Website of the Day - Endless Potential Downloads

Endless Potential is a consulting company providing ABA services and commercial software for designing autism interventions, but buried deep in their site is a goldmine!

The Endless Potential Downloads Page has three sections: coloring, flashcards and worksheets. The coloring sheets are nothing to write home about and the worksheets are nice, basic level, full color activities with a sound educational basis. It is the flashcards that are something to see.

Listed under the sub-category of ABA teaching materials are forty-four folders of mostly high contrast color photographs of nouns, verbs and adjectives. These are perfect for exporting into Boardmaker, cutting and pasting into Word Documents of Power Point activities or just printing on cardstock to use as flashcards. Some of the folders have more images than others and you can pretty much skip the ones with the words, but overall I would recommend checking out this resource, especially if you have student who respond better to photos instead of pictures or who are transitioning from photos to pictures.

Free Assessment of Phonological Awareness and Reading

Available entirely for free online is the Assessment of Phonological Awareness and Reading or APAR. This in and of itself is a wonderful public service, but to make the test more accessible it can be downloaded in print or as a scanning program for use with a single switch. Whether presented on the computer or in person it is designed to be a non-verbal test. It is a criterion referenced test with no norming or validity data on the website, however basic knowledge of reading assessment should making the scoring relatively clear.

The test is hosted by the ELR Software site in Australia, which produces speech and language therapy materials (including the absolutely disgusting Rude Readers series - these will get any reluctant 13 year old boy to read).

Lots of Little Things

I have lots of little announcements today.

1. Thank you to all of you that have this site bookmarked or view the site using Google Reader. Very cool, especially those of your from companied making products for learners with multiple needs (Dynavox - you rock!) and those of you from overseas (who ever you are from Iceland, thanks for your loyalty!)
2. If you are a member of Reading A-Z you should refer five friends to check out the site, because then you get three free months of Writing A-Z!
3. For those of you e-mailing asking me to review a product, sure, no problem. Just contact me (use the comment section or go to my profile and e-mail me), send the product to me, I will bring it to my class and we will test it out!
4. Crayola is giving away free samples to educators!
5. The website of the day is Free Teacher Tools.
   

Yahoo Widgets for the Special Needs Classroom

If you are not a Yahoo Widgets fan or user it might be time to consider the many uses of various Yahoo Widgets in the classroom.

For starters there are useful widgets including:

• counters which can be used to tally behaviors or correct answers of your students
  
• various kinds of timers
  
• a few text-to-speech widgets
• Flashcards including pre-made Dolch sight words and math facts as well as "make-your-own"
• beat per minute counters (60 bpm can have a calming effect on students)
• virtual dice, coin flippers and rock/paper/scissors

And that's just the obviously useful stuff, not counting the mooing cows, quaking ducks, virtual Stephen Hawking speaking in his AAC voice, virtual whoopie cushion, various quote generators, comix fetchers, weather widgets and more.

Tube Feedings at School

Many of our students in the intensive special needs classroom are feed by a g- or j-tube, either alone or in addition to oral feeding. In my first job (what feels like a thousand years ago) teachers and para-educators gave students g-tube feedings, the two schools I have worked at since then both have a nurse give the tube feedings. I have had students "graduate" from g-tubes while in my class (an exciting and scary time for families) and students start using a g-tube while in my class (also a scary time for families). Below I have created a list of links about g- and j-tubes.
Tube Feeding Information

• Tube Feeding Overview with Diagrams
• Mealtime Notions
• Tube Feeding Tips
• G-Tube Facts
  

Tube Feeding Organizations

• Kids with Tubes
• The Oley Foundation
• A.S.P.E.N.
  

Tube Feeding Products/Accessories

• Tummy Tunnel Iron On Patches (for access through clothing)
• Tube Connection Clamp
• Mobility Ball Feeding Pump Carrier
• Jackson Peg Tube Stand
• G-Tube Holder
  

G-Tube Accessible Clothing Companies

• Professional Fit Adaptive Clothing
  
• Easy Access Clothing
  
• Special Clothes
  

Discount Educational Software and AT

It is almost budget and ordering time in schools. For those of us with any sort of budget to spend on technology we might be looking for ways to stretch our resources.

Campus Tech might be just what you are looking for. This online retailer stocks mostly general education and college items, however, it does have a fair number of special education software titles.

Campus Tech carries the full range of Riverdeep (who now make all Edmark titles) Software. Included in the Riverdeep Assortment are the Millie, Bailie and Trudy Programs, all of which are switch accessible, as well as the Edmark Reading Program and Words Around Me. The Edmark Reading Program and Words Around Me are two highly regarded special needs titles.

Campus Tech also has software from DK Multimedia, Kid Pix, Inspiration and Crick Software, including Clicker.


Finally, Campus Tech carries the full range of Attainment software and several of their mid level technology, such as the one talker and the GoTalk Button. Campus Tech's prices are lower than buying directly from Attainment, i.e. the GoTalk Button is $8.85 vs. $12.00.

Website of the Day: Behavior Doctor

During the APBS Conference I went to two workshops presented by Dr. Laura Riffel from the The Behavior Doctor website. The first was the Marriage of Love and Logic and Positive Behavior Supports and you can download the powerpoint and the book from that workshop.

The second was a full day training on Writing Positive Behavior Support Plans from Functional Behavior Assessments. Both were excellent. (Let it be known that I can't even go to the movies with out bringing knitting or some kind of distraction because my attention span is so short and I made it through the entire seven hour workshop without my mind wandering or pulling out my knitting bag.)

All the the handouts from all of the sessions Dr. Riffel presented are available on her website, which is well worth exploring.

Much of the full day training on Saturday prepared us to conduct FBAs including using her free FBA tool. I am already using it to collect some baseline data in my classroom. If you decide to check it out please download the instructions first. It is easy to use and my instructional assistant got really into setting it up and entering data (making my life much easier).