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Paul Nisbet

Free online Oxford Reading Tree eBooks from Oxford Owl

Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 29th May, 2012

I've been meaning to blog about this for ages and have finally got round to it! The Oxford Owl web site has over 250 free Oxford Reading Tree eBooks for teachers, children and parents to read online. The books have a recorded narration (i.e. human, not computer speech) and you can zoom in and...

109 new books on the Books for All Database

Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 8th May, 2012

  109 new books have just been added to the Books for All Database. They are all Large Print PDFs which have been created by the VTSS team in Edinburgh, and we are grateful to them for sharing these accessible copies via the Database.  The books can be downloaded and printed out for...

Have your say on the new Addressing Dyslexia Toolkit

Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 1st May, 2012

  A Dyslexia Scotland Working Group is currently developing new material for the Assessing Dyslexia Toolkit, and would like your views of the current site and how it can be improved. The Assessing Dyslexia Toolkit was formally launched on 1st June 2010 by Sir Jackie Stewart and Mike Russel...

More libraries are lending eBooks and downloadble audio books

Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 9th March, 2012

The eBook revolution continues apace in all sorts of ways, and more Scottish public libraries are joining in by lending eBooks and downloadable audiobooks, for us to borrow and read or listen to on our computers, iPhone or iPad, and Android devices. So far, five local authorities offer eBooks and ...

SQA Answer Booklets in Word format are now available

Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 3rd February, 2012

One of the requests from the staff who attended the Digital Papers Focus Group meeting in October 2011 was for SQA to provide answer booklets in Microsoft Word format. While answer booklets have been provided as PDF documents, some staff felt that the Word format would be more suitable for some ca...

iBooks 2, iBooks Author and digital textbooks

Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 20th January, 2012

Yesterday Apple launched iBooks 2, a new version of the iBooks app for iThingys; iBooks Author, a program for the Mac which is for writing and designing iBooks, and a range of interactive textbooks. The video about the interactive textbooks video a well worth a look - very promotional but also ins...

New TeeJay secondary books on the Books for All Database

Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 8th December, 2011

We have just uploaded the six TeeJay Maths secondary books to the Books for All Database, which means that all the TeeJay textbooks are now available for pupils with print disabilities to use. The files have been kindly supplied to us by Tom and John at TeeJay, and there are strict terms and condi...

Adobe Reader X and PDFaloud 3.0 - don\'t bother

Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 18th November, 2011

When Adobe Reader X first appeared we tested it and said that it worked with PDFaloud 3.0 (see previous blog). This was true, on my ancient Windows XP laptop. However, we've now been using it for some months on a range of different machines and operating systems and it simply hasn't been reliable....

A quick way to get Stuart to work with PDFaloud

Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 13th October, 2011

Following on from the previous post re PDFaloud not offering you Stuart, Robert here in CALL has written a script which finds all the PDFaloud safe voice lists on your Windows computer and adds Stuart to them. Here's what to do:  Install Stuart first. Save the file to your comput...

How to use the new

Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 28th September, 2011

The new Scottish male computer voice is now available for download from CALL's web site. 'Stuart' works with most text-to-speech programs including for example ClaroRead, Co:Writer, PDFaloud, Penfriend, Read and Write Gold and WordTalk. However, if you install Stuart on your computer, you won't ...

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