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.

My Rollyo

I put together some of my favorite bread baking sites so that I could easily trouble shoot any recipes I am trying to perfect. Some of the sites I search often have suggestions for ways to improve on a recipe, or help me figure out why my ciabatta does not have the "holey" texture I keep striving for.

Web 2.0 Learning 2.0

I read the 5 articles posted by OCLC and had to agree about the different attitude that is prevalent now about providing patrons with the information they need. Not that many years ago, the attitude was "What's the matter with that guy? Is he too lazy to copy his own article. The library is not that far a walk." Now we strive to make it as easy as possible for the patron to get what he needs in the most convenient way. Our job is not to create obstacles to information retrieval. I read an article about "library policies" which said to examine carefully every time you tell a patron "No". Is there a good reason?