ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY BLOG | INVENTIONS FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

Today is a big professional in-service day for educators in New Jersey and I was lucky enough to be able to present to teachers in the beautiful Warren County. I always enjoy doing presentations and workshops in Warren County-you can count on beautiful vistas and lots of farms along the way, and there is never much traffic. Today I had the opportunity to do two different workshops-one focused on free Web 2.0 technologies and the other one was a demonstration of more traditional assistive technology.

I really enjoyed working with the teachers as I shared with them a number of free resources that can be used with their students to make the curriculum more accessible. In this economic downturn the teachers were very glad that I was able to focus on free web services and software that runs through the browser. For many of the teachers, many of the applications and resources that I shared with then were new. It was exciting to see them use NaturalReader with Microsoft Word and have it read the web. Many of the teachers saw many application for this application with the students that they work with. Because the workshop was only 90 minutes I need to have a way for them to jump from web site to web site without having them have to type in the URL. This is where MindManager 7 came to the rescue. After creating my visual map I exported it to the web and was able to publish it to my website. Using the Overview map my participants could quickly move to the links by simply clicking. This worked like a charm and it is a strategy that I will use in future presentation when I want my participants to be able to move quickly from one website to another. Here is an example of the Overview map that I used for my workshop today. Take a look at it and let me know what you think.