Transcript Webinar Training on Everyday Technology for Learning Differences: Use the Tools You Already Have

Thursday, September 19, 2013
Presented by: Shelley Haven, ATP, RET Assistive Technology Consultant - Technology to Unlock Potential

From computers to smartphones to e-readers, kids today are immersed in technology. This webinar will demonstrate how to take advantage of familiar technology to compensate for learning challenges, capitalize on learning strengths, and reduce time and effort spent on school work. Through live demonstrations, participants will learn how everyday tech –word processors, Web browsers, consumer electronics, and more – can assist students who struggle with reading, writing, note taking, math, organization, time management, and attention.
Presentation highlights include:

•	Underutilized features in Microsoft Word and other popular programs
•	Learning supports built into the Mac and Windows operating systems
•	Apps that turn mobile devices (Apple iDevices, Android) into portable learning assistants)
•	Alternative uses for consumer electronics (MP3 player, camera, voice recorder, smartpen)
•	Add-ons, Web resources, and cloud drives to configure an Internet browser as an online study tool

CART Services Provided by: Total Recall Captioning, Inc.
Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility, and may not be totally verbatim record of the proceedings.

Captioner 
00:00 -  Thank you so much for attending today's webinar every day technology for learning differences and go ahead Shelly.   

00:10 - >> Okay well this is Shelly and very glad to in a virtual way see all of you here.  I'm an assistive technology consult ant and specialize in learning differences and executive function challenges and just a very little bit on this next slide so I'm on the second slide about technology to unlock potential that's the name of my consulting firm and like I said I work with learning executive function challenges.  Provide a number of different AT services from assessment to training, technical support, um, and implementing it making sure it actually happens at school and of course offering classes and workshops like we're doing today I provide all services on-site -- essentially I travel to the school or home throughout the Bay Area and also collaborate a lot with schools to help them get technology and get up to speed.  Okay.  So next slide is -- this is kind of an intriguing observation -- if you think about the fact that any students who were born in the eighties have never known a world without computers.  I have a wonderful picture of my daughter at one and a half years old lying on the carpet playing with an Apple 2 plus and students born in the nineties have not known a world without Internet and in the 2000's students had mobile devices and students born after 2010 will have always known about cloud computering and E books so students are emerged with the type of technology to help assist with learning challenges.   

02:33 - >> Internal and external learning tools -- why do we even want to use technology to address learning differences?  The graphic at the top shows a desired level of performance and the students current level of performance is somewhat below that and by the way for those of you out there who are professional educators and stuff I'm vastly speeding this up so an apologize for that.  So the first one is instructional intervention essentially instructional or reimmediatation to improve the students' abilities the internal tools that they apply to any tasks that they do and then there's compensate ATORY intervention.   

03:50 - >> Next slide so the goals for the technology is we want to choose technology that helps to complement that internal toolset.  To leverage their strengths like when I look at what sort of tools do I want to use for a student, that's one of the first things I look at what are the things the student does exceptionally well.  As an example someone who has great difficulty with handwriting but has no problem verbally so the best place to start let's take a look at the tools the people involved already have so on this next slide I'm looking at -- I'm getting some feedback here.  I don't know if somebody has their speaker or microphone on but any way you know what are the tools that most people already have you don't have to go out and buy them or learn something new what tools does everybody already have?  Well if you have a computer or mobile device it has an operating system.  Either Microsoft office word excel or PowerPoint or Apple iWork so basically you will have a word processer and probably have an Internet browser as a matter of fact you would not be viewing this unless you were online on a browser and mobile devices are common now not just the iPod and eye touch and iPad but Android and Kindles and things like that.  Some people may even have Adobe Acrobat.  Then of course you have access to whatever you can get through electronics and office supply stores.   

06:15 - >> So next slide is so what are some good reasons for pursuing what I've coined here?  For one thing it's inexpensive because you already have it.  There may be less resistance to using it because it's the sort of technology that everybody has.  It's also -- if it's something you are already using it familiar it may be less intimidating.  I'm going to show you some things with Microsoft word today that you may not know.  Because you already have it you can get started immediately one of the most intriguing -- people who might be resistance there may be less resistance to using something you know that you already have and once you see the benefits from that, that can be an enticement to explore a much more robust technology tool.  So the next 2 slides I'm just giving -- this is a really basic summary of strategies for leveraging every day technologies.  So first know what's on your computer or device.  Every device has an operating system either the Mac IOS or Android operating system there's all sorts of capabilities that are built into that we'll touch on a few today believe me we'll just touch on the tip of those.  Know the basics of Microsoft word or Apple whatever word processer you are using and also Adobe reader or the mobile phone or camera.  If you do have a smart device a Smartphone or mobile device like an iPad or Kindle take a look and really understand what you can do with that.  The second page with the strategies -- most browsers and this is a lot there's a lot more extensions available for most browsers now and they add capabilities to your Internet browser.  Someone just circled my name.  Anyway way there's also web based tools and resources that you can access and for those students who are for parents who are listening and um wondering about what the school has I would suggest checking with the school and find out what technology they also use if they are using interactive whiteboards that can provide capabilities that you might not already have.  So on this next slide is a crudely drawn graphic submerged iceberg and I want to remind everybody that we're really just touching the tip of the iceberg here the tools that we cover today are just a very small percentage of all of the tools that are available as a matter of fact if this graphic were correct that would imply that we're going to hit one ninth of all the tools so I want to hit some high points or interesting technology that you may not know about or buried in the technology you already have and if you want to learn more you can visit my website that's a place to start and the other thing I want to point out there's so much stuff to cover here.  I knew that everybody was going to get as a matter of fact Shannon is going to push out a handout which is a copy of the slides to everybody and so there's a lot more information on those slides than we're going to cover today.  But I wanted you to have that for a reference so I'll you know point out what's on the slides but we're certainly not going to cover everything that's there so I just wanted to make that clear all right?  As a framework for looking at all these technologies, what I've done is grouped them into five different learning areas and I've done them by student so I've applied example students named Annie Lucas Ben and Hans and Annie is in grade five has an issue with reading and Lucas is in grade 6 struggles with writing Leia having problems taking notes grade 8 and Ben struggles with math problems in grade 9 so let's go through these students here.  So this slide is just a little picture of Annie and she says I can listen a lot faster than I can read.  Alright.  This is quite common with kids with dyslexia and a number of other issues like that.  Okay I just went to the next slide by the way for those -- I know there's a ding that happens for those people mainly just listening to the slides here.  Now on the slide -- what is this?  Slide 16, Annie and reading.  I'm going to use this framework and a framework I'll show you on the next slide for each of the five students so the first slide for each student -- first column lists strengths difficulties and strategies for each student and the second column has those strengths difficulties and strategies.  Annie has very good verbal comprehension and reasoning but she DE codes printed text slowly difficulty visually tracking has a limited vocabulary and she's currently 2 grade reading levels behind and the effort she puts into reading really compromises her retention she's getting discouraged so what are some basic strategies we could use?  Well, there are 3 different aspects to reading that I want to address on the following slides and the first one is the visual experience of reading you know what does a text look like and the second one how can we supplement that visual text with audio?  And the next group would be on comprehending and taking notes from that text.  So this next slide -- I tried to break this up into 2 slides but it really makes more sense to stick it in one 3 column table.  All right so this is a table comparing the 2 main alternatives to print text which is audiobooks an audio recording of a human reader and electronic text reading essentially digital text like in Microsoft word or on a web page and for each of those 2 categories, I have a description, what are the pros and cons and you know what are the sources for the what are the best sources for textbooks in the K to 12 arena as I mentioned audiobooks you are just listening to a person reading.  Electronic text is the digital text and you use the computer to read it to you so the computer voices that are used may be a little harder to understand because they don't have the natural inflection intonation and expression in normal human speech but on the flip side with the audio book all you are getting is the audio you are not getting any text on the electronic text side you get to both see and hear the text and you can have the words highlighted as they are being read or you can highlight that text and take notes stuff like that so those are probably the 2 basic categories that you would be working with and I'm going to show you an example here so I'm going to go to what's called APP sharing in blackboard so we'll see how this works out and I'm going to be showing you my iPad so let's see -- we're going to go to reflect or and Shannon you can tell me if you are seeing what you think we should be seeing there.  Is this correct?  Shannon?   

16:10 - >> Yes can you hear me?   

16:13 - >> I said you can see my iPad here?   

16:16 - >> Yes I can see your iPad.  

16:18 - >> Okay I wanted to make sure it's showing up properly.  So just to show you a comparison what you are getting with each of those options this is learning ally and I'm going to be -- hold on -- what I'm doing is listening to chapter 11 in the wizard of Oz and again all you are seeing is the page numbers and hearing it but you can hear a person's voice reading the text.   

16:49 - >> The streets were alive.  

17:02 - >> You can speed it up and slow it down actually you can change the pitch of the voice too which is kind of interesting for the learning ally APP so now I'm going to go to read to go an APP made by Bookshare one of the major distributors for the K to 12 arena of digital text.  

17:30 - >> The wizard of Oz --  

17:44 - >> This is the same chapter.  

17:47 - >> 11 the wonderful city of Oz.  Dorothy and her friends were at first dazzled by a wonderful city.  

17:58 - >> Okay so you get the gist of the two different -- I'm going to see here I got to switch back off of APP sharing so hold on a second.  Let's see I got to remember how to do this.  Alright.  So now we're back confirm Shannon we're back at the slides again, right?  Okay.  Any way that shows you the difference between 2 completely different reading experiences.  It would be really nice if we could do both reading experiences at the same time in other words to hear the person reading while seeing the text and seeing the words highlighted.  Hold on I'm just getting a different slide here.  Right now I'm looking at -- what can we do to change the visual appearance of the text?  This is a 2 by 2 table here and again I used the same format throughout the presentation where it lists every day technology to consider on top and then more robust assistive technology on the bottom so what might be recommended typically for a student is a high end literacy and learning software which combines a number of capabilities that you saw there.  But what can we do with the technology we already have?  One thing we can do is we can obtain the E text from Bookshare and there's a way which I show a couple of slides from here to take that text and copy it into word and pages and now you can adjust the format of the text there.  I also want to point out that E readers such as eye books on the iPad Kindles and stuff have a number of visual tracking capabilities as well and we'll see some of those later here.  This next slide just shows the different things that you can adjust in Microsoft word so the first thing is probably the font the sans SERIF font is easier to read there's one called DYSLEXIE or open DYSLEXIC once you get the text into word you can increase the text size reduce the column width and you can also change the colors of the text and for many students the idea of black text on kind of a very light tan background almost like these slides here, is easier.  I'm going to go to the next slide.  I think I'm going to the next slide there we go a kind of close up on the left side looking at text what you downloaded from Bookshare times new Roman densely packed text I've changed it to much narrower columns changed the fonts and colors a number of different things like that you can do that right within Microsoft word.  All right next slide.   

21:54 - >> These are taking a long time to change so this is just a basic summary and you can refer to your handout later.  This is a 2 or 3 step process from taking text from Bookshare and putting it into either word or Apple pages inside the book folder you download from Bookshare there's a file with an XML extension.  Changing it to HTML and you open that in your browser and once in your browser you can copy and paste to Microsoft word or pages please keep in mind this is very important I wrote at the bottom of the slide here in order to get books from Bookshare copyrighted books from Bookshare or for that matter the audiobooks from learning ally you have to be eligible under certain parts of U.S. copyright law the only reason you have access to that is you are eligible and that restriction still applies even if you are dumping it into Microsoft word it's still only for your use I just wanted to point that out it's a really important point.  I see a question is there no DRM on these files you can do what I suggested with it but keep in mind encoded into the material is identifying information so if it did get out in the wild they can figure out where it came from so read your Bookshare user agreement and you will see more about that.  Okay so what else can we do?  We can supplement that text with audio and -- there's another question on the side -- I'm not sure about that fair use copyright law.  Let's save that until later.  Next slide supplementing the text with audio again another 2 by 2 tables with every day text listed on the top probably the easiest way I have several students listening to their audio book on their learning Apple have their head phones on and following along with the book.  If you are reading a PDF and it's a text PDF not a graphic PDF Adobe reading has a read out loud option we've already talked about the Bookshare APPs.  There's also a GoRead for Android devices.  Google play books on Androids you can use text to speech there's a few other options there that I've listed and you can set your IOS device, iPad iPhone whatever for later operating systems to just speak selected text select the text and say read out loud to me and it will read.  Here's a unique thing the Kindle fire emerging reading and remember what I mentioned before okay so on the audiobooks you are listening to a person but you are not seeing the text on the digital text you are seeing it and the words highlighted but you are listening to a computer reading.  Well, on the later model Kindle Fires they have a feature called IMMERSION reading.  You can buy the Kindle ebook and also if it's available buy the audio book and you can actually use together at the same time and you can see the words being highlighted as an actual person is reading.  It's only available for 30 thousand books right now but they keep adding to that.  You have to have a second edition Kindle fire but hey if you already have one, try it out.  So here's a gem buried in the Mac system it's called auto summarize or summarize on the Mac so say you have a large amount of text to read and you don't want to read through the whole thing you are not even sure it's worthwhile reading you can select that text for instance on a web page and select that text and then I'm going to be talking about the Mac version of this -- you go up to the summarize feature under the name of the APP and then services pick summarize and it will give you a window and I probably should use the arrow.  It will present you with a window is shown here at the lower right.  Cuts down the sentences to only the 20 that are the most important.  Uses a language processing, ALGORITHM so the example I show here says you know Apple's IOS 7 set to drop on Wednesday what you need to know.  Well I don't want to read the whole thing what do I need to know?  It tells me how to update.  That sounds like a good article.  So now I'll read the whole article.  Okay so highlighting annotating and extracting text again for the main assistive technology you might go to a high end literacy and learning software like Kurzweil 3000 how can I highlight and annotate text just using what I'm using now?  Perhaps the easiest way is stickies or highlighters or a 4 colored pen I have hands on students and the idea of them physically interacting with those utensils makes a huge difference to them so I want to make sure that we're not ruling out when we're talking about technology we're not ruling out -- there's a feature when you are collaborating with somebody called track changes and if you turn on track changes you can highlight sections take notes and it's a handy tool for taking notes because of one very interesting feature you can turn off the track changes feature so in other words all your highlighting and notes disappear and you can turn them back on again it's a really cool tool.  The other thing though on the next couple of slides here I'm going to show both ends of the spectrum the low technical with the physical highlighters and using Kurzweil and an in between thing with the annotation tools built into iBooks so this slide shows low technical and for some students the idea of a 4 colored pen is just fine and at the other end of the spectrum you have these expensive tools Kurzweil 3000 read and write gold and SOLO and other stuff like that.  But what can we do with the iBooks APP?  It turns out it has sophisticated annotation features and I'm just going to show you some of those here.  I'm going to switch over to iBooks so hold on a second while I go to APP sharing.  Stop sharing on one APP and start sharing on something else.  Alright.  Okay.  So you are looking -- this is the wonderful wizard of Oz again I happen to like that book.  So I could go to you know, my page here on chapter 11 where this emerald city is first described I'm going back to the table of contents and you will notice in the upper right -- notes.  I've taken a bunch of highlighted notes and the notes are all summarized in the section called notes and in the upper right a thing that says export and I can share those notes.  I'm going through this pretty quickly here.  I'm going to select all my notes and then say send them to myself via e-mail so here's an e-mail with all my notes on it and I've just extracted all my annotation and I can delete that draft there.  All right so now we're going to go back onto application -- whiteboard.  I'm going back to the slide presentation again.  So that's good to check out and if you have an iPad, you already have it.  So let's quickly move on because I see we're already at 4: 12 here and we want to finish up at five.  Let's move on to Lucas and writing.  I can do well when I talk about my ideas but not when I write them down.  Again, I'm going to look into this 2 column 3 row table look at Lucas's strengths and difficulties and strategies we can do for him so he articulates himself very well verbally and good visual spatial thinker but he has difficulties organizing ideas and problems with spelling and grammar and occasional misses words or leaves them out when writing and even though he has a good vocabulary it's difficult for him to retrieve words and also has poor penmanship and the sort of thing we might do if we were just looking at standard assistive technology stuff the sort of thing we might do for Lucas is to -- actually let's go onto -- we'll look at the different aspects of writing here so look at the motor aspects of writing and composition aspects of writing and the mechanics of writing spelling grammar word choice and things like that so I'll do that on the next slide here so this slide -- writing motor aspects again my 2 by 2 table.  If you think the student might benefit from having adapted grips check with an OT about that they would be more skilled about making recommendations about that.  The auto correct -- Microsoft word has a feature called auto correct you may notice if you type if you accidental type TEH for the it will automatically correct it.  How does that happen?  It's deep within the settings of auto correct feature like if you spell about with 2 B's it will know to correct that.  For instance you could enter equals and write down your initials and say that every time I type equals with my first and last initials, it's going to automatically convert that to my full written out name so you can create your own text macros and it can sometimes speed up writing for things that you type frequently.  On the Mac for most programs, not all, if you are stumped on how to spell a word -- for instance let's say I don't know if it's separate or separate with an A or E I can hit the escape key and it will bring a drop down menu and I'd recognize the correct spelling go ahead and use it.  It's a really handy feature built into the Mac.  The one thing it won't work with is Microsoft word interestingly but it will work with pages.  I'm going to get to on the next slide talking about annotating PDF's and talk a little bit about making sure understand the basics of speech recognition so let's move onto the next slide.  Okay so worksheets are kind of the BAIN of some students' existence in schools.  I write slowly can't fit in the space -- perhaps the easy way to do that is to type directly on a PDF copy of the worksheet.  If you have a Mac, you would use the preview program which is actually built into the Mac operating system if you are on windows there's a number of different free third party PDF annotation software like PDF exchange viewer you can go to my website and I have them listed the diagram I have towards the top there -- this is the toolbar you see for preview this icon over here on the right-hand side will give you a drop down for highlighting and this will allow you to draw squares do circles write your own text but it's a way for a student to type and let's say respond to an in class quiz.  They just give it back to the teacher so here's another interesting feature that's built into and Rosemarie I'm going to need you for the video here.  Adding voice annotations essentially adding a voice response to a PDF in Adobe reader so Rosemarie how do I start the video file?  Oh, she's doing it very good.  We have a thing worked out where Rosemarie -- she's running the videos from her end it just works better that way.  And she's starting to share the video.  Slowly revealing itself.   

39:17 - >> Okay I'm hearing my own voice back.  Hold on.  Echo.  Rosemarie, would it be easier to run it from my end?  I can do that too.  All right well I'll tell you what, I'm going to go to -- in the interest of time I'm just going to describe this and move on I've got to make an executive decision here.  I can describe it sufficiently I have the directions and you can follow along.  Essentially Adobe reader the free version has built into it 2 different, annotation features you can add comments and highlight text and that's all you can do however if you take that same document and do a very simple step to open in Adobe acrobat or Acrobat Pro turn on the feature enable for commenting what happens now when it's opened up in Adobe reader suddenly these other annotation icons show up one is add a voice note so a student could add a voice response to a written worksheet which I think is also pretty cool.  Okay so I'm going to move on to the next slide.  This is without a doubt the busiest looking slide of the presentation and I apologize for that but again it was important to kind of see the information here in the context of the other information.  What I'm doing here this is a 3 column table -- columns 2 and 3 are comparing standalone speech to text speech recognition with online speech to text and for each of those 2 options I'm going to talk about how it works what are some examples you know programs that do that what are the pros and cons and the last one a single item on stuff that applies to both.  So it's important to understand the difference between standalone speech to text and online speech to text.  Standalone are programs like drag and dictate for the Mac where the program resides on the device it resides on your computer and even if you are offline you can still use it and as a result all the transcription takes place on your computer and you can train with your own voice makes it more accurate over time add your custom vocabulary create your own commands however it has a fairly steep learning curve and it's also not free it costs something and the online version SURI built into the iPhone you are speaking and you can dictate into the iPhone or iPad but a lot of people don't realize though is the conversion of speech to text doesn't take place on the iPhone.  The iPhone is a long distance remote microphone and it's sending your voice to a server halfway across the country where it's being transcribed and being sent back however it's going to be less accurate you don't have an opportunity to train it to understand your personal voice as opposed to everybody else.  You can't customize it with different vocabulary and you don't see the text as you dictate it.  You dictate it hit the button to say I'm done and you see your text appear.  So it's very important to understand the difference between it.  SIRI Android and chrome speech dictation on IOS devices and interestingly also dictation on the Mac those are all online speech recognition okay?  Windows speech recognition is an interesting in between it's actually standalone built into the windows operating system so you can use it offline it's a little less accurate but it's also pretty easy to get up and running so if you have a windows computer that might be something you might want to explore.  Going to the next slide so what about composition?  Very often for students who are who need to organize their information visually like Lucas here in this example, they will you will hear recommendations using mind mapping and graphic organizing software I'm a really big fan of inspiration and inspiration Macs so many things you can do beyond organizing your thoughts and such but a lot of people don't have inspiration so what could you use other than for organizing what you are going to write -- well you can use the outline layout built into word or show document outline built into pages but word actually has a secret feature in it called smart art graphics and I'll show you that on the next slide.  So smart art graphics -- it's easy to use -- hit insert and smart art graphic and a number of pre-made choices and there's several dozen.  The graphic at the top right here shows the different categories of visual organizational relationships that you can use such as lists process diagrams cycles the typical you know top down hierarchy like an organization chart and other visual relationships so you have a choice between all of those and you see from the graphic on the bottom here, it presents you with the graphic which is organizing the ideas, then you can open up a text pane where you enter the text that goes with that graphics so if you are familiar with inspiration, it's like looking at a very simplified or limited version side by side with an inspiration out line view and it's built into word a lot more limits and structured than what you will find in inspiration and other mind map software however that could be a good thing having it much more structured where you can't go outside the line so to speak.  Okay so what about spelling grammar and vocabulary?  Let's see -- in Microsoft word if you get those squiggly underlines telling you you misspelled the word right click on the word it will give you options.  Somebody asked where can I get a copy of the PowerPoint at the end of the presentation Shannon is going to push out a handout essentially a copy of the slides so you will get it then.  So for -- you can right click in word a lot of people don't know you can do that.  I mentioned for the word completion in the Mac escape or option escape -- I'm going to show you a video of a special type of spell checker which is called the contextual spell checker I'll show you that in the next slide.  Sometimes you see the red squiggly line for incorrect words but you also see a green squiggly line both start with GR Microsoft word has a sophisticated grammar checker.  So if you open up preferences in word and go down the grammar checker you will find you can set for grammar styles or non agreement of verb and noun there's several dozen options you can set so it's really handy if you need to look for a specific writing issue that you have and you want to just have it show that.  I'm going to also talk about word banks in a couple of slides here and finally also text to speech software so we talked about text to speech before for reading but it's also a great tool for writing especially for students who have very good verbal comprehension skills so instead of proof reading your work you can proof listen to your work and have it read back to you and it's so much easier sometimes to hear oh my gosh I've left out a word how could I have done that?  If I have an e-mail that I have to send out that has to be worded perfectly I'll have the computer read it back to me because people have tendency to see what you thought you wrote as opposed to what you actually wrote so the proof listening tool can be really cool.  Alright.  Let's see so GINGER software if you have heard that before it only works on windows and by the way I'm going to pass this off as every day TECH only because it acts like a plug in to Microsoft word so based on that once you have an acquired it and it's free -- but it's only for windows.  If you need this capability I suggest you get the software GOTIT for Mac you have to pay for it though.  Anyway it's a contextual spell checker -- you realize that even if something is spelled absolutely horrible, you can use a human being can look at that text and see the you know and recognize this is what I think the person was trying to say, all right?  So what I'm going to do here it's probably easier just to show this to you and Rosemarie I'm going to go to my APP sharing this time.  Or I should say there is a free version and you are going to have to hold tight with me here for a second I got to do something.  I got to open up QuickTime so I can run this video.  Hang tight for a second because I'm actually not looking at my own screen right now.  QuickTime -- here we go.   

52:01 - >> Alright. So I'm going to open up the GINGER movie and I'll get back with you here in a second.  Go back to blackboard and hit the QuickTime player so hopefully you should be looking at a movie on your screen.  Can somebody confirm that they are seeing what appears to be a blank document in Microsoft word?  

52:28 - >> I can see a blank document Shelly.   

52:33 - >> I'm going to play this and you will see me typing a horrible written sentence into word so I'll scroll through this quickly so we don't have to watch the whole video all right?  So I'm writing if I could do better at spelling I would be able to express myself to more people.  We'll all agree that's a horrible written sentence all right but the point is as a human being you can look at that and say I think I know what the person is going to say.  Look what GINGER does with this.  I click that button.  This is what it would sound like the way I wrote it.  I'll hit approve and we have a perfectly written sentence.  Okay so now I'm going to go back and stop sharing.  Go back to the whiteboard so that's a pretty cool capability.  Talking about word banks a lot of software like word prediction square and others will give you -- yeah I see your note here Shannon.  Anyway, the word banks it's the easiest way to create a word bank if you give access to whether it's transition word or vocabulary words just open up another word document next to what you have all right?  So here you could see on the side here I have a list of transition words for time and I just have a second word document open up and if I want to I can drag the text over into my main document so 2 word documents at the same time.  So let's move on to Leia.  That's a picture of Leia.  I have trouble listening and taking notes at the same time.  She's a very good listener has a good memory although she understand well, she's very slow in processing auditory information so in a fast pace class or webinar like this it's difficult to you know process everything at one time it would be really nice to go back and re-listen to parts of it so we're going to look at -- next slide -- what we can do to reduce the amount of notes she needs to take in class.  So one thing have a note-taking template and annotate PDFs just like we saw before.  I'm going to the next slide -- to think about -- this is one of the most under used note-taking tools around a digital camera think about how much information is conveyed visually.  Taking a picture of the whiteboard to refresh your memory later taking a picture of a lab setup or rock specimens for a visual learner that's going to make a lot more sense than trying to convert that into words.  That's my most under used note-taking tool of the day so what about the idea of supplementing your notes with an audio recording?  Many of you are familiar with Livescribe pen in the interest of time I'm not going to show the video as I've been reminded I'm running close on time at the moment.  We'll talk about that on the next slide and there's a number of different tools that can help you link an audio recording with either what you hand write or what you type and I'll explain in a couple of slides here why that's important so if we're looking -- the Livescribe smart pen looks like a big fat pen audio records and also captures what you hand write but the key point is it links the 2 together so if you tap your handwritten note later it plays back the audio from that point what it was hearing at that moment and you can actually leverage that compatibility and of course you can upload what you do to the computer as well so Livescribe I classify that as consumer technology you can pick up at best buy or order from Amazon so that calls in the category of consumer technical but that also exists in Microsoft word for Mac a lot of people don't know this.  Workbook layout view in word 2011 a slightly difference place in word 2008 and 2004.  You will get a nice notebook and it has an audio feature that you can record while you are typing and click the speaker icon it will play the audio from that point while you were typing it's a really cool thing and like I said it's built into Microsoft word so people are wondering JEE what about windows?  Well in windows they give you OneNote so if you buy Microsoft office you will see an application called OneNote and may be some other time we'll do an entire webinar just on that it's a really powerful tool and also has audio capabilities built into it.  There's audio note and note ability that will also record along with handwriting and typing so this page here just summarizes a good strategy for you know leveraging that audio recording the goal is to listen more write less and target the play back if it was difficult listening to the first time it will be difficult the second time unless you only listen to certain parts so the key is what are the parts that I'm going to go back and listen to such as teacher says this is going to be on the test or here's your assignment for tomorrow or a change of topic or I don't understand this part I need to go back and listen to it and maybe you didn't get enough sleep the night before and you zoned out for a few minutes so you can have your own code or symbol and mark on the page but you got to give it forethought as to what are those places you want to go back to?  So that's a pretty good note-taking strategy you might use.  So how about Ben and -- he doesn't want to show his work.  I'm changing slides here because he feels I can do all the math in my head and he's into algebra now and really doesn't need to show the steps writing is labor us for him.  We'll move to the next slide talking about different options for Mac notation some of you may know there's a tool built into Microsoft word both Mac and PC called equation editor and you can enter all sorts of symbols for writing equations up to including calculus all sorts of stuff the problem is you can't type any of those symbols you have to use your mouse for those and it gets kind of difficult all right?  So what I'm going to look at -- I'm going to go to the next slide here -- is what can we use to type math equations into Microsoft word and again I'm going to pass this off as every day text because once you get this software, it actually links directly with Microsoft word becomes part of Microsoft word -- it's a plug in so equation editor is the version that comes with word the price for Mac type 57 dollars by the way it's the full version of equation editor and will allow you to type complex math and I have several students working with this that are using MathType or FX equation an equivalent program that allow you to type perfectly formatted math and if you are a good typist it can be a lot faster than trying to hand write it.  There's FX graph and FX draw as well.  So finally wrapping up here so I got about 19 minutes left if we want to leave 10 minute left for the question and answer is -- this is Hans and Hans says I have so many ideas and papers and things to do that I often lose track of them.  So this is my standard 2 column by 3 row table here showing Hans's strengths difficulties and strategies he's very creative picks up concepts quickly but his mind constantly darting from one stimulus to another and procrastinates.  I wouldn't know anything about procrastination.  How can we use technology to reduce the visual auditory and internal distractions that are pulling him off task?  How can we increase the awareness of how he's spending his time so he can make good educated decision about here's how I want to spend my time and here's how I don't spend the time I noticed a question came up about the MathType before that said how do you type it with a keyboard?  Yes.  You just use a standard keyboard so I'm changing topic here which is interesting because I'm talking about executive function issues yes you type with a standard keyboard and for most math functions very easy to remember codes like command E for exponent and command R for roots.  So back to Hans -- we want to reduce the distraction and increase his awareness of his distractions and help him break his projects into manageable chunks and kids who need to fidget -- they can be up and around it actually helps their attention so let's see what we can do.  So in regard to attention and focus let's look at removing the visual distractions on a computer.  A couple of commands on windows and Macs for hiding -- you will see in the next slide there's actually free APPs which can do more than that they fade out everything on the background if you are reading on the web look up read ability.com and it will allow you to reformat a web page on the fly reformats the page and removes the images.  Every browser has a capability to hide the images and if the images are distracting with lots of ads on them you can turn off the images on the browser the way to do that is different with each browser but I want to let you know that exists.  There's an extension available for most browsers called Ad Block and essentially blocks the appearance of any add on the page the implications of this are huge so if I said Ad Block is the all time most downloaded extension for any browser, I wonder why?  Anyway so that takes care of the visual aspect if you are working on a computer.  What about auditory distractions?  Very often auditory the solutions for auditory distractions as well you need to work in a quiet room with no distractions.  That works for some people but you want to have white noise.  And music and head phones work well with that and there are white noise APPs you know the sounds of trains planes waves crashing crickets CHURPING anything you want.  Most of you are probably familiar with fidget toys.  It helps you to regulate your attention.  Standing up at a whiteboard standing up at a stand up work table or desk can also help and this last idea of using a blue tooth headset with speech recognition was given to me by one of my recent students he really did much better if he was not sitting in a chair while he was thinking.  We got him hooked up with speech recognition.  He uses a blue tooth headset connected to the computer and dictates while wandering around a large room and he can write so much better by doing that.   

1:08:15 - >> So this is just a summary slide showing a couple of different utilities that you can add for a Mac or PC that essentially dims or hides everything but the front most window and can even get rid of the task bar in windows or dock in Mac which are sometimes some of the biggest distractions.  All right so time and task and Shannon speaking of time I'm looking at my time here.  Anyway, so time and task how do I manage the things I need to do and the time I have to do them?  Sometimes the simplest pad and paper for writing down something you need the simplest is your voice so if you have an APP on your phone or Smartphone that records your voice make a note to yourself.  For that to be valuable you have to have an end of day strategy put it on your calendar or on a time and task management APP or something like that.  Use of digital calendars of course is important I'll show you on the next slide assignment calculator a very interesting web resource for helping to think about how to breakdown large projects.  Let's see -- leach block an extension for Firefox and self-control is an APP a free APP for the Mac and essentially what they do is they allow you to specifically say don't give me access to these time wasting websites and do it for 45 minutes because I want to focus on something so kind of reduces the temptation to go to YouTube or Facebook or something like that because you know you can't access it as a matter of fact the only way to shut it off is to restart the computer so it just lowers the temptation level is all it does.  If that's still not enough well there's parental controls that can be used and then there's the use of the TimeTracker an APP that you can add to Firefox keeps a running total of how long you have been on the web and it can be very Illuminating to see -- I can't believe I've been on the web that long I'm actually going to go to my own website rather than web tour here and show this to you.  I'm going to stop and go to SAFARI okay so this is actually something like that it's called research project calculator and I can type in the name of my assignment whatever my class is we'll say math I don't know I'll make it a writing assignment I put in beginning and end dates and it's going to tell me how to breakdown that task into -- hold on -- I didn't do that right.  Now create an assignment.  Alright.  Please choose an assignment template.  Here we go.  Alright.  And it's going to help me breakdown the task and say by this date you need to have gotten this done and by this date you need to have gotten this done etc. Etc. And it's an interesting way of looking at how to breakdown assignments into different parts.  I know I'm into the question and answer time.  I will finish up quickly here.  Alright.  So what else do we have?  With regard to organization an accordion file but don't organize it by let's say class organize it by context like everything in this part of the accordion file is what I'm going to work on tonight this is what I'm going to give to my parents this is what I'm going to turn in tomorrow morning.  There's also a feature on both Mac and windows called virtual folders or saved searches so if you have searched for something on your computer you can save that search and if you happen to name all your files according to a consistent -- you can create a folder that automatically -- it's built into the operating system.  We talked about digital notebooks and on the interest of time we're not going to watch the video of it.  Quickly.  OneNote allows you to clip information from various sources like the web and dump it into pages you have pre setup in your notebook and Evernote will do that too.  It retains the link back to the original source so if you want to know where did I get this information from?  That's automatically stored you don't have to think about it.   

1:14:06 - >> And then finally these last 2 slides -- I'll leave this as an exercise for the student I realized how many different things you can add to a browser I started to get overwhelmed.  So I have a laundry list here.  Cloud storage book mark web based resources just to think about.  Next slide I have interesting browser extensions to look into so you can do that after the Webinar here and at the bottom of that page are the links for where do I find extensions for Google chrome Firefox Internet Explorer and SAFARI so those you go to find some of those links all right?  So remember I talked about Ad Block before?  I thought I'd end on a humorous.  

1:15:25 - >> Cat block replaces every ad on the page with a picture of a cat.  It was started as an April fool's joke so if you are willing to pay for it, you can get cat block.  So lastly, I'm going to go to -- there's my contact information if anybody has any questions later and also Shannon just mentioned she just pushed out today's handouts to everybody so you all have a copy of the slides and if you have any questions I'll be happy to answer e-mails and stuff like that and now we have five minutes leftover and we'll open it up to questions and answers and Shannon I'll let you moderate that.   

1:16:19 - >> Sure Shelly less than five minutes because we have to go through a survey but I think one question was about -- I'm going back to the chat box something about what is your website was one of the questions.  

1:16:37 - >> The website is on that previous slide.  I've got it at the bottom of every single slide so it's TechPotential.net technology to unlock potential as far as I'm concerned that's what I do for a living.  

1:17:01 - >> I think there was one question about I think it was about -- what was free I think it was mentioned around 430 was GINGER free I'm not sure exactly.  

1:17:15 - >> Without the text to speech function is free if you want to text to speech function there's a subscription charge.  Got it for the Mac is not free it's a subscription based thing also.   

1:17:33 - >> Yeah just making sure.  Anything else?  Any other questions?  One more minute?   

1:17:42 - >> If you think of questions afterwards, there's my you have got my website e-mail address and telephone number on the handout and I'm more than happy to entertain questions so --  

1:17:55 - >> Alright.  Any questions?  Well, the handouts have been pushed out and thank you so much Shelly for presenting and if you think of more questions always call her or e-mail her or find her on the website thank you very much for coming to today's webinar at the end of the webinar there is a survey and please complete the survey so that we can improve future webinars so when you exit the platform a window will appear it's very short a couple of questions just let us know what you thought about today's webinar thank you so much everyone for coming.  

1:18:41 - >> All right have a good rest of your day and week.   

1:18:45 - >> Thank you.