DOGO News at Morning Meeting

Our class has been trying a new morning meeting format since July.  It is a format I have used before, but in a different setting. We are having a morning "news show".  The students rotate in pairs through a different role each week - Top Story, Sports, Entertainment and Weather.  Students help pick the story of the day for their role which is recorded on a sequential switch and also use some means of generative language (speech, AAC) to tell the day, month, year, weather and temperature (as it applies to their role).

This means that every morning we start the day at computers or the iPad searching for the story of the day.  For a while we used CNN Student News but it was a too complicated and often too depressing for our needs.  Sometimes we would use the World News Updates on News-2-You but they aren't updated very often.  WE have similar problem with ELIVE at SymbolWorld.

For now we have settled on Dogo News.  Dogo News, which has won an ALA Award for Best Web Site for Children, focuses "Fodder for Young Minds".  Although sometimes a bit inaccessible for our students as far as complexity and vocabulary it is certainly more accessible than sites like CNN Students News.  If used with a free screen reader such as  Read Please, Browse Aloud or My Study Bar students can hear the news story read to them.  Dogo News features stories from Current Events, Science, Sports and more.  Many stories link to video clips or other websites.  

In addition to Dogo News there is Dogo Sites which highlights different sites for kids daily and Dogo Earth which is a fun spinning globe that pops up with stories from all over the world.  Dogo Teachers allows teachers to create a free account and customize the website for their students.  I am hopeful that if many special educators and their students find Dogo News useful and frequent it they will add universal design and accessibility features (i.e. text to speech, literacy support symbols, vocabulary  and switch accessibility) like some other sites, such as Silly Books, have added just for us.

Many of the stories we start out learning about from Dogo News (or our weekly News-2-You, Unique or another source) we follow up with at Amazing Stories, which is a great site from primary sources.

Switch Accessible News Reader

My Blogger pal Barrie over at One Switch brought my attention to the new BBC switch accessible news reader for kids. The website is a well designed interface for children, 'tweens and even teens and adults with cognitive challenges/learning disabilities to read or have read to them via text to speech the news.

Seeing as it is from the BBC the site focuses mainly on UK news, which is why I would love to see PBS, NPR or PRI pair up with BBC and re-create this site with American news (and other countries do the same thing). If that can't happen perhaps News-2-You, who largely ignore access issues, could create something or Ablenet or Mayer-Johnson could leap at the opportunity (which would mean it would not be free, of course).

A great thing about the BBC Accessible News Reader is the level of customization. You can change how many categories of news from 1 to 6, you can use the scan feature or not and adjust it to 3, 5, 10 or 15 seconds for a scan rate. It does not currently two switch scan (except if you turn the scan off and use tab/enter - which means increasing cognitive load as it then scans everything and has no auditory scan). With the scan off you can also use what ever access equipment you have including touch screens, eye or head tracking, alternative keyboard with a custom overlay or a joystick. You can use the text to speech or not and choose from a high quality male or female voice (British accents, of course). You can change the color scheme of the text to high or low contrast or a color overlay for dyslexia (but they do not have a dyslexia friendly font choice in there font choice list). Overall this is an amazing, free resource