Dyslexic and Loving Words - Video

A film by Vicky Morris

Made for Off the Shelf Festival of Words 2013

Dyslexic and Loving Words asks the question -- "What if you're dyslexic but you love to write or use words?"

Through interviews with seven practicing wordsmiths, the film highlights how it's possible to overcome dyslexic issues or work around the challenges they present if you have a passion for words.

Within the testimonials we find a poet and author, a storyteller, a spoken word artist, a creative writing student, a novelist and the founder of an initiative for dyslexic writers.

John Stein

There are also insights from Mel Hunt, Principal Specialist Teacher at Dyslexia Action Sheffield and Professor John Stein, of the Dyslexia Research Trust.

Check out: 
National Dyslexia Action Charity;
RASP: Rebelling Against Spelling Press (RASP) A publishing company for dyslexic writers.
DYSPLA: Celebrating dyslexic story makers 

Giving children non-verbal clues about words boosts vocabularies

The clues that parents give toddlers about words can make a big difference in how deep their vocabularies are when they enter school, new research at the University of Chicago shows.

By using words to reference objects in the visual environment, parents can help young children learn new words, according to the research.

It also explores the difficult-to-measure quality of non-verbal clues to word meaning during interactions between parents and children learning to speak.

For example, saying, "There goes the zebra" while visiting the zoo helps a child learn the word "zebra" faster than saying, "Let's go to see the zebra."

Differences in the quality of parents' non-verbal clues to toddlers (what children can see when their parents are talking) explain about a quarter (22 percent) of the differences in those same children's vocabularies when they enter kindergarten, researchers found.

The results are reported in the paper, "Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary three years later," published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Erica Cartmill

"Children's vocabularies vary greatly in size by the time they enter school," said lead author Erica Cartmill, a postdoctoral scholar at UChicago.

"Because preschool vocabulary is a major predictor of subsequent school success, this variability must be taken seriously and its sources understood."

Scholars have found that the number of words youngsters hear greatly influences their vocabularies.

Parents with higher socioeconomic status—those with higher income and more education—typically talk more to their children and accordingly boost their vocabularies, research has shown.

That advantage for higher-income families doesn't show up in the quality research, however.

"What was surprising in this study was that social economic status did not have an impact on quality.

Parents of lower social economic status were just as likely to provide high-quality experiences for their children as were parents of higher status," said co-author Susan Goldin-Meadow, the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology at UChicago.

More information: Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary 3 years later, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1309518110

Autism: Early brain responses to words predict developmental outcomes

A 2-year-old in the study sits on his mother's lap playing with toys while researchers record his brain's responses to words. 

Credit: Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington. 

The pattern of brain responses to words in 2-year-old children with Autism spectrum disorder predicted the youngsters' linguistic, cognitive and adaptive skills at ages 4 and 6, according to a new study.

The findings, to be published May 29 in PLOS ONE, are among the first to demonstrate that a brain marker can predict future abilities in children with autism.

"We've shown that the brain's indicator of word learning in 2-year-olds, already diagnosed with autism, predicts their eventual skills on a broad set of cognitive and linguistic abilities and adaptive behaviours," said lead author Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the University of Washington's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.

Patricia Kuhl

"This is true four years after the initial test, and regardless of the type of autism treatment the children received," she said.

In the study, 2-year-olds – 24 with autism and 20 without – listened to a mix of familiar and unfamiliar words while wearing an elastic cap that held sensors in place (EEG).

The sensors measured brain responses to hearing words, known as event-related potentials.

The research team then divided the children with Autism into two groups based on the severity of their social impairments and took a closer look at the brain responses.

Youngsters with less severe symptoms had brain responses that were similar to the typically developing children, in that both groups exhibited a strong response to known words in a language area located in the temporal parietal region on the left side of the brain.

This suggests that the brains of children with less severe symptoms can process words in ways that are similar to children without the disorder.

In contrast, children with more severe social impairments showed brain responses more broadly over the right hemisphere, which is not seen in typically developing children of any age.

"We think this measure signals that the 2-year-old's brain has reorganized itself to process words. This reorganization depends on the child's ability to learn from social experiences," Kuhl said.

She cautioned that, identifying a neural marker that predicts future Autism diagnoses with assurance, is still some way off.

The researchers also tested the children's language skills, cognitive abilities, and social and emotional development, beginning at age 2, then again at ages 4 and 6.

The children with autism received intensive treatment and, as a group, they improved on the behavioural tests over time.

But the outcome for individual children varied widely and the more their brain responses to words at age 2 were like those of typically developing children, the more improvement in skills they showed by age 6. 

In other studies, Kuhl has found that social interaction accelerates language learning in babies. Infants use social cues, such as tracking adults' eye movements to learn the names of things, and must be interested in people to learn in this way.

Paying attention to people is a way for babies to sort through all that is happening around them and serves as a guide or gauge to determine what is important.

But with autism, social impairments impede children's interest in, and ability to pick up on, social cues. They find themselves paying attention to many other things, especially inanimate objects, instead of people. 

"Social learning is what most humans are about," Kuhl said. "If your brain can learn from other people in a social context you have the capability to learn just about anything."

She hopes that the new findings will lead to brain measures that can be used much earlier in development – at 12 months or younger – to help identify children at risk for autism.

"This line of work may lead to new interventions applied early in development, when the brain shows its highest level of neural plasticity," Kuhl said.

More information: dx.plos.org/10.137… pone.0064967

Dyslexia: The Davis Method - Symbol Mastery

Davis Symbol Mastery — the modeling of words in clay – is based on the idea that each word has three parts: what it means, what it looks like, and how it sounds.

When all three parts are fully understood and learned, the word is mastered.

Brain research shows that all skilled readers make this connection, but the balance struck between sight, sound, and meaning may differ depending on the written form of language.

In languages that are phonetically consistent, such as Italian, readers tend to rely first on letter-sound correspondence (phonology).

Readers of a character-based alphabet, such as Chinese, rely more heavily on the correspondence between letter shape and meaning.

English uses an alphabetic system but an orthography (spelling system) that is influenced largely by word meaning (morphology). That is why English spelling is inconsistent.

Noted psychologist and research professor Uta Frith, explains that skilled readers make instant mental links between the sounds, appearance, and meanings of words.

English readers rely more heavily on the meaning element, because knowing the meaning is often also the key to knowing how the word sounds.

Dyslexic readers typically struggle because it is harder for them to make the connections automatically.

That is why the Davis system relies on modeling word meaning together with mastering the visual sequence of letters and the sound of the whole word.

Learn more:
Three Parts to a Word
Davis Symbol Mastery Support
Davis Symbol Mastery Kit

What Is Dysgraphia? - YouTube

Dysgraphia is a learning disability that affects writing, which requires a complex set of motor and information processing skills.

Dysgraphia makes the act of writing difficult. It can lead to problems with spelling, poor handwriting, and putting thoughts on paper.

People with dysgraphia can have trouble organizing letters, numbers, and words on a line or page. This can result partly from:

• Visual-spatial difficulties: trouble processing what the eye sees
• Language processing difficulty: trouble processing and making sense of what the ear hears

As with all learning disabilities (LD), dysgraphia is a lifelong challenge, although how it manifests may change over time.

A student with this disorder can benefit from specific accommodations in the learning environment. Extra practice learning the skills required to be an accomplished writer can also help.

Read more about Dysgraphia

Neglect Dyslexia - Left or Right

Deficits in reading may stem from disruptions of simple sensory impairments to more complex problems involving thinking related to language.

There are several subtypes of dyslexias and they can be categorized as either central or peripheral dyslexias (of which there are two, attentional dyslexia and neglect dyslexia), which result from impairment to brain processes that are capable of converting letters on the page into visual word forms.

There are two types of peripheral dyslexias called attentional dyslexia, and neglect dyslexia.

Neglect dyslexia is usually due to brain damage, and causes an impairment of reading because the affected person misidentifies letters in certain spatial regions of either a word or a group of words.

The defect for neglect dyslexia subtype is associated with the right parietal lobe.

Neglect dyslexia can be further divided into left neglect dyslexia and right neglect dyslexia.

In the left neglect dyslexia subtype, the affected person experiences difficulty reading initial letters of the word, which may cause a letter(s) to be substituted, omitted or added.

In the right neglect dyslexia subtype causes a patient to have letter errors at the end of the word.

Read more about the different types of Dyslexia here: Healthline

Attentional Dyslexia

Deficits in reading may stem from disruptions of simple sensory impairments to more complex problems involving thinking related to language.

There are several subtypes of dyslexias and they can be categorized as either central or peripheral dyslexias (of which there are two, attentional dyslexia and neglect dyslexia), which result from impairment to brain processes that are capable of converting letters on the page into visual word forms.

The attentional dyslexia subtype is a rare disorder of attention control, typically correlated with damage to the left parietal lobe (located on the sides of the head).

The attentional dyslexia causes an impairment of reading words in sentences, since the defect causes many words to be visible at the same time.

Read more about the different types of Dyslexia here: Healthline

Dyslexia: The First 100 most commonly used words chart

High frequency words are quite simply those words which occur most frequently in written material. For example, "and", "the", "as" and "it".

They are often words that have little meaning on their own, but they do contribute a great deal to the meaning of a sentence.

Some of the high frequency words can be sounded out using basic phonic rules, e.g. "it" is an easy word to read using phonics.

However, many of the high frequency words are not phonically regular and are therefore hard to read in the early stages.

These words are sometimes called tricky words, sight words or camera words.

In addition to being difficult to sound out, most of the high frequency words have a rather abstract meaning which is hard to explain to a child.

Below you can download our first 100 and second 100 most commonly used words chart for your classroom as a display or simply to put in front of your child when they are doing their homework to assist them with spelling.

Download First 100 High Frequency Words Chart - Bold Print.   

Download Second 100 High Frequency Words Chart - Bold Print.

Children with Dyslexia Read Better with Free App

Parents who have children with dyslexia know the frustration they and their kids feel as they face the challenge of reading.

Now a French-Italian research team have discovered a simple way to help children with dyslexia read 20% faster and make much fewer errors, and you can try it with a free app.

You can help your child with dyslexia

Dyslexia is a learning disability that can interfere with an individual's ability to read, spell, write, and even speak in some cases.

Dyslexia is the most common learning disability among children, and it continues throughout adulthood.

The severity of dyslexia can range from mild to severe, yet it can be treated, and the sooner the better. Typical warning signs of dyslexia include

• Letter and number reversals. Although this is common in younger children, after age 7 or 8 it usually disappears. If it does not, children should be tested for dyslexia
• Difficulty copying from a book, computer screen, or board
• Difficulty distinguishing left from right
• Written work is generally disorganized
• May have difficulty moving to the rhythm of music

The research team, headed by Johannes Ziegler of the Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, discovered that increasing the amount of spacing between characters and words can improve how fast and how accurately dyslexic children read, and without any prior training.

What parents may appreciate even more is that these researchers also developed an iPad/iPhone application, which is available free of charge, that allows parents and dyslexic children to change the spacing between letters and test if this new approach to reading works for them.

What the dyslexia study revealed
The researchers came upon their finding by testing 94 children with dyslexia, ages 8 to 14 years, and their ability to read. The 54 Italian and 40 French children read 24 sentences with normal spaces and then wider than normal spacing.

When the children read the text with wider spacing, their reading speed was an average of 20% faster and they made half as many errors. This finding opens up great possibilities for children with dyslexia, for whom it typically takes one year to read what a "normal reader" can read in two days.

A free app for dyslexia may help
Parents can get the free app for dyslexia here. The free app is currently available in French and English, downloadable from Apple Store, and allows parents and children to alter the spacing between letters.

Children with dyslexia have an impairment in their brain's ability to convert images into language they can understand. However, this difficulty is not related to vision or hearing problems, nor is it caused by mental retardation or a lack of intelligence.

In fact, many highly successful and creative people had or have dyslexia. Some of them include Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Tom Cruise, Cher, Richard Branson, and Winston Churchill.

The authors of this new study report that "our findings offer a practical way to ameliorate dyslexics' reading achievement without any training." They note that "extra large letter spacing, which could even be optimized adaptively on an individual basis, can certainly contribute to achieving this goal."

Children with dyslexia can become easily discouraged by their difficulty in learning to read, and this can lead to development of low self-esteem, depression, behavior problems, and a dislike for school. A free app for children with dyslexia could be a new beginning for this population of young people.

SOURCE:
Zorzi M et al. Extra-large letter spacing improves reading in dyslexia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2012. doi:10.1073/pnas.1205566109

Learning About Dyslexia - YouTube

Many language-based disabilities go undetected. Doing their own research, sharing family stories, and extensive testing allowed the Giardinas to understand Michael's disabilities and learn how to help him learn and grow.

Apps for Children With Dyslexia - Gadgetwise

There is software out there designed to help children with dyslexia read (expensive software) but nothing yet in the way of an app marketed for that purpose (and there’s obviously no app that will “fix” dyslexia).
But just because there’s nothing actually marketed as helping students with dyslexia learn to better process in the classroom doesn’t mean there isn’t anything helpful out there.

Warren Buckleitner, who reviews children’s technology for The Times’s Gadgetwise blog, has posted his recommendations.

He suggests starting with a few really well designed letter and word-building apps on an iPad to get a child playfully constructing words and associating meanings.

One of his favourites for preschoolers is Toca Boca’s Paint My Wings, which lets children play informally with visual relationships in real time. For older children, he points parents toward Pocket Phonics, Montessori Crosswords and Word Wizard.

If you use any apps to help a child with dyslexia practice the skills she uses to cope, please, share in the comments. Which ones, and which skills do they improve? What works and what doesn’t when dyslexia is in the mix?

Dyslexia: Penfriend's Software claims to provide Homophone support - YouTube

Penfriend software products claim to support you with Homophones.

A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words may be spelled the same, such as rose (flower) and rose (past tense of "rise"), or differently, such as carat, caret, and carrot, or to, two, and too. 


Homophones that are spelled the same are also both homographs and homonyms.

Homophones that are spelled differently are also called heterographs. The term "homophone" may also apply to units longer or shorter than words, such as phrases, letters or groups of letters that are pronounced the same as another phrase, letter or group of letters.

Homophones, sometimes known as 'confusables' are words which have a similar sound but differ in spelling and meaning. Examples of homophones include 'there' and 'their', 'where' and 'were' and so on.

With over 400 homophones in the English language, similar sounding words add depth to a language but they can also be the cause of great frustration. Spell checkers can't even be relied upon where these troublesome homophones are concerned.

The problem with most homophones is that if you're typing too quickly or not paying close attention to what you're writing, you could accidently end up with a properly spelled word, except it's the wrong word. Confusables are often highlighted by dyslexic people as a source of annoyance and confusion.

With Penfriend's new 'Confusable word hints' you can now see and even hear the difference between confusable words so there's no excuse to get 'pair' and 'pear' or 'bear' and 'bare' mixed up anymore.

NB: This website does not endorse or recommend products or services, this information is provided to allow you to access and make informed decisions.

Reading Difficulties: The evolution of those annoying online security tests

A free tutorial website, Duolingo, aims to translate the entire web with the help of people starting to learn a new language.

It's a project born out of guilt from the man behind one of the most annoying features of web surfing - those online security checks involving random words.

Duolingo hopes to convince millions of people to work for free and thus translate all web content in a matter of years.

It may sound like an ambitious plan but it's not the first time founder Luis von Ahn and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University have enlisted a global workforce to work for nothing.

As a 22-year-old graduate student in 2000, von Ahn invented the Captcha - those distorted images of words and numbers used to sign in to ticketing and social media websites, among others, which users have to decipher to prove they are human.

The software is used by more than 350,000 websites to prevent computer programs from attacking them with spam. In 2007, von Ahn realised that 200 million Captchas were being typed by people all over the world every day.

"At first I felt really good about that because I thought, 'Look at the impact that I've had'," he says. "But then I starting feeling bad."

Typing each Captcha takes about 10 seconds, he estimates. Multiply that by 200 million, and humanity as a whole is wasting about 500,000 hours on these security codes every day.

He decided to put these hours to good use and devised ReCaptcha, a system that uses each human-typed response as both a security check and a means to digitise books one word at a time.

At the same time the New York Times was digitising 156 years of its archive using a team of typists. Over a decade, the typists had transcribed 27 years of newspapers. The paper began using von Ahn's software and in 24 months had transcribed the remaining 129 years of archived newspapers.

ReCaptcha was acquired by Google in 2009, and it is still used widely to tell humans and spamming programmes apart. But its translating software is exclusively available to Google's Books project to transcribe every book in the world.

All of that doesn't detract from the fact that for most people, these security codes are nothing more than a frustrating waste of time. For those with dyslexia or sight problems, they can be a serious barrier to internet use.

Dr Sue Fowler, at the Dyslexia Research Trust, says the codes only add to the trouble dyslexics have filling in web forms. "Even looking at it closely, I wouldn't know what to do with it," she says.

There is an audio alternative, but these are even more confusing as most just sound like a flurry of noise.

And the automated security codes are getting more and more difficult. Some of the latest manifestations can appear as a jumbled blur of letters, numbers and punctuation that is almost indecipherable.

"As of a few months ago, if we showed someone a ReCaptcha they were successful at it about 93% of the time," says von Ahn, adding that once that drops to 75%, users give up on trying to access a site.

Since selling ReCaptcha, von Ahn has teamed up with one of his graduate students, Severin Hacker, to create software that gives the user something in return for their time and effort.

The answer is Duolingo, a site that gives free language tutorials and in exchange solicits aspiring linguists to translate sentences from the internet.

At present, it only caters for English speakers looking to learn French, German or Spanish, and Spanish speakers who want to learn English. They start with very simple sentences and work up towards more complex ones, increasing their value as a translator as they progress.

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
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Stephen Fry talks about Language

With Dyslexia, Words Failed Me and Then Saved Me - Philip Schultz

Philip Schultz is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the author of the forthcoming memoir “My Dyslexia.” 

I was well into middle age when one of my children, then in the second grade, was found to be dyslexic. I had never known the name for it, but I recognized immediately that the symptoms were also mine. When I was his age I’d already all but given up on myself.

Repeating third grade at a new school, after having been asked to leave my old one for hitting kids who made fun of my perceived stupidity, I was placed in the “dummy class.” There were three of us, separated from our classmates at a table in the corner of the room.

One day, the teacher, who seldom spoke to us since it was understood that most of what she taught was beyond the reach of our intelligence, placed books in our hands and whispered that we should sit there quietly “pretending to read.” The principal was coming.

It was not the most outlandish thing she might’ve said, given how little was known about learning disabilities in the early 1950s, and how little training a teacher in the poorest section of Rochester would have received. And her request seemed reasonable to me.

I couldn’t tie my shoes, tell time or left from right, or recreate musical notes or words. I not only couldn’t read but often couldn’t hear or understand what was being said to me — by the time I’d processed the beginning of a sentence, the teacher was well on her way through a second or third.

When I did have something to say I couldn’t find the words with which to say it, or if I could, forgot how to pronounce them.

My situation then seemed hopeless; I had no idea what a learning disability was, or that it had nothing to do with intelligence. Being asked to pretend I wasn’t as stupid as I feared made perfect sense. Only in recollection does the pain of such a moment make itself felt.

Read more of this article here: With Dyslexia, Words Failed Me and Then Saved Me

Dyslexia: There is an upside

THE word “dyslexia” evokes painful struggles with reading, and indeed this learning disability causes much difficulty for the estimated 15 percent of Americans affected by it.

Since the phenomenon of “word blindness” was first documented more than a century ago, scientists have searched for the causes of dyslexia, and for therapies to treat it. In recent years, however, dyslexia research has taken a surprising turn: identifying the ways in which people with dyslexia have skills that are superior to those of typical readers.

The latest findings on dyslexia are leading to a new way of looking at the condition: not just as an impediment, but as an advantage, especially in certain artistic and scientific fields.

Tucker Nichols

Dyslexia is a complex disorder, and there is much that is still not understood about it. 

But a series of ingenious experiments have shown that many people with dyslexia possess distinctive perceptual abilities. 

For example, scientists have produced a growing body of evidence that people with the condition have sharper peripheral vision than others. 

Gadi Geiger and Jerome Lettvin, cognitive scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), used a mechanical shutter, called a tachistoscope, to briefly flash a row of letters extending from the center of a subject’s field of vision out to its perimeter. 

Typical readers identified the letters in the middle of the row with greater accuracy. 

Those with dyslexia triumphed, however, when asked to identify letters located in the row’s outer reaches.

The discovery of such talents inevitably raises questions about whether these faculties translate into real-life skills.

Although people with dyslexia are found in every profession, including law, medicine and science, observers have long noted that they populate fields like art and design in unusually high numbers.

Five years ago, the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity was founded to investigate and illuminate the strengths of those with dyslexia, while the seven-year-old Laboratory for Visual Learning, located within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is exploring the advantages conferred by dyslexia in visually intensive branches of science.

The director of the laboratory, the astrophysicist Matthew Schneps, notes that scientists in his line of work must make sense of enormous quantities of visual data and accurately detect patterns that signal the presence of entities like black holes. 

A pair of experiments conducted by Mr. Schneps and his colleagues, published in the Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society in 2011, suggests that dyslexia may enhance the ability to carry out such tasks.

Read more of this article here at NY Times

Typophile Film: Brent Jackson

Typophile Film Festival 5 Opening Titles from Brent Barson on Vimeo.

Even though it’s been around for a few years, if you haven’t seen this wonderful video created for the 5th Typophile Film Festival by BYU design students, it really is an impressive piece of work, especially seeing as no CG effects were used in its production. Enjoy!

Sir Jackie Stewart: Dyslexia 'not a cruel fiction' - YouTube

Motor racing legend Sir Jackie Stewart has admitted that discovering he had dyslexia was like "being saved from drowning."

Speaking at a dyslexia conference, the Flying Scot said that he still could not remember the alphabet despite knowing the precise details of every racing course in the world.

Find out more at www.deadlinescotland.co.uk

Helping to Decode New or unknown Words

Three common curriculum gaps that can intensify children’s reading problems are failing to teach them phonological awareness, automatic word recognition, and an alternative to single letter phonics.

Teach Phonological Awareness. This is the ability to identify and manipulate sounds within spoken words. For example, say the word bat without the /b/ sound. Unfortunately, may struggling readers struggle with phonological awareness. To develop proficiency, they need instruction.

• Good phonics instruction should develop phonological awareness. The key to learning to decode words is the [alphabetic] principle that letters can represent sounds
• The key to the development of the alphabetic principle, word recognition, and invented spelling is phonological awareness
• Phoneme awareness [part of phonological awareness] is the awareness of sounds in spoken words. As words are spoken, most sounds cannot be said by themselves. For example, the spoken word /cat/ has one continuous sound and is not pronounced “kuh-a-tuh.” 
• Children ordinarily concentrate on the meaning and do not think of the sounds in the word. But, since letters represent sounds, a child must learn to think of words as having both meaning and sound in order to understand the alphabetic principle. (Stahl, Duffy-Hester, & Stahl, 1998, p. 340, references omitted)

Teach Automatic Word Recognition. Struggling readers who accurately identify words—slowly and laboriously—will likely tire of reading, resist reading, and become overwhelmed by the volume of all they must read.

Three keys to helping these children become fluent readers are to teach them how to quickly and accurately recognize words, to give them lots of daily practice in doing so,  and to engage them in lots reading they find easy and enjoyable. This will help them to quickly identify words.

• Good phonics instruction leads to automatic word recognition. In order to read books, children need to be able to read words quickly and automatically. If a child stumbles over or has to decode slowly too many words, comprehension will suffer. 
• Although we want children to have a strategy for decoding words they do not know, we also want children to recognize many words automatically and be able to read them in context. (Stahl, Duffy-Hester, & Stahl, 1998, p. 343, references omitted)

Teach Word Families. Many phonics programs emphasise the sounds of individual letters and emphasize sounding out most words one or two letters at a time. This helps many struggling readers to quickly and accurately identify unknown words. But many does not mean all.

Here’s a way that can help struggling readers who struggle with the sounds of individual letters, especially vowel sounds. It uses word families, such ake: bake, brake, cake, make, quake, rake, sake, snake, take.

Word families are also called phonograms or rhymes.

• Recent scholarly inquiry into how children learn to decode words suggests that knowledge of certain sound and letter patterns in words may help readers figure out unfamiliar words. This is often called the analogy approach to word recognition, and a considerable amount of research supports its use as an instrument for word-recognition instruction
• Predominant among such letter patterns are onsets and rhymes.  An onset is formed by the individual consonant or consonant combination (such as pl, ph, st, sch, str, or th) that precedes the first vowel in a word or syllable. 
• Rhymes are another name for letter combinations that we have for years called “phonograms” or “word families,” the part of a syllable that contains the vowel and all subsequent consonants. For example, in the word bat, the b is the onset and the at is the rime; in slick, the sl is the onset and the ick is the rhyme.  
• Fry (1998) has pointed out that just 38 common rime patterns can be used by readers to decode 654 one-syllable words. Moreover, these same rimes can also be helpful for partial decoding of a much larger number of longer, more difficult, multisyllabic words. (Rasinski, 1999)

If your child struggles to identify unknown words when reading, ask yourself:

• Has the school assessed his phonological awareness skills? If they’re poor, are his teachers teaching him how to identify and manipulate sounds he hears in words?
• Are his teachers teaching him to recognize words quickly and accurately, or just accurately?
• If he struggles when using individual letters to sound out (decode) unknown words, can his teachers teach him to use word families (rimes, phonograms)?

References
Rasinski, T. (1999). Making and Writing Words Using Letter Patterns. Retrieved 9/22/2011, from http://www.readingonline.org/articles/rasinski/MWW_LP.html.

Stahl, S.A., Duffy-Hester, A.M., & Stahl, K.A.D. (1998). Everything you wanted to know about phonics (but were afraid to ask). Reading Research Quarterly, 33, 338-355.