Summertime Collaboration Time: Work with parents! Summer is almost here and with it may come an end, or at least a decrease, in services to kids. While collaboration with parents is key to ...
iWork for iCloud Beta: Still No Support For RTL OR Indic Scripts The improvements added by Apple to iWork for iCloud beta on May 21 did not include any fixes to the broken rendering of Arabic or Indic scri...
Summer's on the Way I know it is still snowing in some places and it has been a really long winter for lots of you. Here in Southern California we never really...
Grab a FREE Resource My resource Language Fun and Story Elements with the book Aunt Isabel Tells a Good One (by Kate Duke) will be a Flash Freebie on Teacher...
Being a Good Communication Partner, Part 2 I wanted to touch this topic again, as there continues to be a lot of confusion from parents, teachers, aides and SLPs about how, exactly, t...
Tech Tips for the Classroom Just a quick post here. I wanted to let you know about a free ebook now available on Teachers Pay Teachers. Tech Tips for Teachers. Lots ...
Social Network App for Language Exchange I recently became aware of an unusual app designed to facilitate social networking across language barriers and help people learning another...
Language Improvements In iOS and Mac Pages And Keynote The new versions of iOS and Mac Pages and Keynote released by Apple April 1 have several new features for Arabic/Hebrew. In Pages: +New Arab...
iWork for iCloud Beta: Still No Support For RTL Or Indic Scripts The improvements added by Apple to iWork for iCloud beta on April 1 did not included any fixes to the broken rendering of Arabic or Indic sc...
Apps on Sale for April Autism Awareness Just a quick post - and I try to stay away from too many posts that sell my resources, BUT Question It - the app for teaching kids with auti...
Autism Awareness Day - and Month April 2 is Autism Awareness Day coming up again. And the whole month is dedicated to autism awareness. Interestingly enough, I've...
MS Word For iPad: No Support For Arabic Or Indic My initial tests indicate that the Word for iPad app released today cannot do RTL (like Arabic -- wrong direction and letters not connected)...
Adding Reference Dictionaries to iOS I had not thought it possible to add reference dictionaries to iOS, but recently came across this app which is supposed to be able to do it....
Typing With The International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is not a language but a set of agreed special symbols for describing the pronunciation of any lang...
Shared Reading with AAC Users I touched in this topic a little bit when discussing use of storybook apps. I wanted to come back to it again (and I'm sure I will yet ...
Common Core: Standards, NOT Curriculum I was asked last week to post about the Common Core State Standards and point out that they are just that - standards. The skills our kids ...
Bug in Apple Arabic Fonts A poster in the Apple Support Communities has pointed out that most Apple Arabic fonts in Mavericks will not display certain vowel sign sequ...
Being a Good Communication Partner I spend a great deal of my time training people to be good communication partners to children learning to use aac systems and learn...
Writing Systems of the World I recently came across this interesting map showing the geography of the world's major writing systems.
Mac 30-Year Anniversary Font See this page to get a custom font created by Apple showing Mac models of the last 30 years. The characters are in the Unicode Private Use A...
Reading Non-Unicode Sinhala While it is strongly recommended that only Unicode fonts be used for writing Sinhala, sometimes you have to work with text created using leg...
iWork For iCloud Beta: Still No RTL Or Indic Support The update for iWork for iCloud Beta announced by Apple January 23, 2014 (the 3rd since its initial release to the public last July) did not...
Answering Questions I was doing an evaluation the other day, with a boy who really hit home to me the issue of being able to answer questions. It's an issu...
App To Add Fonts to iOS Devices Thanks to Keith Martin, there is now an app available which lets users add fonts to their iOS 7 devices, using the technique described in an...
New Year - new goals? Nope. The start of a new calendar year comes about mid-way through the school year. While everyone else is setting new goals, making new resoluti...
Story Elements/Story Grammar - Important Language Skills Once students have the ability to sequence events in their daily routines and have moved on to providing personal narratives about their exp...
THE LONDON STORY Visit London, the official visitor's guide, offers us The London Story, a collection of videos where Londoners tell us their stories abo...
Mavericks Update Fixes Japanese Input Problem The glitch with the Japanese Kotoeri IM reported here has been fixed in the OS 10.9.1 update released 12/17/2013. Kotoeri Preferences (foun...
Typing Paleo-Hebrew and Phoenician I recently came across a source for fonts for Paleo-Hebrew and other ancient semitic scripts on this page. Input for most can be via the OS ...
Language Map of the US I recently came across this map showing details of where languages other than English are common in the US. Results I found somewhat surpr...
Non-Unicode Tamil Fonts While it is strongly recommended that only Unicode fonts be used for writing Tamil, sometimes you have to work on documents which were creat...
Bug In Apple Devanagari Font A poster in the Apple Support Communities has pointed out that the font Devanagari Sangam used for iOS (and also available in OS X 10.7 and ...
TOP 100 FREE EDUCATION SITES Help Teaching offers us a compilation of free sites to be used teaching or learning English. As they say: "Need some new inspiration fo...
Keyman App For iOS Now Installs Fonts As Well The Keyman app which vastly expands the screen keyboard possibilities for iOS devices, reported here, now also installs a font if one is mis...
Multilingual Mac Web Site Updated I've updated the reference web site, Unleash Your Multilingual Mac, to reflect OS 10.9. Comments and corrections by viewers are always ...
Alternative Bengali Keyboard for OS X A poster in the Apple discussion forums (ASC) recently brought the "Bangla-onkur" Bengali keyboard to my attention, which may be o...
Language and Literacy: The iPad in the Special Ed Classroom I have been talking about some specifics of using the iPad and apps in the special education classroom for developing language and literacy...
Adding Custom Fonts To iOS Devices Beginning with iOS 7, it is possible to add custom fonts to an iOS device via a mobile.config file. The reference doc for how one creates ...
New Keyboard App For iOS Covers Vast Number Of Languages Tavultesoft has released an iOS version of its Keyman multilingual keyboard app, which they say can cover over 600 languages. For info see ...
Guided Reading with Story Book Apps So, I suppose the next logical discussion is about using iPad storybook apps in guided reading sessions. So many of the kids I work with ha...
OS 10.9 Mavericks: New Arabic Fonts To the 7 Arabic fonts provided with OS 10.8 (Al Bayan, Baghdad, Damascus, Decotype Naskh, Geeza Pro, Nadeem, Kufi) Apple has added 11 more i...
iOS 7 Offers Added Languages Display In Some Apps One of the somewhat hidden features of iOS 7 is the vastly expanded list of extra fonts which can be downloaded by certain apps when necessa...
OS 10.9 Mavericks: Language Glitches Some major language problems found so far in the new OS X: +You can no longer set the keyboard layout for Kotoeri Japanese input in its pre...
Fonts Included In OS 10.9 and iOS 7 For OS X Mavericks (10.9) the list is at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5944 For iOS 7, you can find it at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5878
jrubies New Blog TWITTEEN'S NEWS Let me introduce you a new blog where you can practice reading and listening comprehension activities through real tweets. The blog is stil...
Guided Reading for Special Education/Language Learners Shared and guided reading are great ways to build language skills and build engagement. Building interactions around books also can encour...
Pages 5.0: Significant New Language Features The long awaited update of Pages 09, Pages 5.0, was released Oct. 22, 2013. It requires OS 10.9 Mavericks, and my initial testing indicates...
OS 10.9 Mavericks: New Language Features So far I have the following: +3 new system localizations: Vietnamese, Malay, Indonesian (for a total of 33) +11 new Arabic fonts +New refer...
iWork For iCloud Beta: Still No RTL Or Indic Support As far as I can tell, the update for iWork for iCloud Beta announced by Apple October 22, 2013, still has totally broken support for RTL and...