MyStudyBar: http://thenextchapter-acadia5163.blogspot.com/ was presented by our group this morning. I believe the class found the Free shareware was useful for themselves and for students of all abilities. More presentations of AT continued throughout the day.
Kurzweil: http://www.kurzweil-abs.blogspot.com/appears to be an amazing AT tool. It certainly was a "cadilac" of a program with many features to assist students in many areas. It is a very detailed and to some degree, involved program that can take some time to become aquainted with. From the tutorial that was presented to the class, it was apparent that is is a very useful program for students of varying abilities. I especially liked the Bubblenote feature that could be inserted into a text document. We will be going over the features in more detail in our next class.
Wynn 3: http://wynnwizardtutorial.blogspot.com/ also offered some similiar AT features as Kurzweil that could be useful for students. I don't believe this program is carried in all school districts throughout the province. Visually, the appearance wasn't as attractive as Kurzweil but appeared to have some similar functions that meet the same AT outcome.
Natural Reader 10: http://naturalreadertutorial.blogspot.com/ was a free program for Mac and PC. A very efficient text to speech reader. Opens a minibar/miniboard that can be ignored after opening - text will be read when highlighted after opening. Open any text - Agnes, Alice or Albert will read the text to you. It was mentioned that Natural Reader is on every computer in the SSRSB for all students to use. In the paid version of this app, the text can be converted to MP3 files and additional voices can be added. Natural Reader also contains a pronunciation editor as one of its features.
Text help: http://assistivetechgroupies.blogspot.com/ Also called Read and Write Gold for Mac & PC. Speech Imput, Translator, PDF Aloud, Vocabulary List Builder and Study skills are addressed in this AT program. One neat feature of this program is a pronunciation checker which shows a picture of the mouth pronouncing the word. A fact mapper and fact checker is also an interesting feature (must be online for this feature). It was noted that PDF aloud needs Adobe 9, not 10 when reading text to speech.
In total, I really enjoyed the presentations from all the groups this morning. I found that this was such an informative class and as I previously discussed on this blog, an eyeopening experience. I didn't really know about the many and varied AT software apps available to school students. I can see this type of sharing session becoming an inservice at schools since it offers such valuable information.
