Apps for Special Education

Power Up: Common Sense Media's guide to nearly 100 great apps for kids ages 2-17 who have special needs and learning differences.

Via John Evans

Ebooks are all the rage these days, and your iPad is a perfect device for reading them. Textbooks, too, are becoming de riguer for many students in college and even high school, as educators, schools, and publishers find a greater demand for electronic instructional materials.

 

But studying from a book requires interacting with the text at a greater level than just reading it, of course, as students need to keep track of specific passages, or comment on them as they relate to their learning or lecture notes. Most eReading apps, like Nook and Kindle, have these features as well, but iBooks definitely has the most well designed, so let’s take a look at how to use it to study with your electronic books."

 

Via John Evans

Select and Speak review by Paul Hamilton

Via Kathleen McClaskey

A UVM blog from the Center of Teaching and Learning.

 

"This post focuses on one of the three core principles in UDL: multiple means of representation.

 

This means moving beyond textual representation by presenting information and conceptual knowledge to students in a variety of formats, e.g., images, video, and audio. Not only does research indicate that this practice can enhance student understanding and retention of course content, it can also be used to engage students and prime discussion. Students responding to an image, song or movie clip can spark reflection and debate."

Via Kathleen McClaskey

 
Posted on February 18, 2013 by Thomas Armstrong

"The rapid pace of new educational technologies has made it so that students with special needs can accomplish many things in the classroom that were difficult or even impossible for them only a few years ago. The following list contains some of the best apps I’ve seen for kids with neurodiversities in communication, reading, sociability, attention, and behavior."

Via Kathleen McClaskey

"Nowadays teachers and students have a variety of ways to show what they know and to express themselves.  These web and iPad apps can turn students into teachers and teachers into super-teachers! Furthermore, most of the apps listed in the infographic are free of charge."

Via John Evans, Kathleen McClaskey

At the following list you will find 19 Free Text to Speech tools that your students' will appreciate. Some of them you have to install and some you will install on your browser. The most awesome about these tools is that are FREE!

Via Kathleen McClaskey

"TextGrabber + Translator turns your iPhone into a multifunctional mobile scanner with translation capability."

 

An inexpensive app that can actually turn an iPhone and IPad into a scanner. You simply take a picture of a document with your device and the app uses Optical Character Recognition to create an editable text file. Just take a picture of the text, and you can immediately edit it or translate, share via e-mail and SMS, or post directly to your account at on Facebook, Twitter and Evernote.

 

Not only that, but it can translate documents from more than 40 different languages. This app can also be very useful for anyone who prefers or needs to read (and manipulate) digital text documents rather than print documents.

 

One more app that is leveling the playing field!

 

Via Kathleen McClaskey