Techn-Ucation Using Technology to Enhance Education A Site for Parents and Teachers
					Last update:  Oct 16, 2006
	The mission of this site is to display some of the technology available  to enhance the learning of students with special needs.  It has been produced as part of a presentation to teachers in Special Education.  With time it will become a little more sophisticated.  The aim is to reduce time needed by teachers and parents of students with special needs to find  hardware and software that can make learning easier.
		Overview of major software This section provides and overview of resources readily available on the market.  Links to the company site are provided so you can investigate in depth.  To come back to this site, you will need to use the back button on your  tool bar.  Most websites have free trial downloads and activity sheets or tips.  Teachers be aware that educaitonal prices are available.  Buying  from a Canadian vendor is cheaper than buying from an American one.  Yes this site caters to Ontario. Alphasmart and Dana This is an oversized palm pilot or a midgit laptop depending on your viewpoint.  It does everything a palm pilot does and yet it has a laptop like keyboard to make typing easy.  Students can type in class and download onto their own computer for printing, or send it directly to print.  A must use for student with fine motor control difficulties.  http://www.alphasmart.com/ Canadian vendor http://www.microscience.on.ca/ This is your first stop.  It is a store in Mississauga and they have workshops explaining software.  You can call to visit and they will explain and show assistive devices such as mice, keyboards, screens and calculators, intellikeys.  They can also demonstrate a lot of software: Kurzweil, WordQ, WriteOutLoud, Co-Writer, Dragon Naturally Speaking… They will also give you catalogues that will provide a vast array of software.  This is the place to get Canadian educational prices. Kurzweil This program reads text at a pace controlled by the reader.  You can scan in text, download e-texts, read the internet, etc.  You can choose among many voices.   You can use a dictionary as you read.  There is also a function for writing on texts, or highlighting and extracting the highlights as notes. Teachers can scan in tests, and students can answer on the test.  No longer do you have to read the text to the student.  Students have a lot of independence and control with this software.  It is the cadillac of readers and worth the price.  www.kurzweiledu.com HelpRead A free program, used to convert text to speech.   This is a cheap version of the Kurzweil.  You can use this program  with the Internet and also with a word processing program, like Microsoft Word using cut-and-paste to have the document read aloud to you. Free download at: http://www.helpread.com.  This version only reads 16000 words  (about 50 pages) at a time.  There is an upgrade for 50$ that reads unlimited text. Inspiration  & Kidspiration. This software is a mind mapping tool and concept mapping tool that helps organization in pre-paragraph writing.  There are many templates to get students started.  With a click of a button, students can go from a graphic concept map to a traditinal outline form. www.strategictransitions.com    An excellent “Mind mapping” tool, for organizing your ideas and creating visual layouts of essays, plans or tasks. A free trial version is available from their site.  Ontario schools have a deep discount.  BoardMaker This software is for people who have dicciculty speaking, including autistic children.  There is a picture vocabulary that is generated so you can make books with expressed needs.   http://www.mayer-johnson.com/main/index.html Tutorial and shared materials is also available on the site.  This site also has a lot of technical information about the products carried by Microscience Dragon Naturally Preferred: http://www.scansoft.com/naturallyspeaking/  dictating and reading.  Needs quiet place.  This requires a high end computer, and an extremely quiet place.  CoWriter Speaks back and has word prediction.  It also will accept phonetic spelling.  Grammar checker as sentence is written..  Topic specific dictionaries. http://www.synapseadaptive.com/donjohnston/cowrterd.htm  This page gives access to downloads and tutorials WordQ Similar to CoWriter but less complete.   The French version would  help students with the word prediction http://www.wordq.com SET-BC list of vendors (Spec. Ed. Technology British Colombia)  They have a fantastic list of resources. http://www.setbc.org/resources/vendors.html Collection of demos at: http://www.kurzweiledu.com Resources online: http://setbc.sd59.bc.ca/SETBC/R8Links.html#Learning%20Disabilities%20Links links to resources for LD. Website for parents of LD children. It also caters to students and teachers. http://www.ldonline.org Neufeld has a lot of educational software.  The best Math one I found for my high school students is Understanding Math which spans grade 4-12 www.neufeldmath.com