Apple’s Entrance into Digital Textbooks: revolutionary? Apple announced its entrance into digital textbooks, now selling through its iTunes and iBooks online. Though this has been somewhat expected, it’s exciting news. Believe me, this is not even the tip of the iceberg. I’ve already downloaded samples of the 8 textbooks listed in the iBooks store. While [...]
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wohnai/flickr From Good.is The average community college student in Washington spends about $1,200 per year on textbooks. I know that as a society we’re probably in the infancy of this movement to digitize textbooks and in a variety of ways, bring down the costs of textbooks to students. I don’t understand how they deal with [...]
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Image: Courtesy of Christian Boer I’ve heard of this before and can’t quite make up my mind about it. This article in Scientific American describes a typographic font created by a graphic designer from the Netherlands, that supposedly makes reading print easier for some people with dyslexia. I suppose if it’s helpful to some then [...]
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I’ve recently begun working with a 10 year old boy who has dyslexia. That’s not unusual for me. It’s an important part of what I do in my educational consulting practice, and I’ve been doing it for years. What’s new is that the young boy and his family live about four and a half hours [...]
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New Link for Disability support: High Speed Disability Access Guide for various disabilities.
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…Or does it act like a forklift, freeing your brain from having to remember bits of information in favor of exercising your critical thinking skills? Published by Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner, on the Web site of Science Magazine, and written about in the International Business Times, this study says in part, [...]
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Recordings For the Blind and Dyslexic, which has the largest collection of digitized textbooks and literature (64,000 titles) in the world, finally will make that available through iTunes. I, along with many others, have been waiting for this for a while. I hope the app (which is selling for $19.95) will be worth the wait. [...]
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Apple Experiments with New Way to Differentiate Accommodations for students with learning disabilities AppleInsider reports on Apple experimenting with a fantastic approach to deliver individualized accommodations, with regards to how information looks and feels to students, to their computer screens. This would take “Differentiated Instruction” an oft-used educational buzz word to very cool heights. It [...]
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Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction Matt Richtel at The New York Times documents student use of technology at Woodside High School in silicon valley (Redwood City, California). On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.” What can we say, [...]
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Ghotit Releases Facebook “Spell Checker For People With Dyslexia” Application As Part Of Dyslexia Awareness Week Ghotit is releasing a new Facebook Spell Checker application. This is the first and only Facebook application directly targeting Facebook users with dyslexia. [via Sanford Shapiro]
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SpeakerText Gets Social, Now Open to Everyone SpeakerText providers a service to transcribe videos and link those transcripts to the customer’s video player through a drop-down menu. Once a video has been indexed, SpeakerText hosts the transcript in the cloud and automatically attaches a time-coded link of the transcript to the video, so that users [...]
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Finally, Professional Dictation Software for the Mac David Pogue reviews the new Dragon dictation program for Mac OS X. He gives it high marks. This software will be useful for many people who have a hard time with writing for a variety of reasons.
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