Assistive technology: Samsung Galaxy Core Advance

Samsung Electronics introduced a trio of accessories that are designed to help users who are disabled and visually impaired, those with partial or greater loss of vision.

Their smartphones can be transformed in this way into tools that enable easier handling of messages and more.

The three newcomers are called the Ultrasonic Cover, Optical Scan Stand, and Voice Label.

The three are designed for the Galaxy Core Advance mobile device.

Samsung said that the accessories are already available and are offered separately from the device.

To be sure, smartphone handling, not to mention struggles reading small-screen text, have been barriers for those with special needs for vision support.

Back in December, Samsung had already revealed its intentions of providing an Android smartphone with accessibility options.

Assistive technology was on its agenda. The company referred to the Core Advance, which it said would be available early 2014.

At the time, it spoke of an Optical Scan which "can automatically recognize text from an image and read it aloud to disabled and visually impaired users."

Samsung officially described the three on Friday as the Ultrasonic Cover, which allows users in unfamiliar places to detect obstacles and navigate by sending an alert through a vibration or TTS feedback.

"By holding the Cover in front of the user," said the announcement, "it can enhance a visually impaired user's awareness of their surroundings by sensing the presence of a person or object up to two meters away."

The Optical Scan Stand positions the device to focus on printed materials; doing so automatically activates the Optical Scan application, which recognizes text from an image and reads it aloud to the user.

With the Voice Label, users can make notes and tag voice labels on-the-go.

"With NFC technology enabling a seamless connection to their smartphones, users can record, stop and access their notes.

This feature can also help a user distinguish how to use electronics by allowing them to record a short explanation."

In the United States alone, approximately 10 million people are blind or visually impaired, though estimates vary.

Samsung said the accessories are the result of research and in-depth interviews, resulting in their being specially designed with the needs of specific communities in mind.

Among the tech sites responding favorably to Friday's announcement TechCrunch made the point that "these hardware add-ons really show Samsung is committed to provided the best phone experience possible for those who might ordinarily find smartphone operation frustrating."

Hearing: Brain mechanisms makes the auditory system sensitive to behaviourally relevant sounds

How do we hear? More specifically, how does the auditory center of the brain discern important sounds – such as communication from members of the same species – from relatively irrelevant background noise?

The answer depends on the regulation of sound by specific neurons in the auditory cortex of the brain, but the precise mechanisms of those neurons have remained unclear.

Now, a new study from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has isolated how neurons in the rat's primary auditory cortex (A1) preferentially respond to natural vocalizations from other rats over intentionally modified vocalisations (background sounds).

A computational model developed by the study authors, which successfully predicted neuronal responses to other new sounds, explained the basis for this preference.

The research is published in the Journal of Neurophysiology. Rats communicate with each other mostly through ultrasonic vocalisations (USVs) beyond the range of human hearing.

Maria N. Geffen

Although the existence of these USV conversations has been known for decades, "the acoustic richness of them has only been discovered in the last few years," said senior study author Maria N. Geffen, PhD, assistant professor of Otorhinolaryngology: Head and Neck Surgery at Penn.

That acoustical complexity raises questions as to how the animal brain recognizes and responds to the USVs.

"We set out to characterize the responses of neurons to USVs and to come up with a model that would explain the mechanism that makes these neurons preferentially responsive to these relevant sounds."

Geffen and her colleagues obtained recordings of USVs from two rats kept together in a cage, then played the recordings to a separate group of male rats, while their neuronal responses were acquired and recorded.

The researchers also used USV recordings that were modified in several ways, such as having background sounds filtered out and being played backwards and at different speeds to mimic unimportant background noise.

"We found that neurons in the auditory cortex respond strongly and selectively to the original ultrasonic vocalisations and not the transformed versions we created," says Geffen. "

"Using the data collected on the responses of A1 neurons to various USVs, the researchers developed a computational model that could predict the activity of an individual neuron based on the pitch and duration of the USV. "

"Geffen observes that "the details of their responses could be predicted with high accuracy." It was possible to determine which aspects of the acoustic input best drove individual neurons.

Remarkably, it turned out that the acoustic parameters that worked best in driving the neuronal responses corresponded to the statistics of the natural vocalizations rats produce.

The work makes clear for the first time, says Geffen, "the mechanisms of how the auditory system picks out behaviorally relevant sounds, such as same species communication signals, and processes them more effectively than less relevant sounds.

This information is fundamental in understanding how sound perception helps animals survive. We conclude that neurons in the auditory cortex are specialized for processing and efficiently responding to natural and behaviourally relevant sounds."

The Parts of a Listener

More pictures at PinInterest

ADD vs APD: When an Attention Issue is Really an Auditory Issue

When your child is struggling in school, you want to get to the root of the issue as quickly as possible. Nowadays there is more awareness about a wide spectrum of learning problems.

Most teachers receive some training about the major diagnoses, and educational psychologists have a full toolkit of diagnostic assessments.

Once you have a name for the symptoms you are seeing, plans can be made to ensure that the education provided is appropriate for a child’s needs.

But what happens if you suspect that the diagnosis your child receives is the wrong

ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) is a familiar term to most parents. ADD diagnoses have been on the rise for the last few decades. However, there is a lesser known disorder, with a similar list of symptoms, which may be overlooked: APD (Auditory Processing Disorder).

APD may initially present as an attention deficit issue, but in reality it has nothing to do with a child’s ability to sit still. Rather, APD stems from a weakness in the ability of the brain to process the sounds it receives.

This specific weakness can be either acquired through brain injury or illness, or genetically inherited.

Symptoms

• ADD and APD share a number of symptoms, such as:
• Struggling to focus in a noisy environment
• Fidgety and easily distracted
• Showing some aggression or even isolation socially
• Difficulty following directions
• Lower academic performance
• Zoning out in a conversation

Each of these external symptoms has a different internal cause, depending on the diagnosis. Both can in turn cause reading problems, and both appear in the 7 Main Causes of Reading Difficulty (video).



Children with ADD struggle with the above symptoms because there is insufficient activity in the frontal lobe to regulate the strong neuronal activity in the cerebral cortex.

Without the necessary control over the cerebral cortex, the activity there is just unregulated ‘brain noise’ of neuronal chaos.

Children with APD, on the other hand, struggle with these symptoms because the world around them sounds ‘foggy’ or unclear.

A child with APD will have perfect hearing; the problem lies in the brain’s interpretation of incoming sounds, not the hearing mechanism itself.

You can imagine how not being able to properly understand what people are saying could lead to all of the above behaviours, and then some!

You can read the full article here at Easy read System

Babies Absorb Sounds and Languages Traits in the Womb

Babies only hours old are able to differentiate between sounds from their native language and a foreign language, scientists have discovered.

The study indicates that babies begin absorbing language while still in the womb, earlier than previously thought.

Sensory and brain mechanisms for hearing are developed at 30 weeks of gestational age, and the new study shows that unborn babies are listening to their mothers talk during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy and at birth can demonstrate what they've heard.

"The mother has first dibs on influencing the child's brain," said Patricia Kuhl, co-author and co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington.

"The vowel sounds in the mother's speech are the loudest units and the fetus locks onto them."

Previously, researchers had shown that newborns are born ready to learn and begin to discriminate between language sounds within the first months of life, but there was no evidence that language learning had occurred in utero.

"This is the first study that shows fetuses learn prenatally about the particular speech sounds of a mother's language," said Christine Moon, lead author and a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash.

"This study moves the measurable result of experience with speech sounds from six months of age to before birth."

The results will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Acta Paediatrica. Forty infants, about 30 hours old and an even mix of girls and boys, were studied in Tacoma and Stockholm, Sweden.

While still in the nursery, the babies listened to vowel sounds in their native tongue and in foreign languages.

Their interest in the sounds was captured by how long they sucked on a pacifier that was wired into a computer measuring the babies' reaction to the sounds.

Longer or shorter sucking for unfamiliar or familiar sounds is evidence for learning, because it indicates that infants can differentiate between the sounds heard in utero.

In both countries, the babies at birth sucked longer for the foreign language than they did for their native tongue.

The researchers say that infants are the best learners, and discovering how they soak up information could give insights on lifelong learning.

"We want to know what magic they put to work in early childhood that adults cannot," Kuhl said. "We can't waste that early curiosity."

Dyslexia: Cause may be different than previously known

Iris Berent

New research has argued that dyslexia may result from impairment of a different linguistic system than previously thought.

Speech perception engages at least two linguistic systems: the phonetic system, which extracts discrete sound units from acoustic input, and the phonological system, which combines these units to form individual words.

Previously, researchers generally believed that dyslexia was caused by phonological impairment, but results from the current study, led by Iris Berent of Northeastern University in Boston, suggest that the phonetic system may actually be the cause.

“Our findings confirm that dyslexia indeed compromises the language system, but the locus of the deficit is in the phonetic, not the phonological system, as had been previously assumed,” says Berent.

In the study, Hebrew-speaking college students had difficulty discriminating between similar speech sounds, but had no problem tracking abstract phonological patterns, even for novel words, suggesting that the phonological system is intact but the phonetic system is compromised.

“Our research demonstrates that a closer analysis of the language system can radically alter our understanding of the disorder, and ultimately, its treatment,” concluded Berent.

Read the full article here

The study has been published in the open access journal PLOS ONE. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0044875

Dyslexia: The Role of Hearing and Auditory Processing

Doctors have known for years that those with dyslexia process information differently than others, like seeing words with transposed letters but there is mounting evidence that they might also hear language differently, as well.

“Any sort of language problem could very well have its roots in perception itself,” said Susan Nittrouer, Ph.D., of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. “To many people, the solution seems to be, well, we will just train those with dyslexia how to recognize words correctly but the problem is really more fundamental than that.”

Nittrouer said she began to suspect the role hearing might play in dyslexia after nearly a decade-long study involving children who were born deaf or with profound hearing loss.

“We began following this group of over a hundred children, basically, since they were infants,” Nittrouer said.

All the children in the study got cochlear implants, which use microphones mounted just behind their ears, to capture and feed sound waves to nerves near the brain.

Through consistent testing, researchers found that the implants made a remarkable difference in terms of childrens’ ability to hear, but they’ve raised some intriguing questions as well.

“Cochlear implants have been able to help children who are deaf basically function as hearing children do,” said Nittrouer.

“However, once you begin to scratch the surface, you often find that children who have cochlear implants function similarly to how children who have dyslexia function.”

Nittrouer says that’s important because it points to the role of hearing in dyslexia. “Given that they look so much like children with dyslexia,” said Nittrouer, “we can really connect the dots between their perception, the kind of signal that they’re getting, and the sort of language problem that results.”

Even more encouraging, is that researchers say they spotted problems in these children long before they would have been obvious in dyslexic children who have normal hearing.

“We were able to identify these emerging problems in these children at kindergarten,” Nittrouer said. “If they didn’t have cochlear implants and weren’t in this project, in all likelihood, these problems learning to read would not have have shown up until they were in 3rd grade.”

Nittrouer says more research need to be done, but her findings could eventually lead to a new approach to dyslexia.

“We might be able to develop tests that could be administered earlier to predict who might be at risk for dyslexia,” she said.

“If, indeed, it turns out to be that these children have broader perceptual issues, then we need to begin to put together a broader intervention approach,” said Nittrouer, “one that does not involve just pulling the children out of the classroom for 20 minutes of tutoring a few times a week, but rather a program that involves all educators for the child’s entire day at school.”

¹What is Dyslexia?, National Center for Learning Disabilities, (citing the National Institute of Child and Human Development), June 2012.

A Profile of Paula Tallal Co-Director, Center for Molecular and Behavioural Neuroscience

A Profile of Paula Tallal, Co-Director, Center for Molecular and Behavioural Neuroscience & Professor II. Her Faculty is the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience

Correcting Language Problems Through Neuroplasticity

Similar to a traveler who unknowingly sets out on the wrong route and needs to be redirected, the brain's plasticity can be utilized to guide the development of neural networks to correct language learning problems.

That key finding and insights into the brain's auditory processing system by Paula Tallal, Rutgers Board of Governors Professor of Neuroscience, has helped to bring positive change to hundreds of thousands of children worldwide who struggle with language.

With her co-researchers, Tallal helped to devise a revolutionary technique and software program - Fast ForWord - to assist children with establishing and strengthening the neural networks for language development.

For more than 30 years, Tallal, co-director of the Rutgers Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, has been studying the connections between auditory processing, attention, memory and language learning.

What her research has shown is that timing is critically important for learning language and speech. The central problem for many children who struggle with language, including those with dyslexia, is that their brains have difficulty perceiving rapidly successive acoustic changes, such as the difference between "da" and "ba."

Tallal and her co-researchers hypothesized that the brain's neuroplasticity could be used to rewire neural networks to increase that processing speed or to "fire and wire" as she describes it. 

Neuroplasticity refers to the fact that the brain, rather than being molded and set, is able to reorganize itself in response to new situations or changes in the environment.

In 1996, she and co-researcher Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus, University of California, San Francisco, founded Scientific Leaning Corporation to bring their research out of the lab to help children who struggle with language.

The result was Fast ForWord, a computer-based program that corrects auditory processing problems by pushing the brain to handle auditory information at faster and faster speeds. The software, with an 80 percent success rate, has been used by children in more than 40 countries.

In her research, Tallal found that many children who struggle with language have a listening "window" that is slower than 1/4 second long.

Yet to differentiate fast-changing sounds, the brain needs to be able to perceive differences at the millisecond range to learn the smaller sounds inside of words, the phonemes.

If auditory information could be slowed down, Tallal theorized, it should become easier for children with processing delays to learn those differences.

That instead of mistaking "cat" for "tat," for example, they could learn to hear the discrete changes and if that information then could be presented at increasingly faster rates, their brains could be remodeled to make learning language easier and permanent.

That is just what Fast ForWord and the team's related learning tools accomplish. As shown by fMRI studies, the brains of children who have used the program develop the same firing patterns as children who do not struggle with language.

Her current research is focused on the neural and genetic bases of language development, and early detection methods for language learning difficulties.

In research that followed a set of babies across several years, she and her team found that identifying how fast the brain can organize simple incoming auditory information at very young ages is the best predictor of successful language development.

Such findings could open the way for earlier correction methods to spare children the struggles so many experience because of processing delays.

Phonological Awareness: Instructional and Assessment Guidelines

This article defines phonological awareness and discusses historic and contemporary research findings regarding its relation to early reading.

Common misconceptions about phonological awareness are addressed. Research-based guidelines for teaching phonological awareness and phonemic awareness to all children are described.

Additional instructional design guidelines are offered for teaching children with learning disabilities who are experiencing difficulties with early reading.

Considerations for assessing children's phonological awareness are discussed, and descriptions of available measures are provided.

Row, row, row your boat
gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily;
Life is but a dream

Bow, bow, bow your boat
bently bown the beam.
Berrily, berrily, berrily, berrily;
Bife is but a beam.

Sow, sow, sow your soat
sently sown the seam.
Serrily, serrily, serrily, serrily;
Sife is sut a seam.

Activities like substituting different sounds for the first sound of a familiar song can help children develop phonological awareness, a cognitive substrate to reading acquisition.

Becoming phonologically aware prepares children for later reading instruction, including instruction in phonics, word analysis, and spelling (Adams, Foorman, Lundberg, & Beeler, 1998; Chard, Simmons, & Kameenui, 1998).

The most common barrier to learning early word reading skills is the inability to process language phonologically (Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989).

Moreover, developments in research and understanding have revealed that this weakness in phonological processing most often hinders early reading development for both students with and without disabilities (Fletcher et al., 1994).

No area of reading research has gained as much attention over the past two decades as phonological awareness.

Perhaps the most exciting finding emanating from research on phonological awareness is that critical levels of phonological awareness can be developed through carefully planned instruction, and this development has a significant influence on children's reading and spelling achievement (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1989, 1991; O'Connor, Jenkins, Leicester, & Slocum, 1993).

Despite the promising findings, however, many questions remain unanswered, and many misconceptions about phonological awareness persist.

For example, researchers are looking for ways to determine how much and what type of instruction is necessary and for whom.

Moreover, many people do not understand the difference between phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and phonics.

Still others are uncertain about the relationship between phonological awareness and early reading.

Read more of this article here: Phonological Awareness: Instructional and Assessment Guidelines | LD Topics | LD OnLine

Hearing Disability Linked To Poor Touch Sensitivity

Touch and hearing are very distinct, but German scientists have found a possible genetic link between the two sensory systems.

Superficially, the two senses might seem worlds apart, but both rely on the ability to translate motions - vibrations in the ear and movement and pressure on the skin - into signals to the brain. A common set of molecules or mechanisms might be at work.

To determine if touch sensitivity can be inherited genetically, Henning Frenzel of the Max-Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine and his colleagues first examined 100 pairs of fraternal and identical twins in a study outlined in the journal PLoS Biology.

They tested the twins on two kinds of touch sensitivity traits: "vibration detection threshold," or how low a vibration the subject could detect with their pinky finger; and "tactile acuity," or the ability to distinguish between two pressure points on the skin that are very close together.

Since the identical twins are genetically identical and the fraternal twins share up to 50 percent of the same genes, any genetic effect on touch should be more pronounced in the former.

Next, Frenzel and his team calculated the heritability of the two traits, a figure that explains the degree to which genetic variation contributed to the variation in the traits seen in the subjects. On average, 28 percent of the differences in tactile acuity and 52 percent of the differences in vibration detection could be chalked up to genetic influence.

Second Experiment
In a second experiment, the scientists found that some - but not all - of a population of young people that were born deaf also had impaired tactile acuity. But since there are about 70 known genes that are involved in hearing impairment, the researchers wanted to focus on a smaller group of genes to test the link between hearing and touch impairment.

Third Experiment - Usher syndrome
The scientists next examined patients with Usher syndrome - a hereditary condition that causes both hearing and visual impairment. They zeroed in on USH2A, one of the nine known genes that, when mutated, cause Usher syndrome.

Of the Usher patients studied, the 19 individuals that had a mutation in USH2A had both impaired hearing and poor touch sensitivity. It's possible then, that this gene may play a role in both touch and sound.

"Our next task will be to investigate some of these other cases to see if they are also correlated with problems in touch," senior author Gary Lewin said in a statement Tuesday. "This will give us a better understanding of the genetic mechanisms that underlie both types of perception."

Dyslexia: Beneficial Apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad

Take a look at our recommendations and then purchase the Apps from iTunes.
The pricing shown below is just a guideline as the prices change on a regular basis.

eBook Readers

VOD - Voice of DAISY

The Voice of DAISY (VOD) is a player which plays and reads digital talking books created in the DAISY format.

The VOD is ideal for anyone who experiences difficulties with reading material, such as people with dyslexia or individuals with visual impairments.

The text is read aloud using text-to-speech with highlighting support. There are several functions available, such as: you can open with the last book played; you can go directly to a page by entering the page number and bookmarks can keep the actual time point.

• Requires: iOS 3.2 or later
• Device: iPhone 3G/3GS/4, iPod touch (2nd generation or later), iPad
• Price: Approx. £17.99
• Download: Voice of DAISY

Word Processing

Pages

Pages is a word processor for mobile devices. You can create, edit and view documents wherever you are. With 16 Apple-designed templates to choose from you can produce letters, reports, flyers, cards and posters and customise your documents with colours, fonts and textures.

You can view and edit Pages ‘09, Microsoft Word and plain text files, with the onscreen keyboard or a wireless keyboard with Bluetooth technology.  

Pages works with iCloud so your documents stay up-to-date across all your iOS devices - automatically. You can also easily import files from Mail, the web, a WebDAV service, or your Mac or PC using iTunes
 File Sharing.

• Requires: iOS 5.0 or later
• Device: iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation) and iPad Price: Approx. £6.99
• Download: Pages

Dictionaries

Oxford Deluxe - Oxford Dictionary of English and Oxford Thesaurus of English

Combining the entire Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) and the Oxford Thesaurus of English (OTE) plus 70,000 pre-recorded sound files from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary makes this an ideal application for anyone needing access to the English language with dictionary definitions and more.

Features of the Oxford Deluxe include wildcard search, complete off-line use, bookmarks with editable notations and hyperlinking between dictionary and thesaurus plus to and from appendices.

• Requires: iOS 3.1.3 or later
• Device: iPhone, iPod touch and iPad
• Price: Approx. £37.99
• Download: Oxford Deluxe

Dictionary.com - Dictionary & Thesaurus

Dictionary.com App delivers reference content from Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com including nearly 1,000,000 words with definitions and 90,000 synonyms and antonyms. No Internet connection is needed to search words.

Features: alphabetical indexing, example sentences, custom backgrounds, favourite word lists and more.
When connected to the internet you can also access phonetic and audio pronunciation, spelling suggestions and word of the day.

• Requires: iOS 3.0 or later
• Device: iPhone, iPod touch and iPad
• Price: Approx. £1.99
• Download: Dictionary.com

Oxford Medical Dictionary

The Oxford Medical Dictionary contains 12,500 terms and concepts used in medicine today. Written by distinguished practicing specialists and medical writers the entries are accessible and jargon-free.

Containing over 140 illustrations and diagrams, along with recommended web links this is ideal for anyone working in the paramedical fields: pharmacists, physiotherapists, speech therapists, social workers, hospital secretaries, administrators, technicians, and so on.

It will also be invaluable for medical students and practicing doctors.

• Requires: iOS 3.1 or later
• Device: iPhone, iPod touch and iPad
• Price: Approx. £10.49
• Download: Oxford Medical Dictionary

Text-to-Speech

Speak it! Text To Speech

Speak it! has been designed for ease of use; simply enter the text you want to say and press the ‘Speak it!’ button. Features include: highlights word as they are spoken, ability to create audio files and email them, save phrases to have them repeated later, pause and resume speech playback, change the speech playback speed and much more.

Speak it! includes four quality voices: American Male, American Female, British Male, and British Female with the option of downloading other voices (which will incur an additional cost).

• Requires: iOS 3.0 or later
• Device: iPhone, iPod touch and iPad
• Price: Approx. £1.49
• Download: Speak it!

OCR

ZoomReader (iPhone 4 only)

ZoomReader, from the makers of ZoomText, lets you magnify and read text. First take a picture with your in-built iPhone camera of an object, like a book, menu or even a medicine bottle before the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology will convert the image into text. ZoomReader will then read the text back to you using a natural sounding voice.

It is designed to be able to photograph an 8.5″ by 11″ document. ZoomReader includes colour filtering to make reading easier.

• Requires: iOS 4.2+ Only
• Device: iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S
• Price: Approx. £13.99
• Download: ZoomReader

Prizmo

Prizmo lets you scan and recognise text. Ideal for documents so you can share with other users and for business cards where the information can be extracted to create contacts on your phone.

Key feature of Prizmo is the highly accurate OCR technology in 10 languages: English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish.

• Requires: iOS 3.1 or later
• Device: iPhone, iPod touch and iPad
• Price: Approx. £6.99
• Download: Prizmo

Note Taking

Notebooks for iPad

Notebooks allows you to conveniently write, capture and organize your ideas, notes, reminders, journals, diaries or details of life that you want to keep close at hand.  

Notebooks for iPad allows you to easily create notes and documents and then file them away in notebooks or projects. Import and view PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and many other types of documents and file them with your notes.

You can manage your tasks using reminders and to-do lists and tick them off on completion.

Type your notes and texts, no matter how long they are. Draw with your finger or a dedicated stylus.

Select your favourite fonts, background colours and patterns. Quickly create new documents with the contents of the Clipboard or import web pages from Safari, Mail and other iPad apps.

Create as many nested books as you need with the ability to freely move, rename and restructure your documents and books. Full text search enables you to find notes quickly.

Protect your confidential documents with a passcode, Sync and back-up files via WebDAV and Dropbox.

• Requires: iOS 4 or later
• Device: iPad
• Price: Approx. £5.99
• Download: Notebooks for iPad

File Management and Annotations

GoodReader for iPad

GoodReader for iPad handles large PDF and TXT files, MS Office files including .doc and .ppt, iWorks, image manuals, large books video and audio with great speed. PDFs can be opened and annotated with typewritten text boxes, sticky notes, lines, arrows and freehand drawings. Annotations can be collated and exported via email.

You can create folders, move, copy and rename your files; zip, email, unzip and unrar them; plus send your files to other apps. Files can be synced to a number of file management services including DropBox, iDisk, Google Docs and WebDAV.

There is very limited VoiceOver support so this app cannot be used to read aloud files.

• Requires: iOS 4 or later
• Device: iPad
• Price: Approx. £2.99
• Download: GoodReader for iPad

Mind Mapping

iThoughtsHD

iThoughtsHD is a mind mapping tool for the iPad. Mind mapping enables you to visually organise your thoughts, ideas and information.

You can use iThoughtsHD for: tasking lists, brainstorming, project planning, goal setting, concept mapping, meeting notes; it’s also ideal for revision and course notes.

You can import and export to and from many desktop applications and Cloud synchronise with Dropbox, Box.net, MobileMe andWebDAV.

The mind map features of iThoughtHD includes: multiple topic options, over 90 built-in icon and 45 clipart images. You can attach notes with hyperlinks to topics; assign different colours and shapes to topics and much, much more.

• Requires: iOS 4.0 or later
• Device: iPad
• Price: Approx. £6.99
• Download: iThoughtsHD for iPad

Organisational

Pocket Informant for iPhone/iPod Touch

Pocket Informant is a fully integrated Calendar, Task, Contacts and Notes solution for your iPhone/iPod Touch that lets you focus on everything you do in a day - not just your Tasks list.

With this highly customizable tool, you have the power to change virtually every feature to suit your preferences.  It comes with a full-featured Notes tab and complete Contact management system.

Features for the calendar include: customisable views for Month, Week, Day, List and Today; alarms and icons; photo and contact linking and more. With the swipe of a finger, or the touch of a button, you can add, edit, share or delete your information.

• Requires: iOS 4.2 or later
• Device: iPhone and iPod touch
• Price: Approx. £8.99
• Download: Pocket Informant for iPhone/iPod Touch

Augmented Alternative Communication

Proloquo2Go

Proloquo2Go provides a full-featured augmentative and alternative communication solution for people who have difficulty speaking.

It provides natural sounding text-to-speech voices (currently American, British, and Indian English Only), high resolution up-to-date symbols, powerful automatic conjugations, and a default vocabulary of over 7000 items, advanced word prediction, full expandability and extreme ease of use.

Special Learning Practitioners, teachers and parents recommend it for children and adults with autism, cerebral palsy, Downs syndrome, developmental disabilities, dyspraxia, motor neurone disease, stroke or traumatic brain injury.

• Requires: iOS 4.2 or later
• Device: iPhone, iPod touch and iPad
• Price: Approx. £129.99
• Download: Proloquo2Go

Calculator

Calculator for iPad

Calculator for iPad is a standard and scientific calculator which features: advanced mathematical/scientific buttons in landscape view; basic calculation buttons in portrait view; calculate with degrees or radials; percent button will behave just like the original calculator; memory buttons will also behave just like the original calculator; button sound is mutable; invisible backspace button by sliding/swiping the result screen with your finger.

Also features 7 different themes: standard, silver keyboard, retro grey, sticky notes, pink keyboard, happy pink, and wooden.

• Requires: iOS 4.0 or later
• Device: iPad
• Price: Approx. £0.69
• Download: Calculator for iPad

Recording

PureAudio Live Recorder for iPad

PureAudio is a full function digital voice and audio recording application with enhanced Andrea’s patented digital noise reduction microphone technology.

PureAudio digitally reduces background noise, while enhancing the recorded sound quality and intelligibility when making recordings in real-world noisy mobile environments.

It has an intuitive, simple to use interface with a user guide to all features and functions.

Some of the audio features include: digital noise reduction software to remove repetitive background noise from recordings; microphone sensitivity boost allows for far field recordings and three different recording formats: WAVE, CAF, AIFF.

There are various recording and playback functions to make your life easier including fast forward and fast reverse during playback using finger swipe gestures or by using the audio position slider.

File management for recordings is available so you can add, delete, rename and rearrange recording categories. You can also transfer recordings using iTunes File Sharing and more.

• Requires: iOS 3.2 or later
• Device: iPad
• Price: Approx. £1.99
• Download: PureAudio Live Recorder for iPad 

Full Credit for assembling this excellent list of Apps goes to the people at Dyslexic.com

Auditory Hallucinations in Children Suggest Underlying Psychiatric Disorder

Children aged between 11 years to 13 years tend to hear strange voices, according to a new report.

Researchers from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) have discovered that auditory hallucinations (hearing voices) can affect up to one-in-five children between the ages of 11 to 13.

"We found that auditory hallucinations were common even in children as young as 11 years old. Auditory hallucinations can vary from hearing an isolated sentence now and then, to hearing "conversations" between two or more people lasting for a several minutes.

It may present like screaming or shouting and other times it could sound like whispers or murmurs. It varies greatly from child to child, and frequency can be once a month to once every day," said Dr Ian Kelleher, professor at the Royal College of Surgeons, in a statement.

Researchers had conducted four separate studies on 2,500 children, aged between 11 and 16 years. They found that 20 to 23 percent of younger adults, aged 11 years to 13 had experienced auditory hallucinations. Among them more than 57 percent have mental disorders.

In older adolescents (aged 13-16 years), just 7 percent reported hearing voices. However, among this category, more than 80 percent had psychiatric disorder - showing a clear association between auditory hallucinations and serious mental illness.

In several children, these experiences appear to represent a 'blip' on the radar that does not turn out to signify any underlying or undiagnosed problem.

However, for the other children, these symptoms turned out to be a warning sign of serious underlying psychiatric illness, including clinical depression and behavioural disorders, like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Some older children with auditory hallucinations had two or more disorders.

It is a significant finding which can help the doctors to consider more than one diagnosis, if the child reports auditory hallucinations.

Our study suggests that hearing voices seems to be more common in children than was previously thought. In most cases these experiences resolve with time.

However in some children these experiences persist into older adolescence and this seems to be an indicator that they may have a complex mental health issue and require more in-depth assessment," said Mary Cannon, professor at the Royal College of Surgeons, in a statement.

How Do Students with learning Disabilities Learn?

In this insightful interview, Associate Professor, The Pennsylvania State University, Altoona College, Barbara Hong defines what a learning disability is, and tells us what elements we should start looking for, when analyzing educational websites to ensure children with learning disabilities are integrated in the educational process.

Speechless: Arcola Theatre London

An extraordinary story of two girls struggle to be heard

Shared Experience (Bronte, After Mrs Rochester, Jane Eyre) presents the astonishing story of identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons.

Refusing to speak to adults, the twins communicate in their own private language, their only relationship being an intense and turbulent bond with each other. 

Speechless is a powerful portrayal of the twins secret world and their struggle to find a voice against all odds.

The winner of a Fringe First Award 2010, Speechless is directed and co-written by Artistic Director of Shared Experience, Polly Teale. 

Celebrated for her potent visual and imaginative style, Polly won the Evening Standard Award for Best Director for her own play After Mrs Rochester, which also won the Time Out Award for Best West End Production.

Arcola Theatre London

BBC Radio 4: Woman's Hour Podcast; dyslexia - can it be an advatage

Can dyslexia sometimes be an advantage? Presented by Jane Garvey.

Click on the link to hear the Radio 4 podcast
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Dr Ron Minson: Integrated Listening

Ron Minson, MD had tried all the educational/medical solutions available and was still not able to help their daughter overcome the depression which resulted from a lifetime of dyslexia.

Dr. Minson’s background was traditional medicine– but the urgency of the situation led him to try something new.

The therapy showed signs of success within weeks and by the end of the 3-month program his daughter’s reading and organizational abilities had improved significantly.

More importantly, the depression which had held her back for years finally lifted

Based on clinically proven outcomes, iLs programs strengthen existing pathways and create new neural connections/pathways in the brain (“neuroplasticity”).

As these neurological connections grow stronger, language skills and emotional/psychological functions, such as self-confidence and regulation, also tend to improve.

The improvements in brain function are based on the premise that our higher brain functions – the “cortical functions” such as language, cognitive skills, socialization – rely and depend upon how well sensory input is received and processed as it enters the central nervous system and is relayed to the upper brain. iLs improves processing at both the sub-cortical and cortical levels.

iLs has a global effect on the brain and central nervous system, influencing the following systems: balance, visual, auditory, motor, coordination, behavior and emotional regulation. As a result, it is successfully implemented for a wide variety of conditions:

• Learning difficulties such as reading, spelling, math, auditory processing and attention
• Sensory processing and integration
• Stress, sleep, emotional regulation and mood problems
• Those with autism and neuro-developmental difficulties

Find out more about ILS here on their website

Coping with Central Auditory Processing Disorder | Pride Learning Center

Are you a parent coping with a child who suffers from Auditory Processing Disorder? The other big question is: How would I know? To answer this, here are a few pointers that determine the nature of the condition and ho wit reveals itself in every day life.

• Is your child easily distracted or bothered by loud or sudden noises?
• Are conversations difficult for your child to follow?
• Are noisy environments upsetting for them?
• Are verbal (word based) maths problems demanding?
• Does your child have difficulty following directions?
• Is abstract information tough to interpret?
• Does your child struggle with reading, spelling, writing, or other speech-related language difficulties?

Central auditory processing disorder (CAPD) occurs when the ear and the brain do not coordinate together completely. Many of the behaviours associated with central auditory processing disorder also appear in other conditions such as learning disabilities (LD) and attention deficit hyper-activity disorder (ADHD), also described as ADD.


The symptoms in each individual can range from mild to severe and only a trained professional, such as a speech-language pathologists and an audiologist who specialise in CAPD, can determine if your child actually has a central auditory processing disorder.

If your child does have central auditory processing disorder and finds it difficult to concentrate and follow directions, there are numerous strategies that parents can implement for their child.

What was I supposed to do again?
To help a child with CAPD follow directions, try reducing background noises, always have the child look at you when you are speaking and use simple, expressive sentences. Speaking at a slightly louder volume and at a slower tempo will also help significantly. Have your child repeat the directions back to you aloud a few times and be certain that they understand the directions they are repeating and not just mimicking your voice.

I left my book at school.

A student with CAPD will thrive on routine and structure. Teach your child how to focus and cope in chaotic environments. Before going home for the day, for instance, have the child check his or her assignment book and list what he or she needs to take home that day.

I can’t concentrate; it’s too loud in here.

At school the child should sit towards the front of the room facing the teacher with his or her back to the windows, doors, and other sources of distraction. The teacher can periodically touch the child’s shoulder to remind him or her to focus or get ready for a transition.

Teachers should also use lots and lots of visual aids jotting down instructions or key words on the board, and providing simple written outlines. For younger students a picture or drawing may work better as a reminder.

At home, provide the child with a quiet study place. If you want them to concentrate better, be sure to keep the TV turned off and keep any possible outside stimuli far away.

Make sure the work desk is kept free of clutter and well organised. Maintain a peaceful, organised lifestyle that encourages good eating and sleeping habits and keeping a neat room and desk.

Teachers and parents both need to remember that central auditory processing disorder is a real condition. The symptoms and behaviours are not within the child’s control. Children with CAPD are not being defiant or being lazy.

Help them build a strong self-esteem and learn to advocate for themselves, as they get older. Keep it positive and keep life fun!

Auditory Processing Disorder (APD)

An Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) is a disruption in the auditory nervous system that interferes with the rapid and efficient awareness, recognition, decoding and integration of acoustic signals, especially speech.

An auditory processing disorder may be considered a breakdown in a child's fine resolution abilities. By fine resolution I imply the hearing system's ability to discretely resolve the fine differences that we use to locate, separate, and distinguish sounds in the environment.

In terms of speech perception, there are many fine grained distinctions needed to successfully distinguish the many sounds that are embedded in the ongoing stream of running speech.

For instance, recognising the differences between the sounds in the words [bat] and [mommy] is not too demanding. However, distinguishing the sounds in the words [ran] and [ram] or [lift] and [list] is a more difficult task.

The latter tasks require a more efficient auditory system to rapidly identify and distinguish each pair's sounds than it does to distinguish between the sounds in the first pair. This relates to rapidly resolving the small and fine grained speech sound distinctions.

Children with APD also have problems resolving other acoustic properties, such as time variations in speech.

The two words [dime] and [time] are distinguished, predominantly, by the initiation of vocal fold vibration. The vocal folds begin to vibrate earlier when producing the [d] in dime then when producing the [t] in time.

A child who does not resolve fine time differences may have difficulty distinguishing these two words.

Timing is also important in 'juncture'. Juncture relates to the way we separate words with spaces (or time) when speaking.

Examples of varying junction include: 1) "Are you a light housekeeper?" vs. "Are you a lighthouse keeper?" 2) "Look at the snow, drift by the window." vs. "Look at the snowdrift, by the window." 3) "Look at the cargo." vs. "Look at the car go."

How do you Recognise APD?
Children who present with APD have difficulty with some or all listening activities. They have particular problems when the activities occur in less than ideal listening environments.

Hence, they may exhibit only mild problems with sound discrimination and they may make occasional errors when speaking on a one to one basis in a good (relatively quiet) environment.

They will perform worse, however, when there is competing background noise or speech, when speakers talk rapidly, when they are not devoting their complete attention to the listening task, when the discussion topic is unfamiliar to them, or when they have to perform or remember several verbal tasks in a row.

In addition, they often have weak phonemic systems (speech sound memories used in phonics, reading, and spelling). They also often appear as though they do not hear well. It is common for children with APD to say, "what?" or "huh?". They are not always intimately in touch with the sounds in the environment, hence they do not always grasp exactly what has been said.

Child Development: Talk to your babies

Talk to your babies | ScienceBlog.com

Northwestern University researchers have found that even before infants begin to speak, words play an important role in their cognition. For 3-month-old infants, words influence performance in a cognitive task in a way that goes beyond the influence of other kinds of sounds, including musical tones.

The research by Alissa Ferry, Susan Hespos and Sandra Waxman in the psychology department in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, will appear in the March/April edition of the journal Child Development. In the study, infants who heard words provided evidence of categorization, while infants who heard tone sequences did not.

Three-month-old infants were shown a series of pictures of fish that were paired with words or beeps. Infants in the word group were told, for example, "Look at the toma!" ?-- a made-up word for fish, as they viewed each picture. Other infants heard a series of beeps carefully matched to the labeling phrases for tone and duration. Then infants were shown a picture of a new fish and a dinosaur side-by-side as the researchers measured how long they looked at each picture. If the infants formed the category, they would look longer at one picture than the other.

Preparation for Nursery School

We all want our children to be relaxed and prepared to face their first day at nursery school, possibly their first 'formal' gathering with rules and boundaries.

Introduction
So it's only fair that it does not come as a big shock to them and they don't feel discarded and abandoned. It is essential to put in a bit of work at this point to set the scene for the future and prepare them by introducing them to this new concept.

New Concept?
The acceptable concept of extending the parental care by involving other trustworthy adults; i.e. their new teacher. Hopefully, they will be partly aware of this through grandparents, aunts and uncle.

Show and Tell
You can cover the subject of nursery school by taking them on short but pleasant visits to their local school and let them stand and watch the children playing and having fun. Give them the feeling that it is a normal and enjoyable part of growing up. One that they will be able to take an active part in.

Homework
At home, establish set times for story-telling. Try to instil a routine of how and when things are done. This will make it easier for your child accept this loose discipline from another grown-up, i.e. their new teacher.

Listening skills
While you are sitting down with yor child and telling them stories, you will be able to detect whether they are paying you real attention when being told an interesting story or whether they have an interest in the spoken word at all.

Give them Time
Clearly this could be a one-off occurence, so you will need to monitor this over a period of time to rule out any 'off-days.' Let the child choose what story they want to hear and see if that affects their level of attention.

Writing Skills
In addition to reading and listening to stories, it would be good to see how interested your child is in writing or copying letters and words. The best word to start with is your child's name and hopefully, one that they will enjoy writing.

Don't Panic
If things are not perfect then be thankful that you have some prior insight and knowledge of a 'possible' issue. Don't be too quick to think the worst. Seek help in the face of doubt.

Check with your family doctor, nursery and if you are still in doubt, consult a qualified consultant. Your well-being and peace of mind is directly connected to your child's and you should both be facing an exciting future, happy in the feeling that you are making the best decisions and getting the best results, every step of the way.

You are always welcome to leave a comment and to contact me directly, if there is something you wish to talk about or discuss.