Article
Accessibyte Online Platform and Remote Learning
Have you tried these accessible educational games?
Accessibyte is an online platform built specifically for blind and visually impaired students. The Accessibyte platform is fully self-voicing and highly visual right in the browser on any device, from school or home. Now more than ever the remote learning options provided by Accessibyte are an essential tool for TVI’s and their students. Let’s explore the easy distance learning capabilities of Accessibyte!
Tools for Teachers
Distance learning becomes quite a hassle when juggling many students across many applications. Luckily, Accessibyte offers everything a teacher needs right in one place: The Teacher Dashboard. All a teacher needs to do is log in and they can instantly add or remove students from their caseload, monitor real-time student progress, create charts of student history, send custom assignments, tweak application and accessibility settings, reset student passwords and even create 1-Click Login links so their students don’t require a username or password at all.
Apps for Students
Accessibyte covers a wide range of student activities. Fully-guided touch typing with Typio, customized flash cards and tests in Quick Cards, a ton of study tools in ProPack, and a collection of fully accessible games with Accessibyte Arcade. Students are often logged in and fully engaged with Accessibyte for multiple hours a day. The secret is offering exactly what blind and visually impaired students need in a fun, funky and fully accessible manner.
Always Accessible
Outside accessibility software is tricky, especially when being managed remotely. Accessibyte’s student apps are totally self-voicing, highly visual and easy to navigate without the need for outside software. No screen readers or magnification software is required, regardless of the device the student uses. Windows, Mac, Chromebook, iOS and Android are all supported. Just set the colors and text size your student needs, pick a voice and you’re ready to go! Student progress and accessibility settings follow them wherever they go. Working on a Chromebook at school and a parent’s Android phone at home? That works! Students have the same simple navigation on all devices. All they need to know is the Up, Down and Enter keys on the keyboard.
Converting Classroom Content
Teachers often ask if Accessibyte has included lessons or relies on teacher-created exercises. The answer is both. The aim of Accessibyte is to be a transparent teaching tool, bridging the accessibility gap when needed but knowing when to step back and let the teacher take over.
Typio includes over 250 typing lessons spread across various typing modes. All a student needs to do is fire up Typing Journey and Typio will walk them through the included lessons one at a time. Teachers can also create and send custom lessons to their students, allowing teachers to be as hands-on or hands-off as they’d like.
Quick Cards and ProPack rely on teacher content. From the Teacher Dashboard, classroom material can quickly be sent to students in the form of flash cards, tests, reading assignments, to-do tasks and more. Students can also create their own flash cards and tests within Quick Cards if they’d like.
The games in Accessibyte Arcade are self-contained with the exception of Hangryman. Teachers can create and send custom word lists for students to use, such as spelling or vocabulary words, or rely on Hangryman’s rotation of included exercises.
Accessibyte is fun!
Student’s love Accessibyte whether at school or home. Multiple teachers have said Accessibyte has transitioned from a learning task to a reward because it’s all their students want to do. Typio has turned typing into an audible adventure where students raise their Typing Pets, earn stars and coins, play games, and learn! At the same time, Accessibyte Arcade offers a fun approach to computer navigation, with games ranging from a single keypress all the way through navigating layered menus.
Accessibyte’s remote access is a game changer for blind and visually impaired students. Whether you have 1 student or 100, it only takes a few minutes to get up and running with Accessibyte. You can check out a free trial at www.accessibyte.com and find out just how fun and accessible distance learning can be.
By joejorgenson
