VizZle road warriors will be presenting at the 64th Annual Ohio Speech, Language and Hearing Association Convention March 11-13, 2010 at the Hilton Columbus in Columbus, OH. Visit booth 36 for chatchkes and demos! For more info, visit http://www.ohioslha.org/e_convention.htm

The Michigan Association of Computer Users in Learning will hold its 2010 conference at DeVos Place in Grand Rapids, MI, March 10-12. Our media-miester Jeff has been invited to speak on Friday at 8AM about effective visuals, and the team will be handing out goodies at Booth 401. Stop by and visit! For more info go to the MACUL website.

After a bit of a hiatus, VizZle’s Facebook Page has been revitalized–go and look! If you like what you see, become a fan. Check it out at Facebook.com

MTT salutes Speech Language Pathologist Jinni Krause, winner of the first Creator of the Month honors! Jinni works with children in the Brunswick City Schools in Brunswick, OH, at Kidder and Memorial Elementary Schools. Read on to meet her and see a list of her lessons!

Jinni has been an SLP for 22 years, and has been at Brunswick for the last 2 years.
She works with preschoolers, typical kids on language and articulation, and with special education kids (some with autism, augmentative/alternative communication devices, and one with a cochlear implant).

She says, “Many of these kids have come into the therapy room requesting that we play a VizZle game today. It keeps their attention with the bright, realistic pictures, and they love the sound effects. The reward at the end helps motivate them also.”

Jinni has created an impressive number of lessons for her students since she has been using VizZle–52 lessons total at last count. She has created many games and matching boards for vocabulary from the Big Book series she uses in her therapy room, as well as many for articulation of specific sounds in speech. Listed below is just a small sample of her work:

ID 6645 Prepositions
ID 6810 Answering Yes/No Questions
ID 9920 Past Tense Copular Verbs
ID 6587 Multiple Meanings
ID 6838 Medial “g” Word Associations
ID 6533 Pets
ID 8094 Rhymes-Initial “th”
ID 9860 Rhymes- “g” all Positions

We salute you Jinni for your hard work and generosity in sharing it! And everybody who has borrowed one of your lessons thanks you too. Congratulations on being named our first Creator of the Month!

(hint- to return to the landing page, click on the VizZle logo in the upper left corner)

Looking for lessons on the Olympics? A whole batch, including lots of lessons of various levels on emotions and some books that use recorded audio and awesome Olympic moment videos are now available for you to use today! Click “more” to get a list…

The Olympic collection consists of:

ID 10261 Olympic Happy and Sad (book-lower level)
ID 10263 Olympic Feelings (book-mid level)
ID 10264 Olympic Emotions (book-upper level)
ID 10270 Olympic Happy or Sad? (matching)
ID 10288 Olympic Happy or Sad? (game)
ID 10276 Traditions of the Olympic Games (book-all levels)
ID 10274 What Are the Olympics? (book-all levels)
ID 9752 Olympic Vocab (pix topic board)

Have you made any lessons about the Olympics? Then send them to Share! Everyone would appreciate it

(Hint: to get back to the landing page, click on the VizZle logo in the upper-left corner.)

Jeff and the media team have been hard at work supplying VizZle with new images that are so often impossible to find anywhere else. (It’s not as if “bite” will return you just that image you need for the “No biting yourself” reminder in your typical clip art or Google search…) Click “more” to see a sample of what’s new!

They have also just recently completed a huge project that will lead to leaner, meaner load times for new books and matching boards. Jeff writes:

During January and continuing into February I set a goal for the MTT Resource Center to begin the process of changing the resolution sizes of all the PNG files that exceeded 500×500 pixels. These PNG files are the largest files on our servers outside of Video files.

With the goal of speeding up the load times on newly created books and matching boards in particular we set about identifying these files. This was not a small task as there were several thousand images, but we created some batch actions to speed things along. Also, every file had to have a new name or the database wouldn’t update it. All the corresponding meta-data files had to be renamed to match the newly created PNG files. We then uploaded all those leaner and meaner files and deleted the old lazy fat ones. It is with great joy that I announce that all these images are now on the production server and these files should help Vizzle perform better and print faster.

Congrats to you and your team Jeff!

Jeff also sent over a small sample of the hundreds of images added since our last update.

What’s new in this batch includes…

… Many more calendar symbols for each month to supplement circle time activities

… More cooking sequences, like a 15 photographic image sequence for making pancakes from Bisquick or a line drawing sequence for making and baking lasagna

… More for music, including musical notes 8th, quarter, half and whole

… The previously missing 10 and 20 dollar bills now have both pictures and drawings

… And other odds and ends from a list made up of users’ search queries, like these:

(Hint: To return to the landing page, click the VizZle logo in the upper left corner.)

We hope you all have an entertaining Valentine’s Day and a relaxing long weekend to celebrate Presidents’ Day!

In 2010, MTT will be saluting a “Creator of the Month” . We want to recognize VizZle authors who make the extra effort to share their work, and allow others to benefit from their experience, expertise and hard work. You and a selection of your lessons will be featured here on the landing page, the MTT website and on MTT’s Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages.

Submit your lessons! Show us what you’ve got! What are you teaching now? You can bet there are other users looking for the same type of lesson. Share your expertise and ideas! If you have ever borrowed a lesson from the library, you know how appreciative somebody else would be to benefit from your submission. Sharing is an easy way to do a lot of good. And it may just make you the Creator of the Month!

(Hint–to return to the Landing Page, click on the VizZle logo in the upper left corner.)

Next on the MTT employee Hot Seat is Kim Moritz M.Ed., Autism Software Consultant (and excellent lesson author!) at Monarch Teaching Technologies. Find out how she answered questions like “What is your Secret Super-Hero Name?” and more…

Name: Kim Moritz

Photo Caption: Prom 2008

Position: Autism Software Consultant

Touchscreen, Stylus, Keyboard or Pen? Depends! Touchscreen if it is working and oriented, keyboard if I need to get things done quickly and neatly, pen IF none of my gadgets are working (which has been known to happen).

Favorite Music? Anything that I can dance to…although “rap is crap”

Cat, Dog, Fish or Pet Rock? All of the above. With a degree in biology, I love them all. I also grew up on a farm and lived on one until about five years ago. These are the animals that I have raised: cats, dogs, fish, turtles, hamsters, ducks, chickens, turkeys, skunks, sheep, pigs, pot bellied pigs, guinea pigs, goats, pygmy goats, and ferret. These are the animals that I have dissected: human, cat, shark, pig, frog, fish, clam, earthworm, crayfish, grasshopper, and starfish. By the way, the best spiders and snakes are dead spiders and snakes.

Favorite Website? Anything that will give me the ACCURATE info that I want…the faster the better.

What is Your Secret Super-Hero Name? Wonder Woman

Baseball, Football, Basketball or Dancing with the Stars? Basketball

Zodiac? Gemini, I wish that I had a twin…I have a list of things for her to do!

What Do You Want The VizZle Community To Know About You? Working with VizZle combines three very important things for me: special needs children, education and technology.

Show Us Your Boards:
ID 5556 Back to School with Mrs. Moritz
ID 9168 The Polar Bear
ID 9165 Animal Needs
ID 9736 Groundhog Day
ID 9738 Groundhog Day Words
ID 5543 Fuzzy Wuzzy Was a Bear

Looking for lessons to use for the upcoming holidays? VizZle authors (like the awesome Colleen Parle, author of many on the following list–thanks Colleen!) have been preparing–and sharing! Check out these lessons with Valentine’s Day and Presidents’ Day themes…

The Valentine’s Collection:

ID 9076 The History of Valentine’s Day (book)
ID 9075 The History of Valentine’s Day (matching)
ID 9074 Who Is Cupid? (book)
ID 9073 Who Is Cupid? (matching)
ID 9743 Valentine’s Day Writing (for electronic writeboard)
ID 8363 How Many Hearts? (matching)
ID 8365 How many Hearts? (game)
ID 8379 Color Words (Hearts) (matching)
ID 8361 Coloring Hearts (3 Step Directions) pix

For Presidents’ Day:

ID 9319 The History of Presidents’ Day (book)
ID 9320 The History of Presidents’ Day (matching)
ID 3916 A Tour of the White House (book)
ID 3918 A Tour of the White House (matching)

(To return to the VizZle landing page, click the VizZle logo in the upper-left corner.)