that are out there waiting to be discovered. I hope to continue to find new things to explore and continue to add to my blog. Many of those things can and will help OU users to accomplish needed tasks, either personally or academically. I hope I can be here to help them.

Social Networking and me

I signed up for both FaceBook and MySpace and added a few details about myself. On Facebook I added some new friends and became friends with some coworkers. I discovered FaceBook sites for some people I would never have expected to find. One, an OU administrator and head of a major OU student program. Imagine that!

Too Old for Facebook?
There are several articles in this week's Business Week about social networking. Seems lots of folks are analyzing what is happening.

Facebook Grows Up
Newsweek also has an article about Facebook and it's young creator See that article here.

Special Needs Students and IT

After much searching, I found several podcasts that I thought both interesting and relevant. My daughter teaches in a school exclusively for students with special needs. Most if not all of these students will never live independently, read, write or talk. This does not mean that they can never learn anything or experience the real world. IT can help these special students achieve all they can. The titles are: Overview of Learning Disabilities, Learning Disabilities: From Theory to Application and Learning Disabilities and the Power of Assistive Technology.

YouTube video

I, like several others, had difficulty finding videos I thought interesting on YouTube. Perhaps it was the sheer multitude of choices in so many categories, but I finally found one I thought interesting for me and my chocolate making hobby. I liked seeing good chocolate being tempered and molded, and I liked the fact that the star of this video did not hesitate to throw the molded chocolate back if there was a quality control issue. The video is called Chocolate: A Minister's Daughter.

La Vie en Rose

I have been thinking of going to the Athena to see "La Vie en Rose" about the life of the legendary singer from France, Edith Piaf. I have heard that the actress who plays the lead is deserving an award nomination. Thinking of the movie reminded me of a photograph of a rose taken by my husband Thom Luce and I wondered how it would look as a movie poster using an application supplied by BigHugeLabs.com. So, here it is.

And the winner is...

I chose Squidoo, which is a site for people to create web pages about a subject they feel passionate about. By pulling a lot of information together, they create a "Lens" for their particular subject. I chose Squidoo category Food & Cooking - Chocolate: The Gourmet Guide. It has a lot of links I have never seen before and will be a site I will want to visit often.

Web Based Apps

Nancy Story and I will be working on a major project to manage Southeast Asia serials more efficiently. We will be going through the collection, from A-Z determining the status, making decisions on binding, or canceling. To most efficiently accomplish this task, we will be using a shared Google spreadsheet.

I also experimented with Zoho Creator, which is a database application. I will be using a template for keeping track of DVDs owned by us. Since we often loan DVDs to our daughter and she often loans some to us, we will share the database to try to keep track of who owns what and where it is.