Quest for Learning

The Northern Ireland Curriculum offers a number of materials for teaching and assessing learners with profound or multiple disabilities. Among these are the Quest for Learning assessment materials and inclusive literacy materials. Check them out.

Donors Choose has Issued a Challenge

If teachers enrolled in Donors Choose can inspire 5,000 people to donate (as little as $5) they will release $100,000 in additional funding!

So, would you consider donating $5 or more to one of my projects?

• Avoid the Void - to provide sensory items for students to use when positioned out of their wheelchairs
• Switch - to give us a broader selection of switches to use in our classroom
• What We Really Need is Storage - to give us a rolling storage rack that will provide counter space and 16 cubbies for storing all our belonings

Thanks so much!

Free Online Activities for Intensive/Multiple Special Needs

• Arcess Dice - switch or touch screen dice
  
• Arcess Number Spinner allows picking a random number 1-6
• Bullseye - switch darts
  
• CBBC - switch games requiring accuracy
  
• CBeebies - switch games based on children's tv in the UK
  
• Crick Web - has about 170 activities to teach skill to learners for the makers of Clicker 5
  
• Help Kidz Learn - is created by the makers of Inclusive TLC and Priory Woods, includes switch and touchscreen programs, new activities are added every few months
• HiYah - created by a mom these Power Point based programs address many topics in a cause and effect format that can be accessed with a switch if needed
• Horse Harmony - singing horses works with touch screen or tab/enter switches
• Jackson Pollock Painting - is fun touch screen or mouse emulator painting
  
• Kneebouncers - a simple cause and effect keyboard banger
• Mega Sparkles - touchscreen fireworks
  
• Moorcroft School - has games and sensory stories
• Moving Targets - is a suite of five programs for teaching targeting
• News-2-You the kids site is available without subscription
  
• NGfL Switch Coloring - offers a basic coloring book for switch users
• Online Jukebox - put switch over next song
  
• Papunet - offers a variety of games from early learning, cause and effect to games of skill for switch users
  
• Pete's Stuff Adapted Stories are well known stories adapted for our learners in a Power Point format which allows switch page turning
• Plasma Screen and White Board Room for Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities includes a variety of resources including cause and effect, sensory stories, targeting and choosing and visual stimulation
• Priory Woods Kids Only and Priory Woods Cause and Effect and Switch Activities
• Sarah Greenland has four games some for touchscreen and some for mouse to download
  
• SEN/Switcher - offers leveled switch programs for emerging to advancing switch users
• Tripico - offers a variety of resources and online adaptable spinners, tab/enter works for nearly all reasources, inclucing their calculator
  
• Woodlands Junior School - has a variety of interactive programs and links
  

Sharing of Activities for Specialized Software

• Boardmaker, Boardmaker Plus, Boardmaker SDP at Adapted Learning
• Classroom Suite at Intellitools Activity Exchange
  
• Clicker 5 at Learning Grids
  

See also Power Point Collections, Online Timers, Symbol Based Websites

Unique Learning System October 2009 - EcoSystems

This Post Under Construction - Contributions Welcome!

This is based on the Middle School level, your level may be different.

Topics Covered in This Unit
Migration, Dressing for the Weather, Seasons, Biomes (Tundra, Deciduous Forest, Grassland, Desert and Taiga), Crops by Biome, The Eagle: Our National Emblem, Terrariums, Plants and Animals of My State, Food Chains, How Rivers are Made, Little House on the Prairie Time Line

Check out the great links about Biomes at the Missouri Botanical Gardens.

Online Activities

• Dress Caillou for the Weather (please, please ages 6 and under only)
• Dressing for the Temperature
• Dress the Bear for the Weather
• Survival Skills 101 Dressing for the Weather
  
• Food Chain Interactive Movie
  
• The Food Chain Game
• Chain Reaction Game
• Magic School Bus Habitat Match Up
  

Science

• Animal Cracker Biomes
• Terrariums
  
• Enchanted Learning Biomes Unit
• Humans and Animals Habitats Worksheets
  

English/Language Arts

• All About Food Chains Book

Social Studies

• World Almanac for Kids (research state animals/birds/plants)
  

Arts and Crafts

• dressing for the weather collage (students cut out photographs of old clothing from catalogs and sort by season/weather)
• Eco System Escapade
• Jack O' Lantern Food Chain
• Food Chain Mobile
• Paper Bag Eagle Craft
• Hand and Footprint Eagle
• Habitat Craft
• DLTK Desert Animal Crafts
• DLTK Forest Animal Crafts
• DLTK Rainforest Animal Crafts
  

Lifeskills

• Dressing for the Weather Graphic Organizer
  

Adapted P.E./Fitness

• dress for the weather relay race

Cooking

• Little House on the Prairie Recipes
  
• Frozen Tundra Cocoa
• Alaska Recipes (Tundra)
• Hard Tack aka Pilot's Bread (Alaskan Village Staple)
  

Vocational

Survival Skills 101

Survival Skills 101 is an online interactive activity for learners with special needs. There are three types of activities, money, weather and community. The money section focuses on having enough money for a small purchase, the weather activity on dressing for the weather and the community activity on knowing where to go to make certain purchases/run certain errands. The activities are touchscreen or interactive whiteboard accessible. (Being a flash activity tab/enter does work to some degree for two switch scanning on some activities, but I would not consider this a switch accessible activity).

Happy AAC Awareness Month!

Every year the International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ISAAC) celebrates the month of October as AAC Awareness Month. A poster can be downloaded to advertise the story contest. There is a list of ideas on how you could celebrate AAC in your community. You can also join AAC Awareness Month efforts on Facebook. Finally you can download a bookmark, which would make a fun vocational/community service to print, cut out, laminate and distribute at your school.

Pogo Boards

Update: September 25th, 2009
Pogo Boards now offers a 7 day FULL feature free trial.


Pogo Boards is a new online communication board making resource in the same line of thinking as Mrs. Riley It's In the Cards, which was actually the first, full featured online board making and sharing program.

Pogo Boards was developed by Talk to Me Technologies and had 800+ beta testers (I assume in private beta). They have had 12,000+ people sign-up for the limited use version of the online program since debut a few days ago.

First off Pogo Boards has some quirky, and in what may have been an isolated case for me, very annoying, software and hardware requirements. You must have Adobe Reader (or another Adobe Reading software) installed as well as Microsoft Silverlight (which is not a program most of us have installed, like Adobe Flash or Java). Thus if you are at work, work in a school and do not have administrative privileges you might as well stop trying right here. (That's probably 75% or more of us.)

(The advantage of Silverlight is if you are using Microsoft Office 2007 the interface will feel very familiar, but we are working in education, so chances are you are using Office 2003 or earlier, or you have switched to an online word processing program.)

The next issue would seem that the "basic account" which is advertised as "free" is pretty worthless because you cannot print boards without a watermark across them and it is very limited. They should call it a "limited feature trial membership". Nor is there a 30, 14 day, 7 day or 1 day free trial in which to see all of the site features. Trainers and district purchasers who have asked for full access to show Pogo Boards or determine if the product is appropriate have been told this is not an option. If you do want to take advantage of the "basic account" the registration form is lengthy, which is unusual as most web 2.0 applications have learned that folks do not generally want to fill out long forms just to try things out.

Also the "basic account" is in many ways "nagware" because whenever you try to do anything such as save, print, or even delete or replace symbols you get an error message that you need to upgrade to a paid account to enjoy that feature. I used to have a student who would say, "Nag, nag, nag!", whenever he knew he was being a little annoying about asking for something over and over and all I could think was, "Nag, nag, nag!", while I was using my "basic account".

The boardmaking interface itself is a bit clumsy. You search for your image and then "check" the one you want and mouse click on the square where you want it. Not exactly the drag and drop beauty that is Mrs. Riley It's In the Cards. Nor does it have the features we all know and love from Boardmaker... or maybe it does, who knows with the limited trial.

Another bug is that it took a very long time for each of the computers I tried the program on to open up the Silverlight based boardmaking window. Which is usually fine with me, school computers and special needs software running computers are notoriously slow, however Pogo Boards won't let you do anything else when you have the Silverlight/Pogo Board application open (or trying to open). Thus I couldn't just click to another tab on my browser and read e-mail or my RSS reader. This alone would make me never use the website, so I hope they fix that bug.

Support wise there are online videos for training and place to submit forms with questions.

Finally there is the issue of combined symbol sets, Pogo Boards offers a new symbol set called PiCS, the SymbolStix set by the News-2-You people, images from Google Images and clip art images. Many users may not understand the importance of a cohesive set of symbols (not mixing symbol sets), using the same symbol to mean the same thing across multiple boards and the heirarchy of using photos to picture symbols. This means that shared boards, which is one of the lures to entice subscription, may be of little value and may actually be confusing and cause problems with some learners who have communication and intellectual disabilities.

The cost for Pogo Boards is (buried deep in the FAQ and is) tiered based on the number of subscriptions. One year, for one user, is $69.99. This compares to Mrs. Riley It's In the Cards at $45 for one year. It also compares to $79.99 for one year's access to Adapted Learning's Print Editor (which allows you to change and print boards on the Adapted Learning website if you have a valid license number for a Boardmaker disc).

For my money, were I not already totally satisfied with just using my trusty Boardmaker SDP and Adapted Learning (without Print Editor), I would subscribe to Mrs. Riley It's In the Cards. (Read my original review of Mrs. Riley It's In the Cards, from when it was in public beta trial, here.)

(The only appeal of Pogo Boards to me is the ability to make boards that have Symbol Stix to match my Unique Curriculm, but that is not enough of an appeal to make me join and pay that price.)