Foray into sound editing

I promised my tech aid class that in addition to learning how to take apart mice and keyboards, clean them and put them back into working order. We would do some work with mp3 editing and recording. The time has come for me to get better at Audacity. I looked around the web for tutorials to help the kids and me both. There were lots. Some were too technical, some were not particularly school appropriate. Finally, once again the Aussies came to the rescue (You may remember the Max's Sandbox originally was developed down under, with support from the South Australia Training and Employment Department.)

I discovered the Technology School of the Future (TSoF), a staff training and development centre within the South Australian Department of Education and Children's Services. Inside I found the perfect Audacity tutorial for my needs. I am going to try it out with the kids this week and will let you know how it goes.

PS In the quest I found an early tech literacy site with Early ICT skill tracking which might be helpful in our portfolio work.

Universal Design

Many years ago (1997) a special educator friend, Annie Miler, gave me a copy of an article from The Council for Exceptional Children, Creating Readable Handouts, Worksheets, Overheads, Tests, Review Materials, Study Guides, and Homework Assignments Through Effective Typographical Design. I have hung on to it ever since and have gone online periodically to look for it without success.

Today I ran across it again and tried online once more. Hurray! There is a new, similar article Using Universal Design to Unlock the Potential for Academic Achievement at At-Risk Learners. I think the points covered, especially on layout and design would be a help for all teachers, I guess that is why they call it Universal Design [also posted on Learning Circles]

Rubrics

The DCS Tech Committee is having a discussion on portfolios and rubrics. I shared the following rubric maker. If you haven't seen it already you may want to check it out.

http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php This is my favorite rubric maker.
1. They have a number that are already created.
2. You can modify all of them.
3. You can start from scratch if you like.
4. You can save them and go back and change them later.
5. You can enter your results and look at class distribution.
6. You can export it to Excel if you want to adjust the format.

Cool huh?

There is also a link on this page to Equity Index: http://equity.4teachers.org. This is an index of all special ed related materials on their site.