Tech Tips & Resources

I don’t have stock in Apple – perhaps a mistake on my part. But I felt like it needed to be said so you wouldn’t think my good feelings were all about the cash. Nope. But as an Apple user from the days of the Apple SE, I’m always happy to see them being successful and to see their product line improving. And Apple just updated several product lines yesterday with hardware that looks very impressive. However, this article really demonstrates just how successful they have been – even at a time when the economy just sucks. I mean, Apple sales have grown faster than the rest of the PC market in 19 of the last 20 quarters! That’s pretty impressive.

Books and audiobooks can get expensive. Fortunately, there are numerous web sites compiling hundreds of books that can be read and/or downloaded and listened to for free! These are mostly older books in the public domain, but that doesn’t stop them from being valuable resources for the classroom.

Here are a few to check out…

Free Classic Audio Books offers more than 50 audio books that are free to download. Most of the books have human narration, but some are high quality text-to-speech narration. Titles include Swiss Family Robinson, Legend of Sleep Hollow, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and A Christmas Carol. The site also has a great offer of 200 classic books on one DVD for just $9.95. All 200 are human narration. And all are mp3 format that can be listened to on the DVD, copied to your computer for listening, or moved to an iPod.

Children’s Storybooks Online currently has 35 illustrated storybooks that can be read online. The books are divided into Books for Young Children, Books for Older Children, and Books for Young adults.

Biblomania offers more than 2000 classic texts including books, poems, short stories and plays. All of these are available for reading online along with support options for research and discussion.

Our final resource today is LibriVox. The goal of LibriVox is to make all public domain books available as free audiobooks. At this point, their catalog has more than 2300 audio books available. You can listen online or download the mp3 to your computer for listening, burning to CD, or moving to your iPod.

Just over two weeks ago, I pointed you in the direction of 101 Historical Moments You Can Relive On YouTube. Today I want to share another great list of YouTube videos for teachers. This list – 100 Best YouTube Videos for Teachers – originated on the SmartTeaching.org website, but has been re-posted in numerous locations.

This list of 100 videos is divided into history, science, language, arts, inspiration, classroom management, how-to guides, technology and humor. Some of these are more geared for higher education than the first list, but many are still excellent videos.

So for schools that have not blocked YouTube, this brings us to more than 200 outstanding videos for teachers to enjoy.

Two weeks ago, I encouraged you to go visit Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs. It is a fantastic site with so many great resources and ideas.

Well, today I’ve got two more sites for you. check out Building A Program That Works, a blog by a teacher in Alberta, Canada. This teacher works in a k-12 classroom for students with multiple complex needs and she knows her stuff. She has a lot of great ideas. But perhaps most interesting for some of the teachers in our school, she is using News-2-You for the first time this year. And she is publishing a ton of ideas and activities that she uses to enrich that curriculum.

To go along with that, check out Alicia’s blog, SMD Teacher. Alicia has been working with kids with severe and profound disabilities for 14 years out in the great state of Kansas. Alicia has also worked with News-2-You and is adding the Unique curriculum to her classroom this year. So her ideas and resources are very helpful to others working with those tools. Plus this blog has a lot of other great ideas.

So go…check them out!

There are a lot of tools on the internet designed to help teachers in the classroom. But the real key to just how useful they are is how easy they are to use. No one has time for steep learning curves and lots of tutorials. This list of 100 tools is all about being easy to use. And there are some terrific tools on the list. And…best of all…they are all mobile! Yep, every one of these can be accessed from your cell phone, as well as, from your computer. So you are never too far away to do the things you need to do.

So go check out 100 Mobile Tools for Teachers.

No matter how careful you are, your computer is going to get dirty. And if you share your computer with other users, it just gets dirty even faster. And if you have a laptop that you carry around…well…we already know what those look like after a while. So it is time to do some cleaning.

But how? Too much water can ruin your computer. The wrong cleaning product can damage a monitor. And what about cleaning things besides just the computer such as your iPod, your iPhone, your mouse, etc?

Well here is a very handy set of links to all the official Apple instructions for cleaning your hardware. So find the type of hardware you’ve got and get busy. A little preventative cleaning now can save you a lot of hard work in the future.

Here is your homework for today…

Visit and/or subscribe to Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs. This blog is written by Kate Ahern, a special education teacher in Massachusetts who works with high school aged kids with intensive special needs. And Kate is also a geek. The good kind – who loves to play with technology and find ways to utilize that in her classroom. And her blog is all about her discoveries.

Kate has posted about free online activities for kids with special needs. She has found multiple resources to support those using the Unique Learning System. She shared more things to do with a switch…the follow up her popular 60 things to do with a switch. She had a great post on school safety issues. She finds great material to support and expand on the News-2-You papers. And in one of my favorite postings of the past couple of months, she shared numerous sites that offer special needs clothing, shoes and accessories.

Her blog also has a list of fantastic links to other sites and a great blogroll of other blogs.

So go, visit, enjoy! And leave her a comment so she realizes just how terrific her blog really is!

We are always looking for ways to make access easier for students with special needs. A lot of times we jump right to buying special software or hardware to modify the computer. But in this post on ATMac, the author points out some great advantages to using the Parental Control features on the Mac to make things easier for those with special needs.

I know, many schools get all skittish about the use of YouTube in the classroom. Our school is one of those. And yet, YouTube has a tremendous collection of videos that can greatly enhance instruction.

In meetings, we’ve talked about using YouTube for professional development. We’ve looked at many resources for educators. And we’ve talked about some channels that offer terrific items for students.

Today, I want to link you to one blog post that will give you 101 more exceptional videos for the classroom. OnlineDegree recently posted 101 Historical Moments You Can Relive On YouTube.

The collection of 101 videos is divided into the following sections:

Presidential Inaugurations – video from 13 different inaguarations plus a re-enactment of George Washington’s inaguaral speech taken from the television series John Adams.

World Changing Historical Moments – including a six-part documentary of The Great Wall Street Crash & Depression, an interview with Rosa Parks, ABC’s coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and CNN coverage of the L.A. riots in 1992.

Historical Assassinations and Attempts – with video about the events leading up the assassination of Lincoln, an A&E documentary about the death of John Lennon, video of the events surrounding the deaths of President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and ABC News reports on the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II.

Historical Speeches – readings of the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, one of Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats, and speeches from many others including President Obama, Nelson Mandela, President Johnson, President Reagan, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.

Astrological Moments – with video of the first moon landing, NASA footage from Apollo 13, a tour of the space station, and footage of the Comet Haley.

Musical Moments – including The Beatles, Elvis, Dean Martin introducing The Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, and U2.

Best Sports Moments – with clips from Babe Ruth’s farewell speech, a Sportscenter special on Wilt Chamberlain, Nadia Comaneci’s winning routine on the balance beam, an interview with Michael Phelps, and many more.

Best Moments in TV History – including clips from I Love Lucy, the 1960 Presidential Debate, a classic scene from All In The Family, clips from Saturday Night Live, the first ten minutes from the launch of MTV in 1981, and moments from the first season of Survivor.

If you have not given YouTube a chance as a teaching resource, somewhere on this list, there may be just the video for you!

Dropbox just released their new app for the iPhone. Now you can access and read your documents in your Dropbox directly through the app rather than through the browser interface. But even cooler is the feature that allows you to immediately upload photos and videos that you’ve just taken and they become instantly available to all those with whom you share your folder! A great tool for sharing.