Hello again. Well things have been busy as ever this past week. Work is going well. Over the past week, I've had 3 new people call or stop by. I've met with one of them today, and I'll be meeting the other two early next week. So I think we're up to around 12 to 13 people now.
Magic really seems to be the popular program. Often people just need some form of magnification so they don't have to struggle to read small print on the monitor. The people interested in Jaws have been using the program some already, but just want to learn more. A couple people are interested in Kurzweil as well. So all the technology is getting some use.
I'm still working out how to actually train Dragon for myself. In order to start dictating to the program, you have to go through some initial training. This basically consists of reading through a few paragraphs of text clearly until the computer understands every word. As a Jaws user, it's rather interesting, and by interesting I mean difficult. There is a pretty cool program called JSay that will greatly help bridge the gap between Jaws and Dragon, but like most assistive technology, it's a few hundred dollars. I think I'm going to just set up a time with a library staff member and see if they can help me read the screen, and see if we can get through it. I really need to get better at Dragon, because it's rather hard to help people right now when I'm not able to use it myself. So that's one of my immediate goals for the next week or so.
I'm also working on getting a couple other technologies available to the library. I'm going to put together a proposal for WebAdapt and The Freedom Box. I really don't see any reason WebAdapt can't be put on a machine, because it's small, and totally free. I'm also going to be doing some evaluating of the Freedom Box software, and putting together a proposal why I think this would greatly help library customers. I see it very useful to new computer users who just want to be able to do a select few things, and not really become very technical. A lot of people simply want to be able to communicate with family via E-mail, and look things up on the Internet.
I also had my first quarterly review with my site supervisor and CTEP supervisor. It went pretty well. Things are going smoothly, but we came up with a few things to try and work on for projects and just improving what I'm already doing.
I also had my first conference with my grad school instructor for my course project. Things are actually going fairly well, even though I'm probably still a little behind. I learned some basics about putting my instruction into HTML EZ, and just some tips for the instruction itself. I will also be figuring out how to trim down what part of the instruction I'll actually develop for this semester. My training module is so huge, and has so much content, that there's no way I'd get it all developed, implamented, tested, and evaluated before mid May. I now have a few ideas how to make this thing more manageable. Now I just have to sit down and work on it more...
Finally, nothing too exciting or fun has happened lately. I'll hopefully get together with a few friends in the next couple weeks. Oh, and I did get to visit the science museum last week with the rest of CTEP, and that was really cool. I love the omnitheater. And yay! There's finally a release date for a game I've been looking forward to for the past year or so, 2 actually. The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion and Tetris DS both come out on the 20th, and I can't wait for either. Tetris will be great because I love Tetris, and there are lots of new modes that we can all play with only one copy of the game. That's definitely one of the coolest features of the Nintendo DS. And Oblivion, if it has everything it is supposed to, will probably be one of the coolest games ever, and thankfully my PC is powerful enough to run it now. And anyone who likes action games should definitely get F.E.A.R. and play online. I've been quite addicted to that for the past few months. Hopefully I'll be able to find more fun events and places to go in the near future too.
Anyway, that's all for now.
Magic really seems to be the popular program. Often people just need some form of magnification so they don't have to struggle to read small print on the monitor. The people interested in Jaws have been using the program some already, but just want to learn more. A couple people are interested in Kurzweil as well. So all the technology is getting some use.
I'm still working out how to actually train Dragon for myself. In order to start dictating to the program, you have to go through some initial training. This basically consists of reading through a few paragraphs of text clearly until the computer understands every word. As a Jaws user, it's rather interesting, and by interesting I mean difficult. There is a pretty cool program called JSay that will greatly help bridge the gap between Jaws and Dragon, but like most assistive technology, it's a few hundred dollars. I think I'm going to just set up a time with a library staff member and see if they can help me read the screen, and see if we can get through it. I really need to get better at Dragon, because it's rather hard to help people right now when I'm not able to use it myself. So that's one of my immediate goals for the next week or so.
I'm also working on getting a couple other technologies available to the library. I'm going to put together a proposal for WebAdapt and The Freedom Box. I really don't see any reason WebAdapt can't be put on a machine, because it's small, and totally free. I'm also going to be doing some evaluating of the Freedom Box software, and putting together a proposal why I think this would greatly help library customers. I see it very useful to new computer users who just want to be able to do a select few things, and not really become very technical. A lot of people simply want to be able to communicate with family via E-mail, and look things up on the Internet.
I also had my first quarterly review with my site supervisor and CTEP supervisor. It went pretty well. Things are going smoothly, but we came up with a few things to try and work on for projects and just improving what I'm already doing.
I also had my first conference with my grad school instructor for my course project. Things are actually going fairly well, even though I'm probably still a little behind. I learned some basics about putting my instruction into HTML EZ, and just some tips for the instruction itself. I will also be figuring out how to trim down what part of the instruction I'll actually develop for this semester. My training module is so huge, and has so much content, that there's no way I'd get it all developed, implamented, tested, and evaluated before mid May. I now have a few ideas how to make this thing more manageable. Now I just have to sit down and work on it more...
Finally, nothing too exciting or fun has happened lately. I'll hopefully get together with a few friends in the next couple weeks. Oh, and I did get to visit the science museum last week with the rest of CTEP, and that was really cool. I love the omnitheater. And yay! There's finally a release date for a game I've been looking forward to for the past year or so, 2 actually. The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion and Tetris DS both come out on the 20th, and I can't wait for either. Tetris will be great because I love Tetris, and there are lots of new modes that we can all play with only one copy of the game. That's definitely one of the coolest features of the Nintendo DS. And Oblivion, if it has everything it is supposed to, will probably be one of the coolest games ever, and thankfully my PC is powerful enough to run it now. And anyone who likes action games should definitely get F.E.A.R. and play online. I've been quite addicted to that for the past few months. Hopefully I'll be able to find more fun events and places to go in the near future too.
Anyway, that's all for now.
posted by Jesse Anderson at 1:11 PM
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