During a CPD discussion on risk assessment yesterday, the issue of taking children with autism on field trips came up. In particular, we discussed the fact that seemingly innocuous changes to routine and surprises can have unexpected and potentially disastrous consequences. Whilst my own experience teaching students with autism is limited, I feel that Mark Haddon’s book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has given me a solid understanding of what these students go through.

The book follows a boy with Asperger’s Syndrome (which is on the autism spectrum, despite claims that it should not be) as he tries to solve a mysterious murder. Although the book is disarmingly simple, it does an amazing job of shifting the reader’s perception of reality, allowing a brief glimpse into one of the many ways that the human mind can function. If there is one book all teachers should read…this might perhaps be it!

http://www.gutenberg.org/

Project Gutenberg is an online repository of books that are out of copyright, and thus freely available for anyone to use. With over 30,000 books currently available, this site provides a great source for gratis reading material. However, more important than this, it provides a massive amount of text that can be mashed and remixed in any way you or your students can dream up. Free from the constraints of copyright, and available in unfettered digital form, why not try some of the following ideas:

• Use Wordle to create fantastic word clouds, which can be used to pick out themes or learn vocab.
• Give students part of a text and ask them to write an extension or introduction to it.
• Take a famous novel and come up with some crazy alternative endings.
• Use Flickr Storm (free photos) and Storybird (digital storytelling) to create a picturebook version of a text.
• Work as a class to produce an audio version of a book, publish it with Creative Commons and give it away on the web.
• Take a novel and remix it into a song, poem, play or game.

I am sure there are at least a hundred other uses for Project Gutenberg’s texts. Let me know if you can think of any, and I will include them in this list.

For all the book lovers our there (of which I am one), I have recently been playing with a great online tool. It is called Library Thing (http://www.librarything.com) and it can be used to catalog the books you own, have read and want to read. You can see my current library at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/rossdotparker, and an example book (given to me by a lovely former colleague) at http://www.librarything.com/work/4986/book/51122473. All the books can be reviewed, commented upon, rated and tagged for others to see your views and for you to track your thoughts on the book.

Where this gets interesting is the ability to link it into other places, such as  embedding a particular set of books into a web page. 

Plus, the site will recommend books you might like based on the books in your catalog.

http://storybird.com/

Storybird is a site that allows you to create short, visual stories that you can share on the web. This is a great tool for encouraging creativity through digital storytelling.

http://www.bibme.org/

Whilst citing references is certainly a vital part of academic research, it is also very tedious. By helping to create and format references according to a given system (e.g. Harvard, APA, etc), BibMe makes this task a lot easier. Simply search for the item you need to cite and select it for addition to your reference list. If the system cannot find the item, just enter the details by hand, letting the system format it for you. Select your desired style and simply copy and paste into your document.

Whilst there are other systems that do more (such as integrating into your word processor), BibMe cannot be beaten in terms of balancing functionality with ease of use.