The first presentation was with the awesome Dr Sally Clendon.  Sally and I both do similar consulting roles – although Sally is based in Auckland, New Zealand. We try to collaborate with each other as much as we can.  Our presentation was entitled “Balanced Word Instruction – Supporting Students with CCN to Crack the Alphabetic Code” and allowed us both to share some of the fabulous things happening in the different schools we work with.  Thanks to staff and students from Kilparrin Teaching and Assessment School in Adelaide, Malkara Specialist School in Canberra, Acacia Hill School in Alice Springs and Wairau Valley School in Auckland for allowing us to share their photos and videos.  You can view the slideshow for this presentation below:

Balanced Word Instruction – Supporting Students with CCN to Crack the Alphabetic Code from Jane Farrall

The second presentation was with the very knowledgeable Helen Tainsh. Helen and I both have a passion for literacy and for AAC and we also love collaborating!  Our presentation was entitled “Connect2Literacy: Communication Supports for Guided Reading” and the slideshow is below.

The presentation is below (minus videos) and I’ve also put the links from the presentation underneath the slides for easier access.

Below are links to the presentation resources.

Part 1:

Favourites

Favourites isn’t a new feature of Tar Heel Reader – in fact I blogged about it last year. But it works differently now – so I wanted to walk you through the new steps. Favourites is a really easy way to pull together a collection of books. I use favourites in different ways – with different aims and users in mind.  For example, if I know that  a student is very interested in country music, I might put together a selection of books about country music singers and country music to “tempt” them in the self-selected reading block.  I also create favourites bookshelves as extension reading suggestions – for example here is a favourites bookshelf I made up to extend the themes in “Blue Hat, Green Hat”.

To make a favourites page is now easier than ever – and you don’t have to be logged into Tar Heel Reader any longer. Just follow the steps below.

Step 1: Search for books to add to your favourites page. In this example I’ve searched for books that include the phrase “country music”.

Step 2: You can add books in two ways.

Option 1: You can click on the favourites heart-shaped icon on the search page.  You then select books to add to your favourites list by clicking on them, while still on the search page. The heart icon for the books that have been added will turn a solid colour – as in the example below. I don’t use this option often as it means that I need to know all the books that come up in the search. I generally use Option 2.

Option 2: You can click on the favourites heart-shaped icon on the first page of any books. I generally read the book through once, and then if I want to add it to my bookshelf I select “Read this book again” and then click on the favourites icon, as I’ve done below.

Step 3: Once you have selected all (or some) of the books you want on your favourites bookshelf, you need to click on the Tar Heel Reader icon (found on the top left of most pages) to go to the main Tar Heel Reader menu.

Step 4: Select the “Favorites” button from this menu. Tar Heel Reader will then take you to the Favourites bookshelf that you have just put together.  If you change your mind about any of the books and want to remove it, just click on the heart-shaped icon again and then click on the book. The heart icon overlayed on the book will become an outline again.  Just click on the heart icon in the right corner once more and that book will be removed.

Step 5.  This is a REALLY important step. Once you are happy with your favourites bookshelf you need to save the web address.  Every favourites page has a completely custom web address, and every time you leave your browser the favourites page is cleared from memory. So you need to go up to the toolbar in your web browser and save it as a bookmark or add it to a social bookmarking site e.g. Delicious.  If you don’t save the web address, you will lose the favourites page and have to start again from scratch .

Collections

If you think that the favourites bookshelf you have put together is one that other people will be interested in, then you can turn it into a Collection. Collections are available to everyone who uses Tar Heel Reader from the main menu.  Collections are a new feature to Tar Heel Reader and one that I think we’re going to find very useful.

Last year, I put together a list of alphabet books in Tar Heel Reader, one for each letter of the alphabet.  I refer other people to this list a lot. To make it easier to find, I have turned it into a Collection using the following steps:

Step 1: I put all the books into Favourites.

Step 2: I went to the main menu in Tar Heel Reader and clicked on “Your books”.

Step 3: I scrolled down the list until I got to the section “Your Collections”.

Step 4: Under Your Collections I selected Favorites.

Step 5: I gave the collection a name and a description. I then clicked on “Save as a new collection”.

Now, anyone can view this collection easily. If you go to the main Tar Heel Reader menu and select Collections, you will find it towards the top of the list of Collections available – as you can see below. (It is called “Alphabet Books”).

I’d love to hear how you are using these great tools in Tar Heel Reader – I think they’ve got so many uses.  And I look forward to seeing lots more useful Collections up on the site!

NB – Gary Bishop has written a Tar Heel Reader book about how to use Favorites and Collections too – you can access it at Help: Favorites and Collections.

It took me a little while to get used to using the Zybox with 1 switch as timing is all important. A quick press (of normal duration) selects the item currently being highlighted by VoiceOver. A longer press (1 second) starts scanning and a 3 second press activates the Home button. A 5 second press toggles Quick Nav on or off. This requires a lot of counting in your head and in the beginning my counting was often a bit off and I ended up activating the wrong function! However, once I got used to the timing I was easily able to use the interface to move between apps, open an app and navigate around a VoiceOver compatible app.

In two switch mode, the first switch starts the scan pattern, while the second switch has multiple functions.  Again these are timing related – a short press selects the current item highlighted by VoiceOver, a 2 second press selects the home button and a 5 second press once again toggles Quick Nav on or off.

No manual was supplied with the Zybox but the chart on the back of the adapter gives you the details of what each switch does (see above). As you can see, up to 6 switches can be plugged into the Zybox.  Once all 6 switches are plugged in, the interface can be used to provide control to a large number of functions of VoiceOver. However, as I mentioned when reviewing the Tecla Access, there are limited people who would need switch access and are able to use 6 switches so this review will focus on 1 and 2 switch access.

Once I had launched an app, I was unable to get the onscreen keyboard to appear the first time I needed it in either 1 or 2 switch mode. This is consistent with most other interfaces I have tried. Unlike the Switch2Scan there isn’t a button to trigger bringing up the keyboard. In 6 switch mode it is easy to bring the keyboard up – but for a 1 or 2 switch user it is more hit and miss which could end up being very frustrating.

When I plugged in 5 switches, I was able to trigger iBooks mode. This meant that I was able to use just two switches to page back and forth in a book – but I needed to have 5 switches plugged into the interface to get into this mode even if I didn’t intend to use them.  This is a useful feature though as I can set a one switch user up to change pages or a two switch user up to page back and forth by plugging their switches into the right ports and plugging other switches in as “dummies”.

Overall, the interface is extremely easy to setup and use.  Definitely the easiest that I have setup so far. It also offers the ability to navigate around the home screens and VoiceOver compatible apps with one or two switches as long as the user has the ability to time the length of their switch presses. Typing and use of the keyboard doesn’t always go smoothly in 1 or 2 switch mode.  Many more functions are available if the user has access to more than two switches – particularly if the user can use 6 switches.  Most importantly, this interface plugs directly into the iPad port, which eliminates the problems some users have had with Bluetooth interfaces.

As I’ve said before, Tar Heel Reader is a free online resource that gives users access to a number of easy-to-read, accessible books (thanks to a collaboration between the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies and the department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) - and it is one of my most heavily used literacy tools for early readers and writers.

I’ve written recently about a way to select Tar Heel Reader books and import them into iBooks with speech support. But there are also times that we want a student to have access to the whole Tar Heel Reader website – to search for their own books and find the ones that will inspire them to do repeated self-selected reading or to do research. To help with this, the Tar Heel Reader site has been designed to take advantage of the full screen mode in your iPad’s Safari web browser – which is often referred to as app mode.  I’ve also found it really helpful for myself to have this setup as it makes it faster for me to go to the site and start browsing for books straight away.

To get Tar Heel Reader running in full screen mode on your iPad, the first thing you need to do is to add a shortcut to Tar Heel Reader on your home screen. To do this, you need to open Safari on your iPad and navigate to www.tarheelreader.org. Once the site is displayed, then press the arrow that is up on the top menu bar of Safari. You should see several options appear as in the picture below. Select the option “Add to Home Screen”.

On one of your iPad’s home screens the Tar Heel Reader icon will now appear – as shown in the picture below.  It now just looks like an app, and you can treat it like an app and drag it into a folder or to another home screen if needed.

From now on, you can simply launch Tar Heel Reader by tapping this icon – and when it opens it will launch in full screen or app mode as shown below.

As well as the quick access to the site this offers, full screen mode also gives you some great advantages. Firstly, the site will now re-open on the last page you were using each time you go back to it.  Secondly (and perhaps most importantly), the menu bar from Safari isn’t visible and the Tar Heel Reader website fills the whole screen, which reduces possible distractions as well as making it simpler visually. It also means that you can use the great iPad Accessibility feature Guided Access so that the student can only access the Tar Heel Reader website on the iPad.  They can spend their self-selected reading time browsing the site, selecting and reading books without the other distractions that the iPad sometimes offers .

And please be aware that this won’t work with every website – the site has to be configured to do this by the developers.  It’s typical of the Tar Heel Reader people that they have thought ahead and offered this really useful option.

I hope you find this helpful! 

1. It isn’t self-selected if you don’t choose it yourself.
2. You can’t get better at it if it’s too hard.

One of the literacy activities that we want students to engage in is self-selected reading. Self-selected reading has many purposes: it gives students an opportunity to apply the skills they have learned in their other literacy sessions; it exposes students to a broad range of books; and, it helps them to see why they might choose to read once they can.

Many times, self-selected reading is an easy block to set up in classrooms.  However, some teachers, particularly teachers who have older students who are emergent readers and writers, find they need to do a more structured setup so that they can follow the two guiding rules of self-selected reading (see the beginning of the post). One concern that is often mentioned is that many older students prefer to read chapter books, even though they may be too difficult for them. Another issue is finding enough material at an easy-to-read level that interests them.

When first planning self-selected reading you need to make sure that the students you are working with have a good number of books to select from – I like to plan for 20 or more books per student. You need to make sure that you cover fiction and non-fiction and that you cover lots of different topics and genres to meet the interests of all students. One approach that I use is to list the different students in the classroom and then write down their interests – and then pull together a range of books at an appropriate reading level that includes these interests.

In pulling together a range of books I look at my range of resources. These include:

• The school library and the librarian. Rosie Mackay, the fabulous teacher librarian at Willans Hill, pulled together this list of picture books for older readers. A good teacher librarian is such a great resource – thanks Rosie!  One of the reasons I love this list is that Rosie has also included some simple to read chapter books, such as The Cat on the Mat is Flat by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton.
• Tar Heel Reader. My favourite online resource for easy-to-read books. I can find, download, print or store books electronically for students to use in this block. If a student is interested in motocross then I search and find books on that topic.  Or if they like Taylor Swift, or trains, or animals, or…… Tar Heel Reader is a really important part of your self-selected reading resources when working with older students who are emergent readers.
• Any other appropriate book collections e.g. Start-to-Finish from Don Johnston.
• Books students bring in from home.
• Any custom or personal experience books that may have been written about the student(s).

With younger students, it is much easier to pull together an appropriate group of books from the library – although I still try to make sure that I cover their areas of interest. As students are older they often have more varied interests – and it’s important to keep in mind that many of them don’t want to read books that they might perceive as “baby” books.  If you want an older student to read a baby book then it would be good to give them a real reason for doing it e.g. reading the book to a younger student once they have mastered it.

The other important point to consider is how you are going to present the books to the students for self-selection, especially if you have very different reading levels in a classroom. Different teachers I have worked with have handled this in various ways.  Some have organised the books in tubs and students have selected from a particular tub. Or some have had reading stations/tables with a group of readers at each table.  Technology can also be a great tool in this area – if a student is worried about being seen reading non-chapter books then give them books on an iPad.  Once a student is reading books on an iPad the format of the book becomes irrelevant.  I can build a collection in iBooks that is custom tailored for a particular student or group of students. (see my last post on putting Tar Heel Reader books into iBooks for some information on this).

A collection of commercial books, custom books and Tar Heel Readers made up in iBooks

And finally, it’s important to remember the teacher’s role in self-selected reading. We need to make students aware of the range of books on offer. You should read a few pages of a book that you think might interest some students – a “teaser”.  Remember to read aloud across the range of books available and expose students to both fiction and non-fiction. You could organise a “reader’s chair” once a week where students tell each other about their favourite books. You should also have reader’s conferences with students and steer them towards easy to read but interesting books – particularly around their favourite topics.

And I’d love to hear ideas that have worked for you in self-selected reading too!

If you aren’t familiar with Tar Heel Reader then I will quickly explain! The site was created as a collaboration between the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies and the department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The aim was to create a free online resource that gave users access to a number of easy-to-read, accessible books.  And they have now added an easy way to import these into iBooks on your iPad – with optional speech support.

A user can go into Tar Heel Reader and search for a book on a wide range of topics. I was working in a classroom today that is doing a theme on “People Who Help Us”. The teacher, Christina, was actually using a Tar Heel Reader book to introduce the topic so I am going to use this as my example and take you through the steps to get this book into iBooks.

To find a book to import into iBooks, it is easiest if you do the search directly on your iPad. Please note: before doing this, you need to make sure that you have iBooks installed on your iPad. If you don’t have it installed, then click on this link to go to the App Store and download it.  iBooks is a free eBook reader from Apple.

Once you are sure that you have iBooks installed, then use the Safari web browser on your iPad go to www.tarheelreader.org and select the large button that says “Find a book”.

You then need to type a topic into the search box – e.g. “People who help us”, as in the screenshot below – and Tar Heel Reader will then generate a list of books that meet your search criteria.

Once you have found the book you want, you need to decide if you want the user to have access to speech support when reading the book in iBooks. If you do, then you need to turn speech on before downloading the book. To do this, you need to go into Settings. The Settings wheel for each book is located on the title page of each book, in the top right corner. If you want to download the book into iBooks and have speech available it is important that you do this before downloading the book.

So – if you want speech go to the Settings button and select “Speech” and then select a voice – man, woman or child.

Now that you have selected your voice (or not) you are ready to download the book into iBooks. Once again you need to go to the Settings button, but this time you need to select Download and then ePub to download it in the format compatible with iTunes.

Once you have selected ePub, you might need to wait for a short while during which the download is prepared. After this short wait, a further window opens asking you where to open the ePub book. You should select “Open in iBooks”.

The ePub book will then open up in the iBooks app. You can now browse it just like any other eBook. If you selected a voice before downloading, then there is a sound bar for each page where you can press play to have the text read out to you!

I hope you’ve found this helpful. Once you have imported a few books, you will find that it is really quick and easy to do.  And if you know Tar Heel Reader you’ll realise that this gives you a potential library of thousands of easy to read books (with speech support) in iBooks.  Yay!!

In mid 2012, Mayer-Johnson released a new symbol library for Boardmaker. The PCS High Contrast library was developed in conjunction with Linda Burkhart and Gayle Porter. There are over 1450 symbols in the library – each is drawn within the guidelines for working with students with low vision. They have been excellent for making resources for many of the students I have seen this year – and for helping us to provide great communication books and aided language resources.  As we all know, visual stimulation is proven to help students with neurological vision impairments to improve the way they use their vision – and these symbols are a great addition to the toolkit of anyone working in this area.

Recommendations for instructional strategies/materials with children with neurological vision impairment include:

1. Materials, such as pictures, should be simple in form, high contrast (the colors of a picture or object should be different such as a yellow toy against a black background instead of an orange one)
2. Color vision is usually intact, and color can be used effectively. Yellow and red are possibly easier to see and can be used to outline numbers, letters, or pictures, to color code, or to attract attention to something you want the child to look at.

These symbols help us to meet both of the above needs, and it is then up to us to put the other recommended strategies in place – such as good positioning, being consistent in our language (and our aided language stimulation) and giving the child time to respond, plus others (see the great fact sheet from California Deaf-Blind Services.)

It’s going to take me a while to re-make my resources with these new symbols – but I am slowly working my way through that task as I have seen this year what a critical difference these symbols can make for many students. And in the meantime, a big thank-you to Linda, Gayle and Mayer-Johnson for putting this great resource together to help us to provide more appropriate communication books and tools for the students we work for!

(For the index of symbols provided in this symbol library click here).

Then in 2000 I did my first literacy course with David Koppenhaver and Karen Erickson – and learned how important writing was for reading development.  I still have my notes with a quote from Dave “Without writing, reading development will be limited” – and I’ve highlighted it, drawn arrows and put a big circle around it so I couldn’t forget!  I came back to Australia, put writing into place – and very quickly saw improvements in my student’s reading.  One of many very valuable lessons I have learned over the years from my literacy gurus.In the beginning, I found it hard to develop a good alternative pencil for each student and this slowed my implementation of the writing block.  One of the most fundamental concepts in finding the right alternative pencil is that the student must be able to use it easily – especially if they are a beginning writer.  Karen Erickson has a wonderful construct called Red – Yellow – Green that is a great model to use in thinking about appropriate pencils (click the link above to download a handout on this from the Centre for Literacy and Disability Studies website if you aren’t familiar with this construct). For most students, writing is a “red” activity – it is cognitively and linguistically challenging and might also be a new activity.  This means that their pencil needs to be “green”, or relatively easy to use, so that they can focus on the cognitive and linguistic challenges of writing.  So – if a student can hold a pen or a pencil but struggles to form letters with it, especially if they have already been practicing for years, then we need to look at an alternative pencil for the majority of their writing as the pen is a red light to developing other writing skills. Similarly, if a student is just learning how to use a switch, then we wouldn’t look at a switch operated writing system as that would also be a red light.

Luckily, there are lots of options for alternative pencils today – and I thought I would share some of my favourites with you.  I’d also love to hear about ones you use since I’m always keen to increase my “pencil” options!

My very favourite low tech alternative pencil resource is the Writing with Alternative Pencils CD from the Centre for Literacy and Disability Studies. Below is a montage of some of the different pencils you can make from this resource.

My absolute favourite pencils in this resource are the alphabet flip charts.  I have used these with a really wide range of students – from students who can point to the letters on the chart to students with physical disability who use the flip chart with partner assisted scanning.

Another low tech pencil option is a simple alphabet board.  This can be more cognitively and physically demanding than a flip chart as all 26 letters appear at once – but if a student is ready for it then it can be a faster option. (The alphabet board below has been copied from http://www.kirklees.gov.uk/community/health-care/learningdisability/boardtalk/boardtalk.shtml).

A standard computer keyboard can also be an option for many students – although you might want to look at using a talking word processor or word prediction in a program like Clicker 6  or Co:Writer to give them some extra writing supports.

There are also a range of alternative keyboards that plug into a computer and that can work better for some students who have extra vision or fine motor requirements.  In the photo below, the student is using a Vision Board keyboard from Chester Creek along with its really solid keyguard.  This was a perfect solution for her combination of vision and fine motor requirements.  Her teacher also made some cardboard masks that stuck onto the back of the keyguard and masked some of the function keys that she didn’t need access to during writing.

Onscreen or virtual keyboards can also be a good alternative pencil option. A student can type using a mouse or mouse alternative, such as a joystick or trackball. Some onscreen keyboards also offer scanning and switch access.   The picture below is of the onscreen keyboard in Clicker 6. You can use this to type into the talking word processor built into Clicker 6, along with word prediction support. This can be used with the Crick USB switch box with one or two switch scanning as well.

If a student has a speech generating device have a good look at whether this has text-to-speech capability and can be used as a pencil. This is always a strong preference of mine – if they have good established access to their device then this makes it so much easier to use it as a pencil as well – and makes it a definite green light.

As well as the low tech eye gaze options above, there is an increasing range of high tech options available. The DynaVox EyeMax, the Tobii C12 with CEye are both speech generating devices with eye gaze access and the Intelligaze can be used on a computer – and there are many more as well.  There are also prototype eye gaze units being shown for Android – which probably means that eye gaze is coming to tablets in the near future.

Then of course the iPad and a range of apps can also be great pencils. The Notes app that comes with the iPad is an option. Pages is a full featured word processing app from Apple that might also suit some students. Abilipad is a writing app that offers a range of supports when it is used as a pencil.  I recently blogged about this app so if you want more information on this please just click here.  And Crick have just brought out a new writing app with word prediction and speech support, Clicker Docs. I haven’t used this with any students yet – but I look forward to trying it out!

In my next blog post I plan to share some more “pencil stories”, including some videos of pencils in action. Until then, I’d just like to thank the students at Willans Hill School for letting me share photos of them using their pencils, the volunteers and campers at Big Mouth Camp for permission to use their photos and Sion Gough Hughes for taking the majority of the snaps.