Low Cost, No Cost Technology Ideas with Carol Allen & John Galloway

In this week's podcast Dale Pickles from B Squared is joined by Carol Allen and John Galloway to discuss education technology and how to do it for low cost or no cost.

Carol is an education advisor for ICT and Inclusion in particular supporting the London Grid For Learning and Hartlepool LA. She was named one of the top ten educators for 2018 in the field of educational technology. This was down to all her amazing work on inclusion. John is a specialist in the use of technology to improve educational opportunities for children and young people with special educational needs. He spends the majority of his time working with Tower Hamlets LA, but also does lots of working as a writer, consultant and trainer.

Technology is amazing, but also expensive which means schools don't always have a lot of tech. The first step when thinking about using technology is to understand what you have. This sounds simple, but it isn't always. You might be able to list all the equipment you have and all the software/apps you have, but do you know what they are all capable of?

Software like Microsoft Office has been continually developed over the last 20 years. Office 365 has lots of amazing features around accessibility, including speech to text and text to speech. There are new features every year. Microsoft aren't alone, Google and lots of other companies are doing the same.

In the podcast we discuss how you can use tech better, understand what you have and find out how to get more out what you have. There are also lots of free tools out there to help.

Useful Links

Clicker - https://www.cricksoft.com/uk/clicker/8

Microsoft Accessibility Information - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/office?activetab=pivot_1:primaryr2

Google Accessibility Information - https://www.google.co.uk/accessibility/

Carol Allen on Twitter - @caroljallen

John Galloway on Twitter - @Johngalloway