Sunday, November 15, 2009

Power Point Add-On for "Switch Happy" Students

Image of an animated power point story book title screen with the 4Pete's Sake padlock utility in front.

Barrie over at One Switch has shared this great add-on to make Power Point slide shows a bit more usable for our students.  The add on is called 4Pete's Sake in reference to the wonderful sensory stories at Pete's Stuff.  
 
(I am considering having my December Theme Unit be either "Oz-mas" and using Pete's Wizard of Oz and some of Alicia's activities or "Dickens Holiday" and using Pete's "A Christmas Carol). 

4Pete's Sake has two modes.  The first mode, called Padlock, locks the slide so that the student cannot turn the page until a second switch (or button on the keyboard) is pressed.  The second allows the students to move forward and backward withing a slideshow using one switch and a scanning box with arrows on screen. 

Padlock seems like a great way to allow students to turn the pages of a story or another kind of slide show for themselves or a group without worries of that "12 switch hits in 6 seconds and the book is over" situation.  Back and Forth mode could be a great way to teach beginning scanners.  You could even have yes/no on two slides to answers questions.  Or a student could have two slides with Red Light/Green Light and run a fun game for friends.  The possibilities are endless.

2 comments:

  1. I just got done with a mini-unit using Pete's Wizard of Oz. My K-3 Special Education students really enjoyed it. The theme for us was "There's no place like home" which brought us right into the Thanksgiving theme. I sent a worksheet home for families to fill in with a list of activites that they like to participate in together and asked to include a picture. These were then hung up on our "Oz" bulletin board.

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  2. Try clickMitigator to do something similar at:
    http://sites.google.com/site/jamjolu/clickmitigator/

    To intercept extra unwanted mouse clicks:

    Make the first click target the slide or the button that advances the slide. The second click target can be the "maximize" button in the clickMitigator window. Set the mask time to something reasonable. The delay time doesn't matter as much.

    ReplyDelete

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