LD Resources

My friend Harvey Hubbel is working on a movie: Dislecksia: The Movie. Oh boy, here we go.

Sarah Smith Nessel has written a great essay for the Kansas City Star: ‘Normal” shouldn’t be the only acceptable realm.

…for many of us with less-severely affected children, the “tragedy” of Autism simply isn’t. In our current culture of pathology, children who 50 years ago would have just been considered a bit odd, or loners, now have a diagnosis, a therapy team, endless rounds of assessments, a mound of county and school district education plan paperwork and, all too often, a pile of prescription medications.

Ginger Software offers an automatic text correction (spell checking) product aimed at dyslexic writers. Currently it only works with the Windows version of Microsoft Word but they will expand its application base in the future. It requires an internet connection.

Ginger Software
405 Waltham St, # 371
Lexington, MA 02421
617-230-6600
781-674-2737 fax
www.gingersoftware.com/

Warning: the Ginger Software web site is extremely slow to load, no doubt because of the product demo at the top. The product really does work quite well and it’s worth the wait for the site to load to experiment with it.

School Psychologist Files
School Psychologist Blog Files

Special education resources, information, and relevant links for anyone looking for information related to school psychology or special education.

Understanding and Managing Learning Differences
July 16, 17, & 18

This 20-hour course provides an overview of learning differences including learning disabilities, inattention, impulsivity, and memory and language processing weaknesses as well as their impact on learning, self-esteem and behavior at home. Participants will review psychological and academic testing in order to one, better understand and read reports and two, practice active participation in the educational planning process. Attendees will discuss strategies to help students with learning and behavior at home and school, including more formal Accommodation Plans (504) and Educational Plans (IEP’s). Strategies for effective collaboration at Team Meetings will be practiced. All curriculum materials are included; cost is $500.

For course information or to register online, contact Bridges Associates toll-free at 800-790-1890. www.bridgesassociates.com

Online WebAnywhere, service lets blind surf the Internet from any computer, anywhere

This is a fantastic service and no doubt will be useful for people who can see but can’t read. I urge you to watch the entire video to see how it works.

LD Resources has a new look and some of you who have been following it for a while may need to take a moment and poke around to get oriented.

Most of the work in this new look went into typography and readability and we hope you find things easier to read, especially comment threads.

The pictures in the header change as you refresh your browser or leave and come back to the site. More pictures will be added as I find or take them. All pictures were taken by me.

Let me know if you find problems or have questions.

Welcome.

Samveda Training & Research Centre
# 610, 7th Main, 7th Cross, P.J.Extn.,
Davangere - 577 002,
Karnataka, India
www.samveda.org/

Schools, Facing Tight Budgets, Leave Gifted Programs Behind

This is not great news for numerous reasons: some LD students are gifted, there will be a backlash against special ed programs aimed at pulling up less than gifted students.

Ugh!

© 2008 Richard Mellott

I started out as a kid who was always active, never fit in, and had trouble making friends my own age. I’d get beaten up because I was awkward and wore glasses, so I retreated into reading books. By the time I was 14, I had read Freud, Jung, Hesse, Heinlein, Asimov, Voltaire, Watts, Gurdjieff, James, Lang, and many other philosophers, science fiction authors, religious authors, historical fiction, psychologists, and had a collection of 2,000 books I had snitched from booksellers all over my hometown. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do math, and still couldn’t settle down, so I started hanging with the crowd that had the best self-medicating going, this being back in the late 1960s. My hair grew, my beard grew, and by the time I dropped out of High School, I was a geek/hippie.

I finished my GED in 1971, then went to Ann Arbor’s University of Michigan, where I maintained a B average for about 3 semesters. I then left school again, to go work in a junkyard in Columbus, Ohio. While there, I hung out with friends from the local art school, went to concerts, and just generally wasted a year. After that, I hitchhiked out to Wyoming, worked as a cowboy, and got married, eventually having a family. Over the next 14 years, I had 3-5 jobs per year, and can count over 35 occupations from that period. Talk about a jack of all trades, master of none. Continue Reading »