Ablenet curriculum and accessible books

[Darlene Brodbeck]

I saw the subject line regarding literacy and AAC and I wanted to share an idea with all of you regarding a new twist to an already existing curriculum. I had the great pleasure of meeting Mary Sagsetter from Ablenet in May when I went to a conference with Deb Barrows. That Deb, she is always connecting people!!! Anyway, she showed me some of their materials, MeVille to WeVille and the Star Reporter. Both nice programs. But what is really nice about them is that they provide suggestions to teachers on how to integrate students that use AAC into the curriculum. They are written for my students!! They also have wonderful ideas for integrating adaptive tech into the curriculum and for the activities to go with the units. Both of these curriculum units use a variety of books from a variety of authors. We have since decided to purchase both of these programs for the schools that I work in. However, I was still stuck on the idea that the traditional book was not going to cut it for all of my kids. I asked Mary to send me the book list for the two programs and was in the process of ordering additional books that we could adapt for our students with page fluffers and lamintated cut out pictures when it occured to me that I had a wonderful resource. Joe!!!!! Joe Rickerson is the executive director for the Accessible Book Collection. We pay $50 a year and have access to a very nice list of digital books for our students with print disabilities which we format in Clicker to make them accessible to our students with disabilities. I emailed Joe and being the wonderful man that he is, he agreed to scan what ever books on the list were appropriate for scanning. Sometimes the layout makes them difficult to scan. So Joe is going to start scanning and I am gong to start Clicking in Clicker and we should end up with some wonderful and truly accessible books for our students to go with our new curriculum. For ayone not really aware of the power of Clicker; Clicker allows our students to read the text, read the text that they know and click on individual words that they need assistance with, or have all of text read to them. Students can also record themselves reading or use their aac device to record into the microphone within the book. It is switch accessible and we can increase the font and use a high color contrasat for our students with visual difficulties. We can provide all of this support through one template (UDL) so we do not have to create a zillion different adaptive books.

If anyone else is using the Ablenet products and would like to get involved with this initiative, please send me a message.

I know I am rambling -sorry - must be the allergy meds.

Enjoy the day

Darlene

[Samuel Charles Sennott]

Darlene, this looks terrific. It should be exciting to formally hear about the other links to the Meville curriculum that will be announced at CTG.

In my new position, we are looking into starting a similar project adapting the book list from the Building Blocks book from the Four Blocks Framework. Projects of this sort seem so powerful because they are linked to good teaching, er...curriculum rather, but hopefully that leads to good teaching.

I would love to speak with you off list about the project with Meville to Weville

[Darlene Brodbeck]

Lets talk at CTG which might actually work better than email because I would like to hear about what you are doing with your project.

[Samuel Charles Sennott]

Sounds great Darlene! That will be here before we know it!

[Nichole Thomason]

Wow this sounds wonderful. My husband teaches high school students with disabilities and this is always a difficult task to conquer... finding age appropriate books that the students enjoy.

[Samuel Charles Sennott]

It will be awesome to see the connections worked on by Don Jonston and Karen Erickson at Closing the Gap. Nichole, definitely forward that info to your husband when it is formally rolled out:
http://www.donjohnston.com/offers/project_converge/dji.html and

http://www.donjohnston.com/prof_services/conferences_events/events....

It's called project converge! How cool!

[Darlene Brodbeck]

Hi Sharon
We are very excited about using the programs from Ablenet and I think our students will really enjoy them. Having the books formatted in Clicker will just allow our students to take a more active role in the process. I will keep you posted.

Darlene

[Wendy Homlish]

We have been implementing Star Reporter since 2004 and we LOVE it. I have created extension activities that are available on our webpage http://www.cliu.org/se/assistive_technology.aspx Here is the link.. Not updated for a while - no time! You can also access copies of all of our newspapers if you want to see what they might look like. We also bring our classes together monthly (our classes are spread out across 14 districts!) for a theme-related CBI (gee, now there is INSTRUCTION in CBI!). It has been great. I will post some photos!
Wendy

[Linda Bastiani Wilson]

Patricia Weismer and I are presenting about the project to convert the books on the AccessibleBookCollection.com into Clicker 5 and IntelliTools formats. Anyone interested in helping with the project or learning more about it is invited to join us at "Electronic Picture Books - Stop Reinventing the Wheel" on Friday, 19th, at 9:30.

Darlene mentioned a single template that provides access to a wide variety of kids. You can download these templates at http://accessiblebookcollection.wikispaces.com/. Hopefully, you'll be interested in working with us! Joe Rickerson has already started scanning some of the books from the Ablenet programs. Silly Sally is ready to go in IntelliTools format. It is accessible through touch window, click to read, auto scan, or step scan (as are all the books that have been converted on accessiblebookcollection.com).

Linda

[Samuel Charles Sennott]

Linda,

Thanks for sending me the link the other day. We have started a new initiative at Nova Southeastern and want to speak with you about participating. Let's talk at CTG briefly or I will message you in the coming weeks. That's awesome you are doing that with Patti!

[Darlene Brodbeck]

Hey Linda

Thank you for mentioning the original project.

FYI: For those of you working with younger readers please check out the link http://accessiblebookcollection.wikispaces.com as we already have a lot of books converted to Clicker 5. Last year as part of our professional development at ACES I worked with teachers converting approximately 70 books using Clciker 5. That should keep the students clicking (and reading) for awhile! We have an excel sheet listing what books have already been converted (in Clicker or Intellipics) and what books are waiting to be converted. I have converted longer chapter books for students as well but they are too large to post at ABC and have made some adaptations to the template for specific learners so that they can be more successful. If you would like help with books for older readers using Clicker 5, please email me as I would be happy to assist.

Enjoy the day

Darlene

[Samuel Charles Sennott]

Their session at CTG was terrific! What a great project!

[Laura Leigh]

Thanks for the link to the accessible book collection. Wow!