PUBLIC MARKS with tags teachers & software

OATSoft is dedicated to improving Assistive Technology and computer accessibility through the power of Open Source development techniques. OATSoft makes the best Open Source Assistive Technology Software (OATS) easy to find. Users and developers meet at OATSoft to create better software. Users can find useful software and discuss and work with developers to get the features that you want.

PowerTalk is a free program that automatically speaks any presentation or slide show running in Microsoft PowerPoint for Windows. You just download and install PowerTalk and while you open and run the presentation as usual it speaks the text on your slides. The advantage over other generic 'Text To Speech' programs is that PowerTalk is able to speak text as it appears and can also speak hidden text attached to images. Speech is provided by the standard synthesised computer voices that are provided with Windows.

StarOffice 4 Kids has been uniquely designed for easy customization by individual teachers to support specific learning objectives. It is aligned to the needs of a teacher and his or her specific teaching materials and not vice versa. StarOffice 4 Kids allows the teacher to handle an interactive learning process according to learning steps that he or she considers appropriate. Not only according to the age-specific steps of the class, but also in regard to the individual learning progress of the class or a selected group of students. Adjusted to the learning speed of the students a teacher could, for example, easily focus on the fundamentals of word processing. The teacher could start with work sheets with just the functions for using of texts in different fonts and font sizes. Once the students have learnt how to use those functions, the teacher could add new functions to the function toolbar and teach those in a next step. StarOffice 4 Kids makes it easy for the teacher to produce documents for the exercises in class. A teacher can easily transform usual office documents into task sheets for the class and store them into the subject specific folders. The students will find them in the workspace of their class. They will work on them and save them in their own workspace. This workspace only contains the personal files and that is protected from the access of other students. StarOffice 4 Kids documents and user interfaces are based on an XML data format, augmenting the open source StarOffice/OpenOffice format. That way StarOffice 4 Kids guarantees smooth integration and immediate use of external teaching material as provided by publishers in education. Teachers could directly take on the teaching material they need and use it in class.