Super Tutor: AI to Support all Learners

Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool for teaching and learning. One of the most beneficial uses is for supporting students. 

It has been said that with AI it is like every learner can now have their own 24-hour personal tutor.

I recently recorded a 47-minute training video for an updated version of my session "Super Tutor: AI to Support all Learners".

In this session we explore ways AI can assist educators as they are helping students, as well as ways for students to use AI directly to get individualized support. Tools explored include MagicSchool AI, Khanmigo, Brisk Teaching, Diffit, SchoolAI, AI chatbots, and many more.

See below for the recorded video and session resources. And be sure to share your suggestions for AI tools and uses. I am excited to learn with you!

Free Webinar: Read and Write Can Do That?!

Read&Write for Google Chrome is an awesome extension that provides assistive technology tools and support for all users. Anyone who follows my blog or has attended my training sessions has heard me mention this tool many times, as it is one of my all time favorites.

However, most of the time when we talk about Read&Write, we just think about its text-to-speech feature. Certainly this is a powerful tool that will read text aloud from any webpage or Google file, in a voice and at a speed of your choosing, highlighting the words as it goes.

But there is so much more to Read&Write! 

I am excited to be offering a free live webinar where we will explore "the rest of the toolbar" and see so many other useful features and tools that can help every student succeed.

See below for details on this free upcoming live-streamed training session...

Google Tools to Support All Learners

Technology can be a powerful tool to assist students when learning, as it provides accessibility and accommodations to support everyone. In particular the Chrome web browser allows users to install a wide variety of web extensions that provide tools that can help all learners.

In this blog post we will take a look at dozens of Chrome web extensions and apps and other tools and features that can assist students in seven main categories:

🗣️ Text to Speech

🎙️ Speech to Text  

👓 Readability

📗 Reading Comprehension

🔊 Audio Support  

☑️ Behavior, Focus, and Organization

🧭 Navigation

 
Some of the tools fit into more than one topic, but each is only listed once. Certainly this list does not cover all of the useful web extensions and tools available for learners, but it is a great place to begin. 

In addition to the list of extensions and tools, I have also linked in the video from a webinar I did on "Google Tools to Support All Learners" along with my ever-growing resource document and slideshow from the session.

Google Tools for Speech to Text

Our students have so many amazing ideas in their minds, and we want to make sure they are able to get those words from their heads into writing.

However if a student struggles with typing or spelling they may take those big awesome ideas and shrink them down to smaller words and shorter sentences.

Thankfully there are technology tools to help with this. Speech to text tools allow anyone to simply speak their words and have them typed up automatically.

Three of my favorite tools for this are Docs Voice Typing, Voice In Voice Typing, and the Dictation Tool in ChromeOS See below for a short 5-minute video demonstrating these tools, as well as written directions for using them.

New Online Video Course - Enhancing Special Education with G Suite

I am excited to announce a new online video course that I have created through Kiker Learning, called "Enhancing Special Education with G Suite"!

This course covers tools for accessibility and accommodations either from Google or that work within the Google suite of products. These tools can be so helpful for all learners, whether in person or when working remotely.

In the course we take a look at four specific categories of tools:

• First, text to speech tools that will read aloud content for our students.
• Next, speech to text tools that will allow our students to simply speak and have what they say automatically typed up for them.
• Third, readability tools which will make it easier for students to read what is on a webpage.
• And finally reading comprehension tools to help students better understand the content they have read.

See below for all the details on the course and how it can be accessed.

10 Alternatives for the Readability Extension

Recently I had to say goodbye to two big comfy chairs. The first one was an actual chair that no longer had a spot in our house and had to get offered up as a “curb alert” on Craigslist. The second one was a digital comfy chair ... the wonderful Chrome web extension called Readability.

Readability is one of my favorite Chrome web extensions, and is always a "go to" I use when introducing teachers or students to the idea of extensions. Basically it is (was) a tool that cleans up a web page to make it easier to read, by removing ads, comments, and other unnecessary page elements, so all that is left is the content of the main article in an easy to read format. This is a powerful tool to help students of all ages with reading comprehension and focus. I have referenced Readability multiple times on this blog in previous posts (here, here, and here)

Back in September Readability announced that they would be shutting down their bookmarking services but “the vastly more popular Readability Parser API, which extracts article content from web pages, will continue to run and will improve." Unfortunately they seem to have changed their mind on that and have now edited their announcement to read “The Readability Parser API for developers will shut down December 10, 2016.” At the moment the extension is still working, but it sounds like that will stop in early December.

So if Readability is shutting down, what alternatives are available? Thankfully there are many other extensions that do the same task or some similar version of it. Below are 10 Chrome web extensions you may want to consider as options in place of Readability. I would encourage you to try these out to see which ones may be a good match for your students (and yourself) to help make the web more readable.

Chrome Extensions for Struggling Students and Special Needs

Technology can be a powerful tool to assist students when learning, as it provides accessibility and accommodations to support everyone. In particular the Chrome web browser allows users to install a wide variety of web extensions that provide tools that can help all learners.

In this blog post we will take a look at dozens of Chrome web extensions and apps and other tools and features that can assist students in seven main categories:

🗣️ Text to Speech

🎙️ Speech to Text  

👓 Readability

📗 Reading Comprehension

🔊 Audio Support  

☑️ Behavior, Focus, and Organization

🧭 Navigation

 
Some of the tools fit into more than one topic, but each is only listed once. Certainly this list does not cover all of the useful web extensions and tools available for learners, but it is a great place to begin. 

In addition to the list of extensions and tools, I have also linked in the video from a webinar I did on "Google Tools to Support All Learners" along with my ever-growing resource document and slideshow from the session.