#ATchat

I'm new to the Twitter world, but I often hear that its a great place for PD. I've made it a goal to try to use Twitter more often now that I'm in this field. Karen Janowski is a well respected professional in our field, and I've learned a lot from her through classes, meetings, conferences, and various professional development opportunities. Karen leads an #ATchat on Twitter every Wednesday evening from 8-9, and I finally had a chance to attend last night! The discussion was on "AT, EdTech and UDL" and I thought it was awesome! People from all around the United States participated, and I felt that there were some great conversations, questions, and ideas. It was interesting to see how everyone runs into similar problems no matter what state they are from, but it was great to hear the different ways people educate and provide PD to assist with these problems. I'm looking forward to attending more #ATchat discussions in the future.

Resources for Apps!

Besides scrolling through the iTunes store, googling, and Pinterest, I wanted to share with you some of my favorite resources to help you find apps!

Here is a link that gives you alerts when there are apps that are temporarily FREE for kids!  It is also a great reference page: http://www.smartappsforkids.com/

Here are some other great references when you are trying to find apps:

Apps in Education

Appy Mall

Best Austism Apps

Apps for Children with Special Needs

Geek SLP

Jane Farrall - AAC and switch accessible apps

Positively Autism

Speech Techie


Voice Dream Reader App

As an assistive technology specialist, I assess and consult on a lot of students that have print disabilities.  One of my favorite apps is called the Voice Dream Reader.  This is a way to access reading material such as Bookshare books, PDFs, Google Docs, Gutenberg books, etc. with a user friendly text to speech platform.  It allows you to adjust the text size, font, background color (for contrast to help students that have vision impairments), choice of high quality voices, and adjust the rate of speech.

One of the best features is the ability to have the text highlighted as it is being read aloud.  This can be an important support for some students that struggle with tracking text.  It also allows an individual with reading difficulties to have multiple supports: text being read out loud and words being highlighted to help the reader to follow along.  

I absolutely love this app, and recommend it all the time! You can find the app HERE. In order to help new users to navigate through all the tools and features, I've created this "cheat sheet" to help:

Welcome!

Welcome to my page!! This is my first blog and my first post! I'm an assistive technology specialist, and I wanted to create this blog to share some of my ideas and resources. I have a background as a speech language pathology assistant and completed my undergraduate work at UNH in Communication Disorders. I am currently working on my graduate degree at Simmons College in Assistive Technology. This is my 8th year working in special education, and my third year working as an AT Specialist. In the past, I’ve had experience working at a Collaborative, a private school for students with learning disabilities, a pediatrics clinic, and a public school. I hope this blog will allow me to capture some of my knowledge, thoughts and ideas as I continue my journey in the field of assistive technology.