Haugen’s Tech Tips Blog

Paul Hamilton has amassed an amazing collection of Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education that you won’t want to miss! Well organized and very comprehensive.  It’s also an inspiring design for a resource-sharing blog.

Now this is amazing to me: dotSUB uses a Creative Commons license and a wiki format to provide video captioning in multiple languages. Anyone can view the videos in any of the available languages. To upload, caption or translate a video, you need a registered account.
The opportunities here are endless, for people learning languages, sharing cross culturally, those struggling with literacy or those who can’t hear.
Explore the site and try it out. Then add it to your toolkit!

ATSTART is an online curriculum for educators to learn more about Assistive Technology: Strategies, Tools, Accommodations and Resources, made with the help of many of the good people I know through QIAT.

ATSTAR is an online curriculum designed to improve educational outcomes for students with disabilities by helping teachers learn to use assistive technology in the classroom. Our core program is a series of online teacher training modules with supporting expert videos.

This is a subscription service, with outstanding content and quality.

I have been a list serve fan for several years now, thanks to Joy Zabala and her good work at QIAT.  I feel like I’ve got a whole world of experts at the click of an email send button.  But often all that good insight and discussion gets lost in the archives, and I’ve longed for a ‘better way.’  I keep thinking a wiki or two might do it — a collaboratively written site all about assistive technology.  But somehow people have to want to come and then know what’s new or what to add and so on.  It’s a bit overwhelming, and I think some people hold back because their query may feel too insignificant or unformulated, etc.  So how to bridge the gap? 
Well, whether Ning is it or not, it definitely has me intrigued! Karen Janowski keyed me into Ning via the social networking site she and Brian Wojcik created at http://assistivetech.ning.com/
What I’ve ‘grocked’ so far is that Ning lets you create social networks with blogs, discussions, groups, tags, photos, videos and more, so you can pop your question or idea wherever it may fit.  I’ve got lots more to learn, but it’s exciting stuff… Can’t wait to see where this goes!

Karen Janowski does it again… an extensive blog post on free technology tools for universal design in the classroom. Karen is one of the most down-to-earth and get-it-done people I know and she has a great way of communicating. Bookmark her post and keep coming back for updates.
Now, what I’d really like to see is a wiki on the same topic, so we could all add in our two bits. Maybe a QIAT wiki…