Student Guide Corner

As a lifelong learner, I continue to learn about new tools and strategies which help improve my professional practice as an educator (and read articles that challenge my thinking). Here are some that I learned this week from my PLN: Speaking Fox - Unfortunately, Click, Speak doesn't seem to work easily on the Mac OS. SpeakingFox takes care of that and allows free online text-to-speech (TTS). Add it to your school toolbar and show all students how to use this tool. Some students may need to hear one word; for other students, this free tool makes the text accessible. Audio Pal - Add audio to your blog, wiki or website. Can record your own voice or add TTS. Free and cool possibilities Signed Stories - Many signed picture books with audio attached for hearing viewers. Try Different - Seth Godin always makes him points, concisely. "If it's not working, harder might not be the answer." Think of the applications in your daily work as an educator. Good Riddance to Print ...

When marketing guru Seth Godin enters the fray, people listen. His Textbook Rant blog post today focuses on the expense, impracticality, and lack of engagement textbooks provide and stresses how quickly they become outdated. He declares, "As far as I can tell, assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice." And he concludes, This industry deserves to die. It has extracted too much time and too much money and wasted too much potential. We can do better. A lot better. What didn't he say? He never mentioned that textbooks are inaccessible to many students - those with physical, vision or other print disabilities. But he offers a digital solution that offers accessibility at no cost to the student. The solution seems simple to me. Professors should be spending their time devising pages or chapterettes or even entire chapters on topics that matter to them, then publishing them for free online. (it's part of their job, remember?) When you have a clas...