New Basic Skills and Switch Accessible Activities at HiYah and Help Kidz Learn

Both Help Kidz Learn and HiYah have posted new basic skills and switch activities on their sites. Just in time for those end-of-the-school year blahs.

Help Kidz Learn has an Early Mouse Movements activity that also works with touchscreen, interactive whiteboard and was super fun on a Tablet PC with stylus for us. It can be set the color changes as you go over the paint spots and you can set it to have additional music or sound effects to add to the fun.

Help Kidz Learn also added a two player switch curling game with is higher level than many of their switch activities both in switch skills and in cognitive ability, but is a nice addition to the library of activities they have online.

Finally Help Kidz Learn has added a textless animated story called How We Used to Wash.

HiYah offers simple spacebar (or switch set to spacebar) programs about basic concepts for download or play online. They have recently redone many of there basic language programs (such as their nouns series) and added some new programs including: Spring, Yummy Tummy, The Earth Revealed...at Last!, Happy 4th of July, Colors-Basic, and Opposites-Basic.

Free Unique Summer Curriculum

Unique Learning System, the standards aligned special needs curriculum from the folks who bring us News-2-You and SymbolStix Symbols, are offering their summer curriculum for FREE! The unit is on science and is definitely worth checking out even if you aren't teaching this summer.

All you need to do is register and then you can download all the bands (grade levels).

FYI - Make One Minute Wonders One Switch Accessible

Did you know you can play BBC's One Minute Wonder Videos with play with one switch randomly? Set the mouse arrow over the lever just where that red arrow points in the picture. You will need to press play on the video screen the first time with your mouse and them replace the mouse to the lever. After that your switch set to "mouse click" will change the video to a new one randomly. Very fun on the "big screen" (LDC projector or SMART board).

Memorial Video for Stacey Ahern

It was my intent to post a memorial for my sister on March 20th, one year after her death, but I just wasn't ready. Today our brother, an Autism Specialist in Hawaii, sent me Sissy's Song by Alan Jackson and the spirit moved me. Searches for my sister's name are about 9% of the visits to this site

Our sister Stacey was a remarkable young lady. She was a disability activist and a gifted writer who over came the odds again and again. When told she would never walk, use her hands or speak she went to go on to do all of those things. When told she may never live on her on and that she would certainly never finish community college she not only lived on her own and finished community college; she also transferred to the prestigious Sarah Lawrence College in New York and, two months after her death last March, received her diploma. That was in spite of an in ability to write by hand (imagine taking math or econ without writing by hand) and a speech disorder. She was also a writer.

You can read about her here:

• Assistive Technology Used During Rehab from Brain Injury
• Eulogy
• Obituary
• "Those Looks" Original Disability Activist Poetry by Stacey Ahern
  

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

Wijits

I learned about Wijits, an adaptation to the wheels of a manual wheelchair that can benefit many wheelchair users and increase self propulsion from Elina on the Youtube video posted on Eric's Speech Pathology Sharing Site. What a super way to promote independence in some of our students!

New Site for Adapting Curiculum for Learners with Visual Impairments

VI Curriculum is a new site from the Maryland School for the Blind focusing on adapting curriculum for learners ages birth-3 who have visual impairment. However, as you explore the site you will find that much of the content carries over into working with students of any age who have multiple disabilities including visual impairment.

Some features of the site include ideas for adapting various common thematic units like "All About Me" and "Insects", adaptations for the curriculum domains and the expanded curriculum domains (including a whole section on switch use and assistive technology), the Tips for the Trenchs Make it Take it Sections with the not to be missed 10 Low Tech Ideas For a Pool Noodle, a blog, and more.

Be sure to add this web site to your bookmarks!