iOS 5 Accessibility Features for Students with Disabilities

This is an excellent article from Luis Perez who provides Technology Integration Assistance at the University of South Florida. Luis who has a visual impairment himself has used his own situation as an opportunity to assist others with impairment or who teach students with impairments to make the most of available technology. In his article Overview of New Accessibility Features in iOS 5 Luis steps us through some of the features we should be taking advantage of.


Read the full article here: Overview-of-new-accessibility-features-in-ios-5
Check out Luis's Website for a great list of resources: http://luisperezonline.com/portfolio/

Pearltrees - Visual Content Curating

There is a lot of discussion on blogs and twitter about the benefits of Content Curation. This is one very good way of dealing with the overload of information that the internet has become. To some extent we started this process with sites like Delicious, Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. There has been a shift occurring lately with developments in the Semantic Web and fuzzy search algorithms.


The end result is a number of Apps that allow you to collect, curate, make connections and then share sites, blogs, articles or websites around similar ideas or concepts. One of these is Pearltrees. I like this concept because it such a visual interface that it allows the viewer to see the physical links between ideas. In a way it is similar to the way that an App like Wikinodes deals with searches in Wikipedia.


Both teachers and students are able to decide, collect and share only that information that they deem to be relevant to their particular area of study or inquiry. Pearltrees is a place to organize, discover and share what you like on the web. Their unique visual interface lets you keep everything you like at hand so you can organize it your way. Collect web pages and turn them into pearls. Organize your pearls into pearltrees based on your interests. Enrich your account with pearltrees from other community members. Share all of this and start to cultivate your interests with Pearltrees.


        


If you would like to see one in action check out the one curated by Judy O'Connell @heyjudeonline - find it here - http://pear.ly/1ntz . While you are at it check out her blog Learning in an Online World at http://heyjude.wordpress.com/.




http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/pearltrees-for-ipad/id463462134?mt=8




App Building Tools for Teachers and Students


There are one or two tools that allow teachers or students to create apps for Mobile Devices - the first that I was aware of was probably Wix Mobile. Wix Mobile is based on HTML 5 and is designed to simplify the creation of mobile websites, Wix Mobile provides a set of templates specifically designed for optimal display and performance on smartphones and tablet devices. 



There is also iBuildApp. iBuildApp provides a simple and inexpensive way to build, test, track and update a native iPhone/Android, web app or even iPad apps that supports text, RSS feeds, images, audio, and video, and much more. You can create a free app for your school, department, college or friends within a very short timeframe.






Appsbar is a robust yet easy-to-use app builder. They have made it simple enough to make it possible for anyone to create an app, yet so powerful that you can create an amazing and functional app that can be published to the world quickly and easily. It would have been a lot easier for them to develop software that builds apps, but that doesn't offer any instruction, improvements, or options to create an app that meets publishing standards in the industry, instead this is a fully supported app builder.

iGenapps is another one specifically for iDevices. Not yet released on iTunes (but available and FREE as an Android app) this app promises to be a simple drag and drop method of producing content based apps. iGenApps will let you make hundreds of different kinds of applications. You can create applications such as cooking recipes, instruction guides, video tutorials, blogging apps, bands and fans apps, photographic or artwork portfolio, personal or business profiles, website conversion, restaurant menus, flash cards and teaching apps, conventions and events, product listing, contact directory, among many more. 

It will be interesting the see the cost - if any, on iTunes but this is a great way to introduce students to writing apps without the need for up-skilling in Xcode.






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