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Grammar Checker
This is a copy and paste grammar checker with spell check that helps to identify any grammar errors .
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Children's stories and activities
This was a recommendation from a second grade student whose teacher has visited some of these links in class.
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Free Classic Audio Books
As the name says , these are free classic audio books . Many are human narrated and availible in MP3 and M4B for i-pod forms.
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Free audio books at audio book treasury
This site allows you to download audio mp-3 files of books. I will be including similar sites below . Each has some of the same books and also ones that are unique to the site. You may want to browse each to see which ones are your best fit.
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More free audio book links
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Bookshare
Accessible Books and Periodicals for Readers with Print Disabilities
50,000 books available
- Bookshare™ is free for all U.S. students with qualifying disabilities. Student memberships are currently funded by an award from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP).
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free reading instruction PK-6
This site provides 40 week by week instruction for teachers to teach reading to children at risk of dyslexia K-3 . It is designed for teachers and so the instructions are for small groups. I have looked at several of the activities and while I am not suggesting everyone homeschool their young dyslexics this would be a great resource for someone that does.
This program may be helpful for frustrated and motivated parents of dyslexic children that have trouble finding help and/or want to identify the specific areas where your child needs the most help so that help can be focused there.
As the name says it is free and is offered at no cost.
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Free games at the Nessy Learning Programme!
You will need to click on ( Meet Nessy and Play free games ) to go to the free games
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Google SketchUp 3D modeling software.
This page allows you to download a basic google drawing program for free. There is a better Pro version for sale but I think most people will be happy with their free program.
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Free Worksheets for dyslexics
                        1593 worksheets that can be downloaded for free by the American Dyslexia Association
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Recordings for the blind and dyslexic
Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic is offering a free 1 year membership for students (includeing home schooled) with documented print disabilities and learning disorders. This offer is only active until January 25 , 2010 but the membership will extend 1 year from date of application. What is new for RFB&D is that now their audio books etc can be downloaded to your computer and played or transfered to other media types and played .
I started to fill out a membership so I could report on what the usual membership cost. Towards the end of the application it was required to swear that you had a learning disability to continue. At that point I had to stop so I have no idea of what the cost will be to continue the membership after the free year.
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Ginger software
This is a new text correcting software program that is presently free to download because it is in its Beta form. It works very well and was made to correct the types of mistakes made by dyslexics. They will be comming out with a commercial version sometime in 2009 so the window for getting the download free is not very big. It presently only works with MS word. This link takes you to a page where you can type something and see how it will be corrected.
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Read the Words
Read the Words is the text to speech product that I use on this site. It has a free level of service and is easy to use. I have a paid account at a higher level but the free level is very useful also. The avatar feature is also nice. There are several different ways of using the free service .
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The Natural Reader
The Natural Reader is a free easy to use text to speech reader. There are upgraded versions that cost money. I downloaded and tried the free version and it works well.
I didn't try adding it to my tool bar instead I have been using the miniboard option . The program works by having you highlight the text that you want read and then clicking on the play arrow in the miniboard to read it. There seems to be a limit on how much text you can highlight and read at one time but I don't see that as a big problem unless you are making the text into a MP3 files to listen to later which I haven't tried yet.
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Children stories ( videos)
Children's stories read by members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) presented on video with text at bottom of screen.
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Awsome talking library
This site has a free download to make using the web more fun. An animated character reads and highlights the words on a web page. It is a big file so will take a long time to download if you have a slow connection.
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Vocabulary Builder
Much of my vocabulary was built from reading the words in context while I was reading for pleasure. As I read hundreds of pages a day growing up that worked for me. Since dyslexics in general read less , their chances of increasing their vocabulary from context is less. This site can help improve vocabulary by giving examples of words in a contextual manner. It is a different concept of learning vocabulary from learning definitions of a word and I suspect may be helpful for some dyslexics.
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Information for Assessing Dyslexia
This site ,designed for teachers and parents, does a fine job in explaining how literacy skills are developed and may be helpful in identifying specific problems that need help.
It explains what skills are important to develop for literacy and gives examples of age appropriate development.
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Free dyslexia online test
Answer a questionnaire about your child and submit to experts on the British Dyslexia Association web site. Different questions for different age groups.
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Scottish Rite's dyslexia centers
There are currently 59 Children's Learning Centers in 15 states.They have helped thousands of dyslexic children receive free one-on-one multisensory reading and written language tutoring.
This link goes to their location page so you can quickly find out if they are in a location near you.
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Clever Keys
CleverKeys is free software that provides instant access to definitions at Dictionary.com, synonyms at Thesaurus.com, facts at Reference.com and more
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The Easy Essay
This might be a help for the dyslexic that is having difficulty writing an essay. The idea is basic but someone might find it helpful to be forced into the proper pattern.
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Children of the Code
This site discusses the history and development of reading
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Dept of Education Evaluations of Reading Research
Almost all dyslexia educational interventions claim to help all dyslexics and claim to being research based. This site has evaluated all published studies on reading interventions and gives the results.
These are not studies made by the government but rather an analysis of all the published studies that meet certain criteria as to being well designed studies where the results would be expected to have scientific merit.
Because of the huge amount of information available you will need to help select the relevant categories. Some examples of your choices : beginning readers or adolescent readers , alphabetics,comprehension,fluency or general reading ability ( you can only pick one at a time) narrows down the type of problems and age of the study participants.
There is also a box to select studies that were done with poor readers or everyone and also different grade levels or ages.
A hypothetical search might be:all interventions, beginning readers, reading comprehension, of poor readers,in grades K-3 and a list will be provided of what studies have been done that meet the scientific criteria used of a dozen popular interventions.
The interventions are blue hyperlinks that will take you to a description of the basics of the interventions and the results of the studies . The results show average improvements in different categories and also the minimum and maximum improvements.
I suggest it is important to look at the average, minimum and maximum numbers to get an idea of how likely it is to benefit from the intervention. If all the numbers are about the same in a category it is likely that is about the gain anyone taking the intervention will have. Some results I looked at had negative or low results in some categories indicating that some who took the intervention had little benefit.
I have found it is very difficult to find this type of objective data for educational dyslexia interventions. If anyone finds the site too hard to use you can e-mail me at john@dyslexiaglasses.com and I will try to help you get the information you are looking for.
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Tjark's blog on visual dyslexia
Tjark's photography of natural scenes capture the experience of visual dyslexia and help non-visual dyslexics understand it.
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My blog on dyslexia issues
This is a link to my personal blog. Many of my posts are about what I think is just bad information about dyslexia that I see on the web.
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Myomancy.com
This site has a a very good search engine to the site's information about dyslexia and learning disabilities. Use the search engine to find your information.
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http://www.dyslexiaconsultants.com
A well designed site with good navaigation to different dyslexia information. I often disagree with what is written about dyslexia because much of the information presents a specific viewpoint . After a random sampling of a dozen pages of their content I concluded that the site has well balanced information about dyslexia.
I would not recommend that anyone who wants to understand dyslexia limit their reading to one source. That being said , this site seems a reasonable one to start or include in your reading about dyslexia.
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