Happy New Year 2010

Happy New Year to all my readers! May this be a happy, healthy, peaceful and prosperous year ahead for you and your families! See you in 2010! Brian

iPevo Point 2 View Camera

As many of you know by now I carry quite of bit of technology with me when I am doing presentations and workshops. I always carry with me my laptop, data projector, PaperShow, and speakers. The only other piece of equipment that I wanted to add to my toolkit was a document camera, but I had not found just the right one for me. Then a couple of weeks ago I was introduced to the iPevo Point 2 View Camera at the New Jersey Computer Cooperative (NJECC) by Dave Marra from Apple Computer. Dave was using the iPevo Point 2 View Camera to demonstrate some apps on his iPhone. I was totally blown away by the quality of the picture that I saw and by the size and flexibility of the camera and knew that I had to get my hands on one to review for you. I would like to thank Pauline from the iPevo Company for providing me with this review unit.

So if you are looking for a lightweight document camera that can be used with both Mac and Windows then I urge you to take a look at the iPevo Point 2 View Camera. The iPevo Point 2 View Camera is a 2.0 Mega pixel camera with auto focus which attaches via your USB Port. In order to start using the iPevo Point 2 View Camera camera I downloaded the latest iPevo P2V software application from their website simply plugged in the camera. It was just that easy to get started. The iPevo Point 2 View Camera does come with an installation CD and a User Manual on the supplied CD- but just in case I wanted to download the latest software from their website.

In the box is a QuickStart Guide which will have you up and running in no time. The iPevo P2V software is easy to use and allows you to adjust the Exposure, Resolution, Zoom in, Zoom Out, Mirror, as well as Timer function. The iPevo P2V camera has an Auto Focus feature which makes it an ideal tool to be used as a document camera. Place a book or any object under the camera and within seconds your picture comes into focus. The iPevo is an ideal tool for taking a look at objects at a very close distance with great sharpness. It is amazing to see the object or page you have placed under the camera lens come up on your computer with such clarity. The iPevo Point 2 View Camera comes with handy weighted stand that can be used to affix your camera and makes it an ideal portable document camera. The camera can also be taken off the base and used as a handheld camera for taking close up snapshots of items. Likewise, you are also supplied with a handy clip to allow you to use the iPevo P2V camera as a webcam that can be affixed to a monitor or a laptop. Once you have placed an object under the camera it is very easy to take a snapshot of the item by pressing the Enter key or by Pressing the Green camera button on the camera itself. The images are automatically stored in your pictures directory and can be reviewed from within the iPevo P2V software.

For anyone who is doing instruction of an electronic device (ie. iPhone, IPod Touch, Blackberry phone) or needs a portable document camera, I urge you to take a look at the iPevo Point 2 View Camera from iPevo. I truly was amazed at the quality of the picture and just how light it is to carry around. I know that this is one gadget that I will carry around in my bag when I do presentations and workshops. If you are a presentor or teacher you are going to really enjoy uisng the iPevo P2V camera and at a selling price of $69 dollars I predict they will fly off of the shelves. For more information about the iPevo P2V Camera click here.

Technology Predictions for 2010

I guess this is the time of the season to look into the crystal ball and make predictions about the year ahead. Certainly 2009 has been an exciting year for all types of technology and in 2010, I predict we will begin to see even more rapid developments. One of the really exciting development has been in the area of mobile handsets.

With more people connected to the web via their smartphones we need to take a look at this factor and plan accordingly. With Apple raising the bar with the iPhone we have seen a flurry of development and new smartphones are being released on a weekly basis. This year we saw the release of the BlackBerry Storm 2 as well as the Motorola Droid featuring the Android operating system from Google. This has certainly been a hotbed of development and the apps for these mobile devices continues at a furious pace. Next year we will continue to see huge developments in the mobile handset market which will play out well for us in education. The real tipping point for this technology will be the ability to run Flash applications on these handsets. From what I have been reading Adobe is working hard with Research in Motion (BlackBerry) and Google to build Flash into their development tools. Once Flash becomes standard on these devices you will see incredible applications that can deliver on the promise of these devices for learning. In many cases the students we work with are carrying very powerful computing devices which could be used as an educational tool to advance their learning. So next year look for smartphones to play a larger role in the area of classroom and mobile learning. I am already beginning to see a number of companies that are developing accessories or companion products to work with smartphones which could really propel this whole arena. So next year might just be the year of mLearning- that is mobile learning opportunities from anywhere on your smartphones.

As much all of us are used to starting up our applications from our hard drives - we will continue to see a shift to the cloud at even a faster pace of adoption. I recently had a conversation with my nephew who is in his early twenty's who had just purchased a new Windows laptop. I asked him if he had purchased a copy of Microsoft Office to install and he looked at me and said "there is no reason to, I am now using GoogleDocs for all of my work." So yes there is a huge shift happening and as we move forward we will begin to see more and more students and educators adopt the cloud to do all of their work. I suspect that as I speak to educators, that many schools will jump on board in 2010 and will sign up for Google Apps for Education. In doing so, both teachers and students will recognize the quantum leap in collaboration and learning that just wasn't possible with standalone applications. So look for 2010 to bring about huge shifts in collaboration and moving to the cloud for our personal computing.

We have also just begun to witness the movement from the printed book to the digital book and 2010 is going to be a banner year for ebooks as it explodes into the market. If it is any indication, Amazon reported that their sales from downloaded books to the Kindle outpaced that for printed books for the 2009 Holidays! With this in mind we will see a number of new players in this market with their own spin on the feature set. During the 2009 holiday season we saw the release of the Nook from Barnes & Noble which was an instant success. We also have Sony in the market touting not one but three different Sony Readers. Competition is good, and I suspect we will see a host of other companies making announcements about their branded eReaders at the Consumer Electronic Show come this January in Las Vegas. In any case- it is clear that ebooks will evolve over time and will play a much bigger role in schools. As we saw in the Kindle 2- having access to text to speech built-in can make a world of difference for students who need accessible curriculum material. Having consumer products that are designed with assistive technology from the beginning helps to keep the costs down and make it a universally designed product from the get go.

I hope you have a wonderful and Happy New Year! I would appreciate hearing about your predictions for 2010- so feel free to add your comments.

Happy Holidays!

Wishing all my readers a Happy and Healthy Holiday Season. Enjoy your time off with friends and family!

From Adobe Captivate 4 to YouTube

In a recent post I talked about how I used CodeBaby Production Studio with an Adobe Captivate 4 project to create some very unique and engaging content. In my effort to share the project I decided to upload it to YouTube so that others may find value in looking at what I did. One of the new features in Adobe Captivate 4 is the ability to export your projects and save them in a .AVI format which can then be uploaded to YouTube. In previous versions of Adobe Captivate you would have to use a third party application to convert your SWF project to .AVI. But now with the new enhancements in Adobe Captivate 4 all of the conversion can be done right from within the application. Here is an Adobe Captivate 4 video to show you how to export your video in an .AVI format. You can view the resulting video on YouTube by clicking here.

SOLO 6- A Literacy Tool with the Right Balance of Power and Features!

It was with great anticipation that I arrived home last week to find my copy of SOLO 6 waiting at my doorstep. I have trained hundreds of educators and students on SOLO over the years and was excited to learn about all of the new features that Don Johnston Incorporated had added to the new version. For those of you who may not be familiar with SOLO 6, it includes the following four applications: Write:OutLoud 6, Co:Writer 6, Draft:Builder 6, and Read:OutLoud 6. SOLO 6 provides students with a suite of applications that work together to provide the student with a level of support not often found in other products. SOLO 6 is an ideal tool for both writing and reading and provides students with text to speech support using the high quality Acapela speech engine. Using the Acapela speech engine throughout the SOLO 6 product is a welcome addition. Students will now enjoy having access to a high quality naturally sounding male (Ryan) and female (Heather) voice to read their text. For me this is a huge feature and one I know that students will enjoy using when writing or reading text on the computer. From the user's point of view, I am really excited to see that students can jump into any of the four applications without having to Log–in. Students can now simply click on any of the four applications and get right into the work they need to do. However, if the teacher does prefer, students can sign in to Student Central as they did before in SOLO 5.

Write:OutLoud still remains one of the easiest talking word processors to use and provides student with a great deal of support in the writing process. Students will appreciate the ability to easily navigate through their written work and listen back to what they have written in the new high quality voices.

Write:OutLoud still provides students with spelling supports using the Franklin Spell Check engine which is really good at picking up the mistakes that students with learning disabilities tend to make. If you work with students with poor spelling skills you will find that having the text-to-speech support available in the spell checker, as is the case in Write:OutLoud, is essential. Students can also use the Homonym checking feature in Write:OutLoud to help them flag the confusable words that often wind up in their writing. I have always found the Bibliographer Tool to be indispensable for students who are creating their first bibliography. In fact when I show this feature to teachers that I am training, they often comment that they wished they had a tool like this when they were doing their graduate work. In today’s Internet age, students younger and younger are now be asked to show where they found their information; and being able to create a citation with the advent of the Bibliographer Tool and the Bibliographer Wizard has really streamlined the process for students making it possible for them to successfully create a bibliography. In Write:OutLoud I was please to see that there is more flexibility in the interface allowing students to change the size of the icons on the toolbar, making it more consistent with the concept of Universal Design and this is true throughout SOLO 6.

Working with Co:Writer throughout the years, I have always been amazed at its ability to predict words based on a couple of keystrokes. For me Co:Writer has always been the premier word-prediction tool in the industry and with the release of Co:Writer 6 it continues to hold its place and takes a quantum leap in usability and design. If you have used other versions of Co:Writer, you will be extremely happy to see the redesign of the user interface. The value proposition now for using Co:Writer 6 is in its simplicity and power. After you launch Co:Writer 6 you will see a small floating window in your writing application. Begin typing and Co:Writer 6 will begin to provide you with a list of predicted words. The interface is clean and helps students to focus on their writing. With the latest version students should be up and running with Co:Writer 6 in no time. All the familiar features are still retained in Co:Writer 6 and customizing the user experience is significantly easier to do. To customize the features in Co:Writer 6 you simply click on the arrow at the bottom of the Co:Writer 6 dialog box and the dialog box flips over to reveal the Options. You will find it incredibly easy to select or create Topic dictionaries and giving students access to the Word Bank feature that shows up when word processing can help students with word-retrieval difficulties. I guess I can’t state it enough to say just how clean and usable the new interface is in Co:Writer 6 that will allow students to focus on the task at hand and complete their written work. I should also mention that Co:Writer 6 can be used to read text in almost any environment.

For students that need more support in the area of writing, Draft:Builder remains a very strong application. While Draft:Builder 6 has not changed all that much as compared to the previous version it does contain many more writing templates that students will find helpful. Draft:Builder 6 is ideal for students who are challenged when presented with a blank page and told to write. Using the templates and prompts, teachers can create writing environments that can help move students through the writing process. In Draft:Builder 6, students have the text-to-speech, spell checking, Bibliographer Tool, and dictionary supports built in that they can take advantage of. The real power of SOLO 6 is in the integration of the tools. Students who need spelling supports can quickly open a note in Draft:Builder 6 and turn on Co:Writer 6. It is this integration that allows students to focus on their writing so that the tools fade into the background. Students can now customize the tool bar in Draft:Builder 6 as they can in Write:OutLoud.

Of all the applications in SOLO 6 the one that has really evolved is Read:OutLoud. With the advent of a high quality text-to-speech engine and ease of use, Read:OutLoud firmly plants itself as an all-around tool for reading text on the computer and on the Web. Keeping in the tradition of Read:OutLoud, students can easily highlight and extract text notes to the sidebar or can add an Outline to complete as they are reading the text. Read:OutLoud comes with a number of outlines that can be used to help students better comprehend the text that they are reading. Once the student has captured the notes, they can be sent to Write:OutLoud or Draft:Builder and take advantage of the tools that are available in each of the respective writing environments.

One of the most important features which is not apparent to the user is the ability of Read:OutLoud to open a wide variety of different text formats. Read:Outloud can open PDF, NIMAS, DAISY 3, Microsoft "Save As Daisy", Bookshare files, Rich Text Format (RTF), TXT, HTML, and XML. For districts investing in a text-to-speech reader, it is important for the reader to have the ability to support a wide range of formats, which is the case for Read:OutLoud. As more students access services that provide text in the NIMAS or DAISY 3 format it is important that the text reader can efficiently work with these file formats. When working with NIMAS files it is not unusual to have to use a utility to unpack them before they can be opened in a reader. This is not the case with Read:OutLoud—simply open the file and Read:OutLoud does all the work for you. It is really that simple!

With more and more students accessing NIMAS formatted books, this is a critical feature and one that that I know teachers and students will appreciate. Once you have opened your NIMAS formatted book, students will be able to change the Etext style very quickly. If you are working with students with visual impairments you can quickly change the background and the color and size of the text with one mouse click. Then with a click on the Read button, students will have access to the text, have it read to them and highlighted on the computer screen.

Read:OutLoud has made huge improvements in being a tool that can access and read the Web on both Windows and Macintosh platforms. When accessing the web, you will find Read:OutLoud to be much faster than the previous version at rendering web pages and now you can quickly jump around the web by clicking on page links. The text-to-speech engine makes it a pleasure to listen to and you will find some really nice features like the ability to look up the definition of words using the Google search engine. Read:OutLoud uses a simple Read button to have students turn the text-to-speech engine on and off. With a simple and clean interface students will be accessing the information they need and take notes if they desire.

Users of SOLO 5 who migrate to SOLO 6 should feel right at home with the release, but with the fine tuning and interface improvements, students will be able to be more productive and access the features they need more easily. SOLO 6 provides students with an array of features which makes it a compelling literacy tool for students with a wide range of abilities. With the release of SOLO 6, Don Johnston Incorporated has set the mark for an integrated literacy suite that has the right balance of power and features. More importantly, with the changes in the interface and careful vigilance to usability, students and teachers will be up and running with SOLO 6 in no time.

Brian S. Friedlander, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Education at the College of St. Elizabeth, Morristown, NJ where he Coordinates the Graduate Programs in Special Education and teaches graduate courses in assistive technology. Brian is the subject matter expert in the soon to be released video: Assistive Technology: Powerful Solutions for Success available from National Professional Resources (nprinc.com) as well as new reference guide: Assistive Technology: What Every Educator Needs to Know to be distributed by National Professional Resources (nprinc.com). Dr. Friedlander maintains an assistive technology practice and provides evaluations, workshops and training in the area of assistive technology. With a background in school psychology Dr. Friedlander brings a unique perspective to his assistive technology practice. Dr. Friedlander publishes Inclusion Times an electronic newsletter which focuses on educational and assistive technology- it is published four times a year.

One Sentence Summary Created with Context Organizer -SOLO 6 provides students with an array of features which makes it a compelling literacy tool for students with a wide range of abilities.

This article originally appeared on the Don Johnston, Inc Website.

Online Degrees Get No Respect

Saturday Night Live certainly doesn't think much of online degrees a subject that I was thinking was going away since I posted about it back in 2006 - Lower Value of Online Degree Programs?