assistive technology

For this weeks "choose your own adventure" lab, I chose to go with audio books. I had briefly learned about them in my CEP 452 but I really wanted to explore the options more in depth. I am passionate about my special ed students and I want them to exceed their goals and be able to grow and learn as easily as a general ed student. I will be teaching learning disabled students, and audio books will greatly help them with their reading skills. Assistive technology is an example of Universal Design for Learning (or UDL). This is a major area in special education that is growing at a rapid rate. Firefox also has a text-to-speech reader that we learned about when using audio books. This will help my students even further.

There are many different options to choose when searching audio books in google, but I chose to research LibriVox which is a fairly recognizable program online that allows users to read books that are in the public domain. The other choice that I almost choice was Kurzweil. This seems to be for more severly disabled students than the ones I am going to be teaching so I chose LibriVox instead.

LibriVox runs strictly off a volunteer basis. Volunteers record the books and then make them available on the website. The website is also extremely helpful as it has links that show you how to listen/read on the website. You can either download a zipfile or save it in your itunes. I found the itunes version to be extremely easy to use. After you download whichever book you choose into your itunes, you click play just as you would with any song. I choose to try Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

The largest drawback I saw to this website is that there are no pictures for the books. For younger students, this would be problematic. However, I plan on teaching middle school when the students are moving away from using pictures in stories to plain texts. I think that this will be extremely beneficial to them.

I hope to explore other audio book sites as well, but I think LibriVox is a useful starting tool that will hopefully open new doors to teaching and learning.