Austin, Texas & RMC

Last week, I spent some time doing training for the Red Cross. Before I left, my students asked me if I would take pictures for them the way I did in Seattle, and send them. I did, but unfortunately, only managed to get one set of pictures into the slide show and sent off. I've put the whole thing together now, so I thought I would share it with everybody. The bulk of the pictures are from our tour of the Response Maintenance Center. The RMC is where all of the technology that the Red Cross deploys for a disaster assignment come from, and go back to. We have satellite dishes, satphones, antennas, and more radios than you'd ever want to know about! See... I can make EVERYTHING into technology! We're also going to play "guess the soundtrack song". If you know it, leave a comment. :)

RCT 3

Two of my students have started working on RCT 3 parks with me, and one student is using RCT 2 on his own. The parks in RCT 3 are working very well, although I am controlling the mouse in order to reduce the possibilities of information overload. As I said, the hardest part is getting the paths laid correctly. One student has made it all the way to the Tycoon level challenge in Vanilla Fields (the starter park), and another has made it to that section in the Splash-Water Park expansion. I asked the one student do to Splash because his research is on Sea World. We've also had some trouble connecting the slides to the pool complexes, but I don't know why. I think it might be the terrain being uneven. We'll keep working at it.
I will post some screen shots of the parks in a week or so; I neglected to bring the CD home with me this weekend, so I can't run the game.

Technology to Make the Job Easier

I have Mary Poppins singing "A Spoonful of Sugar" going through my head right now. Last week, the job coach that works with a lot of our students had the idea to label the shelves in the cafeteria kitchen so that the students could be sent to get something when they are working. She wondered if we could do it on the computer. And, as I mentioned, my duty this year is to provide tech support to the special education department. We looked at different label templates available in Word, and then the job coach and a student went back over to measure the front of the shelf.
The next day, the student came down with a list of items they had found by inventorying the shelves. I set up the template for him, and he started typing. The student already knew how to find clip art, and digital pictures, so only needed minimal assistance for that. In fact, he was able to get about 15 done in the period, with pictures, and ready to print. He only needed help when the picture wasn't clear.
The benefit to this, beyond the students being more independent, is that a lot of our cafeteria staff are not native English speakers. It will also help keep things organized on the shelves. Oh... and the student also learned a very valuable skill which he is starting to generalize to other areas.