Repeated exposure to the same story book is better for child language development than lots of different stories.

Interesting new research findings from the University of Sussex about how children learn and retain new words. I remember researching this and advocating repeated use of the same few stories back in1994  - in the days of the CALL SAIL Kit (Special Access to Interactive Literacy) project. (Cheering to know that was good advice!) CALL still sells Story Packs - 3 book pack + CD of overlays in symbols

Also reminds me to commend to readers the excellent work of the

North Carolina Center for  Literacy and Disability Studies

And the great Tarheel Reader site, where you can get access to loads of free switch accessible books (mosty with simple one line per page text), with a speech output option (switch it on via the cogwheel 'Settings' icon)

Wow! just wanted to share info about the stunning interactive story App for iPad that I just stumbled across - The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore.

To me, this is what an interactive story App should be like - all the best of both a short film and a story book , somehow brilliantly integrated.

You can just read and listen to the story - fabulous graphics, bit retro, plus music  - or each page has interactive features that you can explore  - when you do, they somehow make the page turn into an animated movie.

This multiple award-winning animation by William Joyce and filmmakers (some from Pixar  - who, let's face it -  know what they are doing!) - is a beautiful tale about the value of stories. It's not exactly a 'starter level' story, but it's very accessible and the interactivity enhances engagement.

It comes with 'extras' -  a short film and a 'Making of this App' and it somehow incorporates both the Wizard of Oz and hurricane Katrina & Sandy with resonances of Up! and other well-known tales and films.

You can change most of the settings re audio, text, music etc. but unfortunately there is no alternative to a 'swipe' for turning the page. 

Well worth £2.99 anyway. Take a peek! (Also available as a real book or for Kindle - dearer, of course)

AND......while we're at it - here is a must-buy book-type book.  Charming! A gem! Guaranteed to make you smile,  and also effective to help children think about the differences between books and other forms of story formats 'It's a Book' by Lane Smith published by MacMillan Childrens Books AND - ironically - it even comes with an animated video trailer!

Crick have just released 2 Clicker Apps – they had said the official launch would be at BETT so they have actually got this out earlier than expected! I’ve just installed them and these are my first thoughts.

In the Clicker Docs App (£17.99) there are some grids/WordBanks available from Learning Grids which is just a couple of taps away in the app itself. It then automatically saves the grid so it is available whenever you want to use it. Or you can create your own wordbanks. The speech option allows you to have it set letter by letter, word by word or full sentence. You can also use the ‘Shift Speech’ button to have individual words/cells read out from the grid, predictor or document. There is a choice of 3 voices (Rachel, UK; Heather, US; Tyler, ANZ). Prediction is available and SoundsLike Predictor is an option. There is a choice of number of words from 250 to 60000 but you don’t seem to be able to add new ones. It did seem very slow as I typed in or used the word grid.

Clicker Sentences app (£14.99) is for writing sentences using whole words. You can add pictures to the grid from the iPad photos library (or take a photo).

To get to the next screen you have to swipe so you can build up the piece of writing. You can choose to have a ‘model sentence’ or a ‘model sentence pop’ for pupils needing a bit more support. Using the speech is the same as in the Clicker docs.

What’s new in Clicker 6?

Bryan Adamson, who recently joined Crick Software as their Scottish Educational Consultant, will be hosting the next CALL Live webinar (free) on Tuesday 20th November at 1pm. 

Clicker is well established and widely used to provide literacy support for pupils with a wide range of additional support needs.

The latest version, Clicker 6, allows pupils to work more independently. Clicker 6 also helps teachers to easily and quickly create Clicker Set resources  for individual pupils or groups of pupils.

What will the Clicker 6 webinar cover?

The webinar will provide an overview of the ways in which Clicker 6 supports reading and writing  and will also show how Clicker 6 can be easily tailored to meet the needs of individual pupils.

The new ‘wizards’ that are used to create resources will also be demonstrated.

Read more and book your place on the free Clicker 6 webinar now.

If you are interested in using the iPad to support your pupils then you will probably be familiar with the large number of websites that have appeared over the past year offering ‘lists of Apps’ to support a range of difficulties including communication, literacy, numeracy etc. Some examples include Apps to support AAC, Apps to support literacy as well as Apps to support magnification and vision. 

While these are useful resources, particularly if you’re new to the iPad and unsure which Apps to download (and feeling a bit overwhelmed with so many Apps to choose from), lists of endless Apps have their limitations. 

As Apps become increasingly more sophisticated and offer improved features and options, I think there is much to be gained from using the built-in sharing and export features to create ‘integrative workflows’ for pupils. Using integrative workflows is about exploiting what an App has to offer or making the most of its main features. For example, there are a number of ‘literacy support’ Apps which have a ‘Send to App’ option, allowing learners to plan an essay using a mind map, export the mind map to a text-to-speech App for proof reading and finally sending the text to a word processor for formatting, final spell checking and submission. 

This is a similar approach for pupils with dyslexia when writing an essay or project – use a visual mind map to get down the main points, use nodes and notes to expand on ideas and finally export the mind map to a word processing program such as Word. Additional support in the form of word prediction or text-to-speech, is often provided via programs such as TextHelp Read&Gold, Co:Writer or even Penfriend. 

If you would like to find out more I’ve written a short article which explains this process in 4 simple steps. You can download the article by selecting this link. 

We have added a new section to the Books for All web site which gathers together all the quick guides and also the new video guides on the Education Scotland web site, into separate pages. It should be much easier to navigate and find the resources you need. 

We'll be adding to these in the coming months and if you have any suggestions for topics that need covered please add a comment or let us know.

Jane Farrall in Melbourne Australia has just published on her blog a really useful step by step instructions for how to get a free book from the Tarheel Reader site into an iPad. Good way to make appropriate materials available without having to make them yourself. (You could also run the book online, which would be even quicker and easier, but downloading it as a powerpoint into iBooks means it can be always available and stay there for the child to enjoy again and again.

If you don't know about the TarheelReader site, go and have a look. There are many short and very simple stories there, freely useable and downloadable, made in Powerpoint, all with picture and speech support, one line of text, ideal for our emergent readers and learners with complex additional support needs. For example , see here, 'my cat is fat' (choose a voice on top left and off you go). (The quality can be a bit variable, so you do need to check before you select a book for a pupil. Some are a bit too 'American- mind you, there's nothing to stop us uploading our own books to the site, good idea!)

Earlier this year Stuart and I were videoed finding, using and making books in accessible formats, and the videos are now available on the Education Scotland web site. They provide a quick and reasonably (we think!) straightforward introduction to Books for All, and you can download the videos and the transcripts for CPD. The only unfortunate thing about the videos are the dodgy presenters.

There are also some very illuminating and useful comments from staff and young people about how accessible formats can be used in practice, and why it's so important for learners to have books and materials that they can read and access independently.

Essential viewing!

 

We are pleased to say that there are now 59 books in Daisy format availlable from the Books for All Scotland Database. These books were produced by Kim Walker and Jamie Cutherbertson and the team at RNIB Scotland Transcription Centre in Glasgow with Scottish Government funding and we are grateful to them for sharing these Accessible Books via the Database. Thanks also to Patricia Carroll, Jennifer MacDougall and Anne Beverdige at LTS for liaising with RNIB to obtain the books.

What are Daisy books are why would you be interested in them?

These Daisy books give you both text and synchronised human narration, so for novels especially, this can be a more pleasant and engaging reading experience than using a computer (even with Heather!) to read the text. Across the Barricades, by Joan Lingard, for example, which is set in Northern Ireland, is narrated by a reader with an Irish accent. The Daisy talking book format was originally developed for people with visual impairment, but Daisy books are also very accessible for anyone with a print disability because they (should) have built-in structure for easy navigation; the reader software has keyboard shortcuts for readers with visual or physical impairments, and readers with visual or learning difficulties or dyslexia can read the books using either the recorded narration (if provided in the book) or text-to-speech.

How can I read the Daisy books?

You can read Daisy books on lots of different devices. On a Windows PC, for example, you can use the free Amis Reader. This gives you control over font size and colours, keyboard control, and it highlights the text as it is read out. Another popular Daisy book reader is Dolphin's EasyReader.Or if you have an iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone, you can use a Daisy book reader such as Read2Go, InDaisy or DaisyWorm to play the Daisy book.

You can also listen to the Daisy audio with a Daisy audio player.

If you want to find out more about Daisy books visit the Daisy Consortium web site. In the meantime, happy reading!

Maybe everyone else already knows about Mr Thorne, but I didn't (Thanks for the tip, Angie McC!!)  Wonderful website with videos. It's aimed at teaching / reinforcing synthetic phonics to young children (and parents) but also useful for older children as it's not too babyish (well, OK, giraffe puppet --but cute!) but he's a trendy young guy so acceptable to girls and and a good role model for boys. There are over 200 separate 'lessons' all carefully organised into the appropriate Phonics 'Phase'. Also found in the iTunes Apps store (a range of cheap and useful iPad Apps), on YouTube, iPlayer, DVD and on Twitter.  Have a look!

The Kindle for PC Accessibility Plugin is now available for UK customers (and also for users in Australia, Canada and the U.S.). Kindle for PC is free software for reading Kindle eBooks on your Windows PC. The main feature of the new plugin is a text-to-speech tool which means that blind, visually impaired and severely dyslexic readers can listen to the book being read out by the computer. Kindle for PC Accessibility plugin has:

• Text-to-speech reading with adjustable voice settings
• Voice-guided menu navigation
• Large font sizes
• High contrast reading mode
• Keyboard navigation
• Accessible shortcuts

The Kindle reader software can be used to read out the text of the book, and blind readers can use Jaws or NVDA to read the menus and navigation instructions.

The software comes with two American voices - one male and one female - which are OK but not as good as Heather, for example. You can start, pause and stop the speech and read the current, previous or next sentences (see the list of shortcuts below). You can't use other voices on your computer with the Kindle software, and it doesn't highlight the text as it reads.

Like the standard Kindle reader, the font size can be massive (up to about 90pt), and you can change the colours (white on black, black on white, black on sepia).

For keyboard only users, there are keyboard shortcuts to navigate around the software and the eBooks.

The new Kindle reader is a significant step towards making commercial eBooks accessible for readers with print disabilities. There are now over 700,000 books available from the Amazon UK website and so it's a huge source of digital books.

I've updated our Kindle Quick Guide with the new features and you can now download it.

A few years ago Aileen MacIntyre, who teaches at Croftcroighn School in Glasgow, produced some 'symbolised' versions of Oxford Reading Tree books for pupils in the school who were struggling to learn to read. Aileen's books and work was featured in Examples of Best Practice in the 2007 Books for All Report. The idea of adding symbols to books intended to help children learn to read might seem unusual, but staff at Croftcroighn have found that the books help children with engage with the text, and they are sure that the books have improved the childrens' reading and word recognition skills.

Teachers might have concerns that children will rely on the symbols rather than learn to read the text, but the exact opposite seems to happen: for example, one teacher at Avenue End primary says:

"It is having a huge impact on their reading. It has helped with their recognition of high frequency words. They can now identify a lot of these words without the symbols. This is improving their reading and is now transferring to their writing."

Another advantage of the books is that they motivate children who are struggling to learn the words. Another teacher remarks that:

 "These children were struggling with the reading scheme being used in class and were showing signs of losing confidence. Use of this innovative symbolic approach as an aid to word recognition has helped the pupils regain their enthusiasm for reading with definite signs of progress being made by them.

 Aileen has now set up a company called Help Me Read to publish the books, together with worksheets, communication boards and record sheets to support teaching in class. The books are high quality publications, similar to the standard ORT books, and have Widgit symbols printed above the text.

The web site has information about who might benefit from the books, how to use them, an online ordering facility, and examples of how they can be used to support children with additional support needs, reading difficulties or English as a second language.

Most people think of alternative formats as being for example, Large Print, Braille, audio or digital books: Aileen's publications are a great example of how symbols can be used to make books more accessible in a different way.

Today is Burns Night and so we'll all be reading, reciting and singing songs from the bard. You can even download a free App to help you remember the words and find out what they mean (See An App's an App for a that).

So, I was thinking, what about children who use voice output communication aids? How can they join in the fun? 

Well, I suggest they need a decent Scots voice for their communication aid for starters. So girls are maybe OK, because they can get Heather, provided free of charge courtesy of the Scottish Government. So click below to hear Heather reciting the first verse of A Red, Red Rose:

O my luve's like a red red rose,

That's newly sprung in June.

O my luve's like the melodie,

That's sweetly play'd in tune.

Not quite Eddie Reader, but better than some of the alternatives, especially if you want a bloke's voice ....

Here's Microsoft Sam performing the first verse of Address to a Haggis.

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,

Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!

Aboon them a' ye tak your place,

Painch, tripe, or thairm:

Weel are ye wordy o' a grace

As lang's my arm.

 

Not pleasant.

Or we could have delightful Daniel assuring us that a man's a man for a' that:

 

Is there for honest poverty

That hings his head, an a' that?

The coward slave, we pass him by -

We dare be poor for a' that!

For a' that, an a' that,

Our toils obscure, an a' that,

The rank is but the guinea's stamp,

The man's the gowd for a' that.

 

Hmmm. Loses something I feel.

Culture Minister Fiona Hyslop said:"Robert Burns is Scotland's greatest cultural icon, recognised and celebrated all around the world. His legacy is of incalculable value to Scotland and the country's image abroad."

What we need on Burns Night is a high quality MALE Scottish computer voice! Then boys who use voice output communication aids can have their say too!

The Seeing Ear library is a free online library with about 2,300 books in digital format. Until recently only visually impaired or physically disabled people, or staff  working them, could join, but Seeing Ear has a new CLA licence which means that it can now be used by any person with a print disability, which includes dyslexia.

This is great news for pupils in Scotland and the UK because the library has files for loads of books by popular children's authors such as Jacqueline Wilson, J.K. Rowling, Eoin Colfer, Michael Morpurgo, and many more.

To join the libary and download books go to the Seeing Ear web site.

Most of the books are 'Plain Text' (.txt) files which can be read using almost anything on your computer, but you'll probably want to open them with Microsoft Word  or another word processor like OpenOffice and then change the font and font size to your own preferance. Then read them on screen or print them as e.g. Braille or Large Print.

During November 2010, all Primary 1 children in Scotland will receive a free copy of Manfred the Baddie from the Scottish Book Trust. Manfred won the 0-7 age category of the Royal Mail Awards for Scottish Children's Books last year, and over 11,000 children voted in this age group. The books will be delivered to local authorities for distribution to every P1 class in the area. The author, John Fardell, is 'on tour' meeting pupils and will also be taking part in a Glow Meet on Thursday 25th November from 1.45 to 2.45. The Scottish Book Trust web site has more information and also videos and teacher resources and posters.

However, some children won't be able to read or access the books. Some pupils can't hold the book or turn the pages because of physical disability; some pupils with sight loss won't be able to see the book; others, with learning difficulties, will struggle with the text.

Last year we produced accessible digital versions of Manfred so that pupils with these 'print disabilities' could read the book and take part in the awards. Pupils with physical disabilities can press a key, click the mouse, or hit a switch to turn the pages, while children with other difficulties can listen to an audio narration of the story.

If you have any children in your class who won't be able to read the Manfred paper books and you would like a digital version for them, download a request form (PDF format or DOC format) and send it to us, and we'll send you a CD.

Note that these digital books are only for children who can't read or access the paper copy.