Friday, January 11, 2008

Five Friday Finds

It's Friday, a great time to share some of the treasures I discovered this week, in no particular order.

1. Free Mac Text-to-Speech with highlighting (finally a WordTalk alternative for Mac users - Incredibly exciting news!) thanks to Dave at Infinitec

2. The video "1620" created by Barry Bachenheimer at A Plethora of Technology - see the other reason why 1620 is noteworthy in the field of education.

3. Voice Thread Tutorials - Those of you who follow my blog know how much I love VoiceThread for all learners - it is possible to use this free online resource to reach all the learners in our classrooms no matter whether they are gifted, have learning challenges or have cognitive deficits. This is truly a universal tool! Watch the VT tutorials here to learn how to get the most out of this wonderful tool. (this is from Beth at Thriving in School). Addendum: Larry Ferlazzo pointed out Langwitches excellent VT tutorial for education. Save this to delicious!

4. Lego Digital Creator - this is the virtual version of the toy that everyone loves. Get the free download here and you will have hours of fun!

5. The Well-Rounded Teacher - Jeff Utecht's graphic explains the difference between the 20th and 21st century teacher.

Add your own in the comments. We benefit from the collective wisdom of the educator network as vast as it is!

8 comments:

Larry Ferlazzo said...

The Langwitches blog recently had a nice post with even more VoiceThread tutorial and examples:

http://www.langwitches.org/blog/2008/01/11/voicethread-school-project/

Larry

Beth Lloyd said...

You're ambitious...Five on Friday! I am enjoying Scribbles right now, a drawing program for Mac (multiple layers in a drawing, infinite canvas, etc.). Check it out @ http://www.atebits.com/

Karen Janowski said...

Larry and Beth,
Thanks for the suggestions. Langwitches has created a great Voice Thread in Education tutorial - it's a must read and bookmark to delicious. I'll have to check out Scribbles.

Samuel Sennott said...

Karen,

That TTS software looks very cool! : ) Thanks, Sam
http://alltogether.wordpress.com

Samuel Sennott said...

Regarding the Mac TTS application, in the application, it has quite a delay between words. :( Yet, for creating audio files it does not have this pause. :)

Karen Janowski said...

Sam,
Disappointing to hear about the Mac Text-to-speech. I will need to check it out, too.
Thanks for visiting!
Karen

Anonymous said...

I agree with TLC about the TypeIt-ReadIt software. When you listen to it BEFORE saving it, it has too long of a pause between words. But when you play it back after saving, it sounds better and, of course, can be tweaked in your audio editing software.
This might be useful for PowerPoint presentations for lower level ESL learners.

Lisa Parisi said...

Thanks for the great links. I posted on two of the sites and saved two for delicious. So much to do, so little time. :)