YouTube.com/Teachers Helps Innovative Educators Transform Learning

Schools that have moved from banning and blocking to safely embracing tools like YouTube are able to empower their students to learn with real-world resources.  If you’re like middle school history teacher James Sanders, you may be using YouTube to spark discussions, energize and excite students about various topics, increase instructional time by flipping the classroom, and create playlists for each lesson so students can dive deeper into specific areas that interest them.

Now YouTube.com is taking a more active role in supporting learning. They started last summer with The YouTube Teacher’s Studio. This is a workshop that brought teachers from around the world together to get smart about using YouTube in the classroom. Topics included “Finding your inner Spielberg,” “FlipTeaching,” and Using YouTube as a powerful educational tool. From there, YouTube took these workshops as a springboard to launch a new site called YouTube.com/Teachers.

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25 Incredible Assistive Technologies

Editor's note:  I recently pulled together a compilation of assistive technologies here. I think this guest post from Best Colleges Online  will also be of interest to innovative educators who want to ensure their students have access to multiple learning supports. 


Learning disabilities manifest themselves in countless ways, varying in severity from the very mild to the debilitating and those that impact different elements of education. Yet they almost universally end up equally stereotyped, misunderstood and sometimes even unfairly stigmatized. The rigid traditional classroom structure rarely provides the learning disabled with the resources necessary to meet their reading, writing, math, social and mobility skills or sense impairment. Because of this, many learning disabled students feel marginalized by their peers and instructors alike, oftentimes hindered more by imposed isolation than the conditions themselves. But as technology marches on, so too do opportunities for academic success. No matter their struggle, these perfectly competent, capable individuals probably have something available to close any unfortunate, challenging gaps. It’s all a matter of finding the right answer and finding ways to pay for it — though the more financially strapped have a few options available, depending on their situation and what they require.

Please be aware that this article is not meant to take the place of legitimate medical advice. Different individuals require different solutions based on numerous factors, and only a small sample of the myriad assistive technologies available receives representation here. Take it as a brief overview rather than something even one atom definitive or professional — save diagnoses and prescriptions for the experts.
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Free Assistive Tech Tools Make Learning Accessible to All

Technology provides a terrific way to remove the obstacles to learning.  Fortunately, many of the tools available are free but what are they?  I reached out to my PLN through Facebook, Twitter, Classroom 2.0 and Google+ to find out.  Here are the fabulous resources shared by my PLN. 

Assistive Tech Starter Kit
The following accessibility tools are recommended to get started with assistive technology.

• Google Apps Accessibility
• accessibility features of our products for vision & hearing impaired.
• Accessibility on the PCs with MS Office
• WordTalk,  Balaboka, or Windows Speech Recognition
• Accessibility with mobiles
• VLingo (Android - free, BlackBerry - cheap)
• Dragon (iOS - free) on handhelds or tablets.
• FireFox with Accessibility A collection of free accessibility add-ons available from Firefox. FoxVox and CLiCk-Speak are great.

These are all free (or cheap) and provide both effective Text-To-Speech (thus access to content) and those with Word-by-Word highlighting help build sight-word recognition. One of the best uses of text to speech is to support writing with "read back" editing.

Resource courtesy of Ira Socol 

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Cut out the interesting part of videos with TubeChop

Innovative Educators often use video to supplement learning.  Sometimes however, it's just a small clip of a longer video they are interested in showing. For those times, TubeChop is a terrific tool to just show the part of the video you are interested in featuring.

Here's how it works.
1. Find the video you want to chop.
2. Enter the url at www.TubeChop.com
3. Select & cut interesting part of the video.
4. Share it with friends.

The chopped video will have a unique url which will be nice for some schools where YouTube is blocked, but TubeChop is not.