Intellitools Classroom Suite and a SMART or Promethean Board:A Winning Combination!

Classroom Suite by Intellitools has some great activities and applications that come alive with a SMART Board or Promethean Board. I have been piloting 5 Classroom Suite ver. 4 licenses out in 5 different school resources rooms this year ranging from elementary to middle and high school. My goal has been to train and allow a classroom to learn how to publish activities, set up student folders and start doing remedial support with it.
One school (the one taking off the most with it) has been doing early literacy activities with Classroom Suite on a Promethean board, having students work with an assistant in pairs and use the talking word processor tool, Intellitalk, and a virtual keyboard on the board, to get kids writing, spelling and hearing what they write read back to them. They have also used the board and Classroom Suite activities for a student who is visually impaired and needs to see things enlarged and close up. He is dragging word, picture and symbol cards in the phonemic awareness activites and getting the opportunity to do math manipulatives with it too.
I have 2 schools really training and using it, 2 that are struggling to integrate it at all and 1 that is somewhere in between. I have been available for support and have been working with the schools that request me and place a priority on integration.
I like to support free tools as much as possible, and there are free talking word processors and on-screen keyboards that could be used, but there are also many wonderful pay software supports out there as well. I am trying to find ways to help schools trial them first to make sure they really see the benefit where we think they are appropriate.
I would recommend pairing up the Classroom Suite Version 4 with a SMART or Promethean Board - you will be surprised at what it can do. Intellitools has done all the hard work for you to build easily adapted and personalized remedial activities in reading and math. They have a free trial available for download. I will have to share the free alternatives with you for another post.

All the best to you!
Lon





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Sharing Assistive Technology in the Midst of Many Demands

I stopped mid-sentence on an email, to answer the phone, pull a file, set a calendar date on my on-screen calendar and print off an administrator approval for a laptop trial. I prepped the laptop I will deliver tomorrow to an OT an hour and a half away, set up a home visit for next week, finished converting a VCR video of a student trial to digital, burned it on a CD, helped an administrator set up Dragon in her office and then ran to get in the car and drive 30 minutes to a training of an assistant on Intellitools Classroom Suite.

After the training, which I made an effort to make interesting - having her set up a word wall for a writing activity and test it out on a Promethean board, I asked her if this would work for her to use with the student.

"Oh, I guess so..." sounding not too thrilled. Here we were using what I consider cutting edge technology and she was saying she "guessed" so?

"You don't sound like it is going to work too well." I said, just doing a check to see if I was on the right track.

"It's fine. I am just really tired today."

Wow. Tired...hmmmm. Who else knows the meaning of that word?

I got home at 7:30 tonight and it is now 10 PM. I am not complaining, it is just that I am doing my darndest to spread AT enthusiasm and cheer at job sites, schools and online with you too...

and I know one thing - most everybody reading this out there has many demands on them from morning til night. We are all tired if we let ourselves be tired! I am nothing special and I don't want you to feel sorry for me. That's not the point.

I just believe that sharing the incredible freedom that can come through assistive technology is an honor and joy for me. I sat this afternoon and watched a little kinder boy with CP grin from ear to ear as he accessed a laptop talking word processor with a word wall and images in Clicker 5. He was able to type and tell me about his parents, the weather and what he was learning at school using the symbols and word buttons.

Amazing. I am not tired when I see that!

So, if you find misspelled words in my posts I write at 11 PM before bed or I get some information wrong - or maybe don't get a radio interview in for awhile - just know I do more than sit at a desk and write blog posts for the day. Just like most of you, I am juggling a daily life of training, teaching, supporting, driving and then taking care of my own family at the end of the day. But for me, that is what makes this blog mean something - I am an AT professional using it daily in the field - not speculating on what it might do. I am learning what it CAN do. And those things give me ambition to start a new day.

I hope your day is filled with purpose and joy. Be encouraged, you are heroes and pioneers!

All the best to you!

Lon

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Promethean Board and Activstudio Have Applications for AT

We have several districts that have purchased Promethean Boards, a computerized whiteboard, and our instructional technology team have been holding trainings and getting teachers familiar with the cool tricks that the board and the software packages can do.
Last year I had set up a trial with Kurzweil 3ooo and the teacher and the CP student loved it. It had been the first time he had been able to turn in his worksheets with the rest of the class. They had used the K3000 program and a scanner and converted his wprksheets. Then he used the Click-n-Type keyboard to enter his answers in the fields set up on the e worksheet. Then they printed the worksheet and handed it in.
The trial was a success but the specific program wasn't written in the IEP. The school wanted to trial some other methods to get the student access to his worksheets and assignments. Enter the Promethean Board and its software.
The sped teacher told me the other day that she wanted to try the Activstudio software with this student to access his paper assignments. I asked her what it did. She said you could scan any papers you want to put up on the Promethean Board and enter the answers on the board - or from a computer. Since they already had the software, they wanted to see if it would give similar access for keyboarding in the answer fields.
While visiting with the instructional technology folks in our region I asked about Activstudio. They said similar things also. I haven't gotten to assess this feature yet because I haven't had a chance to use it with a scanner, but it sounds like a great tool. Of course there won't be all the K3000 bells and whistles like the text to speech, study tools, etc. but since the school has it, why not give it a try. There are some nice applications for the low visionl earner with it. We used it last year with Intellitools Classroom Suite 4 to give a CVI student a chance to see things big and manipulate them. He loved it.
I did a little research and found a thread on Promethean Planet, a discussion thread for sharing ideas on the Promethean Board. Under the topic scanning and importing, Bill Lohman, an area rep for the company shared the following:

"When you import a scanned image and it is huge...do this:right click on the image...select "fit" on the menu...choose the selection you want. I usually choose "best fit to page"...This will resize the image. I then lock it to the background so that the students can then annotate over it without accidentally selecting it. I have not had any problems with slowing my flipcharts down at this point. I could see issues if you do not have sufficient RAM and harddrive space though. I have used flipcharts with several large images (my latest postcard to Hilary) with no significant performance issues, its just 6 mb. Another option would be to scan the worksheet with a decent OCR program and scan it into text.. "

Bill Lohman
Promethean Inc.
Gulf States Area Manager

I am going to observe how it goes , spend some time learning the software and give you feedback. If any of you use this tool already and have used this feature, maybe you can give us your impressions.

All the best to you!
Lon



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Touch Web Pages to Search with RedZee and a SmartBoard or Tablet PC

Do you remember Tom Cruise working from a glass screen with fanned out images and how he touched, dragged and moved them around in the movie "Minority Report"?

Well, you can get a sense of that with a SMART Board , Promethean Board or Tablet PC and Tablet Mac and the Internet search engine Red Zee.

Red Zee pulls up search results as a series of full page images of the sites. They are fanned out like a deck of cards. By clicking and dragging the mouse, or your finger, you can scroll through the pages and then double-click on the one that you want and view it full-screen.

When I put in searches, the top ones were different than the ones I got on Google, but the results were interesting. A teacher on my blog list, Annemarie80's classroom blog does posts on how she uses the SMART Board in her classroom and RedZee is one of them.

All the best to you!

Lon

Drawing on the Wall

Today I expanded on several weekly visits where I have been modifying the curriculum and working with 2 challenged students. One is Downs Syndrome and the other CVI. We connected Intellitools Classroom Suite to a Promethean Board. The Promethean Board is like a Smart Board but caters more specifically to education and the classroom with templates and all kinds of activities.

I worked with the SLP and special education specialist to design some writing, reading and dictating activities where the students could design a story and hear it read and watch it animated back to them. The CVI student enjoyed seeing things big where he could manipulate them. He used the wand that was callibrated to the board so he could draw, write letters and drag and drop manipulatives for math.

We had a good time playing with technology today and so did our kids!

Check out the Promethean Board. Check out the latest version of Classroom Suite by Intellitools. The two work great hand in hand!