Livescribe Pen Introduction: Long Overdue

Here at SOU, we've been using the Livescribe pens extensively for the past couple of years. It's astonishing to see the difference they can make for students. You can check out details on our program, or even see a local news article, if you're so inclined. This blog post will explain a few of the basics of using the pen for taking lecture notes, so continue reading!

Creating Accessible eReader Formats: A How-To Story

A growing number of students are finding that the scalability of text size, integrated dictionary, and text-to-speech options of the Amazon Kindle and Apple's iPad are fantastic features. They also enjoy the speed of purchase, lighter physical load, and (often) lower purchase price, as do their peers. A growing number of textbooks are available in this way.

But what happens when a student with a print disability depends on those formats in order to have access to the text...and it's not available for purchase in that format? Enter Disability Resources! I'm going to focus in this post on how we create those formats in response to some colleague questions. Info on the legalities and suchlike for our students is available elsewhere.

Google Docs and Accessibility, Part 1: Documents

Here's the dealio. Google Docs, at this point, incorporates word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, forms, and drawings. It's a big chunk 'o stuff, and frankly, I doubt anyone's got the patience to read through a blog post that covers the accessibility of them all. Today's post will tackle just Documents, the word processing portion of Google Docs. I'll get to the others in turn. (If you have a burning desire to hear about one of them next, just drop me a note in the comments!)

Keep It All Organized with Google Calendar

Last week, I posted about the benefits and barriers of Gmail for students with disabilities. This week's topic is Google Calendar- a webapp I love, love, love. Once again, we'll be taking a look at the ways that Google Calendar can make life easier for students with disabilities, as well as some of the need-to-know accessibility info.

Tips & Tricks in Using a Kindle for Academic Reading

With the dawn of the iPad on the scene, some people are wondering why they'd bother with a Kindle. After all, the Kindle can't play games or surf the web (ok, it can, but it's k.l.u.n.k.y.)--or at least, not yet it can't. I've posted before about Kindle accessibility and the advantages and disadvantages of a Kindle for students with disabilities. There have been several pilot programs with the Kindle for college-level reading and they have started posting their results. Examples include Reed College and Princeton University. For the sake of argument, here, let's just assume you have a Kindle, and talk about doing academic reading on one of these bad boys.

Locating Info Within the Book

I'm a very visual person. I use highlighting and margin notes in my books now in order to do one thing: remember where on the page to locate information I may want to use again. Often, I highlight quotes I may want to use in a paper, or I will write a phrase that summarizes a couple of paragraphs and include arrows or brackets. When I go back to what I was reading in order to use it, I use these visual cues to help me locate information. With a physical book, I can flip through the pages and locate what I want. Flipping through the pages is a no-can-do on the Kindle. You'll have to approach it a little differently.

While you're reading:

• Make generous use of Kindle's highlighting feature. Conventional wisdom says to highlight between 10-15% of the material in a physical book. Because you are going to use these highlights differently, shoot for 20% or so. Err on the side of highlighting more than you think you'll need.
  
• Keep the highlights relatively short. The bigger your preferred font size, the shorter you should make your highlights. The reason: when you view My Notes & Marks, where the Kindle stores your highlights, it will display between two (big font size) and size (small font size) lines of highlight. If you are trying to locate something and it's below that cutoff line, you won't see it when you're scrolling through the Notes & Marks.
• Type your notes as tags, not conventional notes. Typing on the Kindle is a bit of a, well, pain in the gluteus. The less you have to do, the easier it will be. Think of your notes as labels (tags) that will help you get back to related content. You can put multiple tags in a note, if you want. I also don't worry about capitalization or punctuation in the notes as it just slows the note entry process further. A bonus of this practice is that it encourages you to make concise (1 word!) summaries of the material you're reading, which will help your retention and comprehension. (For example, the tags I'd create for this paragraph are: tag, label, category, summary, notes, suggestions. Yours might be different from mine!)

Finding the information again:

• Search! The search feature in the Kindle is pretty darn handy. If you remember a key word or phrase (the shorter the better, by the way) that can help you locate a passage again, search for it. You can also search just your tags (notes) by typing in the search word, then moving the 5-way button to the right until it highlights 'notes'.
• View your marks. In the Menu, select "View My Notes & Marks" (one book) or in the Home screen select "My Clippings" (all your books). Because, again, I'm recommending a generous use of highlighting, there will be several pages of marks. While this is a little time-consuming to flip through, it is significantly faster than trying to remember where you saw that one thing and going through page turn after page turn in the full book. In one book I was using for my last paper, I had 72 pages of notes and marks. However, I was always able to find what I was looking for...which is kinda the point, right?
  

Citations

There's just not a lot of agreeement out there on how to cite Kindle books. The lack of real page numbers makes specific references just a bit wonky. However, the folks at the APA were kind enough to actually address citing the Kindle. For other style formats (MLA, Chicago, etc.), the consensus seems to be to consider it an online/electronic, unpaginated source. Remember, cite the version you read. If you read the Kindle, cite it. If you read the physical book, cite that. If you read it on Google Books, cite that.

Those Darn PDFs

One of the best - and worst - features of the Kindle is its ability to read PDFs. Yes, you can read PDFs natively on the Kindle with no conversion process by either sending them through Amazon's service (cheap) or connecting your Kindle to your computer with the USB cord and dragging the PDFs to the Documents folder on your Kindle (free). However, you can't annotate, change sizes, have the Kindle read it aloud, or any of the other features that make the Kindle such a good reader. I'm going to let you in on a secret that will make this easier... shhh, lean in a little closer....

Go download Calibre.

Free. Open source. End of problem. Wish I'd discovered this three terms ago when I first got my Kindle.

Desktop Distractions? Block 'Em Out!

So, you're working on a paper. Chugging away, everything's going great... and then, since you have Facebook running in the background, one of those little popups comes up at the bottom of your screen. You stop writing to read it...

(30 minutes later)

Oh, yeah, you were writing a paper. Hmmm... train of thought has not only left the station, but it took all your baggage with it.

There are some ways to deal with desktop distractions. Today, we'll look at some options. If you have other techniques or technology that you find helpful, post it in the comments!

Clear the Visual Clutter with Ghoster or Isolator

Concentrate only on one window at a time and dim the rest of your screen. Both programs work quite similarly, making only the active application clearly visible.

Ghoster (Windows)
Ghoster does a nice job of clearing the background, though it doesn't (as you can see) block all visibility. However, with everything in the dark, I'm much less likely to wander off to it. My favorite part is that it also dims out the Task Bar, which likes to distract me with its flashing lights and popups.






Isolate (Mac)
Isolate can be configured in a few different ways - my favorite is the complete blackout. Because my Mac doesn't pop stuff up at me nearly as often as my Windows machine does, I'm less worried about the fact that the Dock doesn't dim.

Really Distracted? Lock Yourself Out With LeechBlock!

If you know that the siren song of the web will be calling your name (shhh, Facebook, I'll be with you later!), but you still need to use the, well, useful sites to complete your homework, you might want to try LeechBlock.
LeechBlock - Firefox extension (Windows/Mac)

LeechBlock allows you to specify specific sites, like MySpace or Facebook, that tend to be less than productive for you. You choose the sites, you choose the times to block them. You can, of course, choose to unblock them, but generally the extra steps you need to do that will help you remember why you blocked them in the first place.

Better than Spell Check on Steroids

Have you heard about Ginger?

I was absolutely blown away by the demo at the AHEAD conference this summer. Ginger has the potential to completely change the way that students with dyslexia and other visual processing learning disabilities feel about writing.

"Why for how come so?" I hear you asking. Ginger takes the spelling and mechanics errors dyslexics can often make and corrects them by looking at the syntax of the sentence, rather than just the word in isolation. An example they have posted on their site:

Original: H ws nt fileing wale whan he retrnd
MS Word's corrections: H was not filing wale when he returned
Ginger's corrections: He was not feeling well when he returned


One thing you'll notice immediately about Ginger is the contextual help for choosing the correct word.

One other thing I also notice is that it's slow. Ginger does all of its work over the Internet, so even with my high-speed connection here in my office at SOU, there's still some wait time. Pretty much, that's the only downside I'm finding.

Currently, Ginger is in beta - which means it's free! Download it and give it a try; you may just find Ginger revolutionizing your writing.