Jay McKay: There we go. I'll record that beginning later. You don't have to sit through that. So that's what we're going to be covering today.
So this is where Neil was supposed to come in today and really talk about what helps us focus, and when we talk about focusing, what what's important to think about. And one of his big takeaways in my conversations with him is reminding ourselves that to focus means that we need to put away other things, and it's that idea of being able to shut other things out, but also a way to prepare ourselves to focus and get to work.
So if you had a chance to look at our blog post, Anthony did a great little write up, and he had a chance to talk with Neil. And Neil reminds us of the things that some of our best tools for focusing are no-tech or low-tech. So it's about where do you put yourself when it's time to get to work, when you need to focus, making sure that as best we can, especially for some of us who are now working from home or going to school in a virtual setting, finding a way to make those environments. So it reminds us if I have to work in my bedroom, maybe having a table instead of having to sit on my bed. So that way, I know when I'm at the table, it's time for me to work. Making sure I have ways to cut off those other distractions. And again, just helping yourself prepare to be focused.
So those are just some kind of big takeaways from focus is that it's not just you put an app on and it's going to take all your other stressors away. You kind of have to do a little prep work.
Some of the other things that we'll be talking about today, I'll show you a tomato timer. That's something very low-tech anybody can do. On your phone if you have a timer or an egg timer, just turning that on and just telling yourself, "Just make sure you're working for this next 20 minutes," and really giving yourself that time to work through. And then at the end of it, then you get to take the break, as opposed to trying to tell yourself, "Oh, I'll work a little bit here, a little bit there." Having those timers helps give you that structure. So again, it's what kind of environment are you setting up for yourself?
And we'll talk a little bit more about some other examples of those no-tech, low-tech was as we go through these two, because when you start seeing some of the examples in the systems, you'll go, "Oh yes, of course. This makes sense."
So all right, so first thing we're going to do is actually go through some walkthroughs. I'm actually going to switch over to my Windows computer so I can show you these and we'll look at the accessibility settings. I want to make sure that you know where to find the contrast themes. And then if you haven't played with the Reader Focus Mode in Word, and then I also want to play around with a little bit the Immersive Reader and the Picture Dictionary that's available.
So I will say I tried to make sure I had some links to most of these so you know how to get to them later. I know I'm that type of person who sometimes I want to click along or I want to watch, but then I forget where to find it later, so we'll make sure that that's there.
I'm just going to do a quick shift. So I'm going to turn off my camera for a moment so I don't make anybody motion sick. So give me one second as I swap out computers.
All right. Are you able to hear me? Yes? Good to go. Excellent. Perfect. All right, I'm going to minimize the screen. All right.
So the first thing I want to show you is on the accessibility settings. So when you are in your Windows computer... And first I need to share my screen so you know what I'm looking at.
There we go. Now you're all there. Let me hide this for a second. Perfect.
Okay, so now I'm going to go into my Windows and I'm just going to look for the Settings App. There we go. All right. So there are several different things here that you will notice. A lot of times when we're looking to fix accessibility issues with our students and being able to access things, we forget to look at the settings page, and there's actually quite a bit here that can help us out.
So you will notice, first thing right at the very, very top after display, so you'll see display at the top, but if you scroll down a little bit, you'll see focus. So it already has a focus mode built in where you can do that timer session or you can hide your task bar apps. So it gives you some options already that you can do, and it's already built into the system, so I'm not even having to download something else.
Let me go back to my other settings. There we go.
So the first thing I want to look at is the accessibility settings. So over to the left side of my screen under settings, so right now I'm currently in system, but if I scroll over and go down on that left toolbar or left side, you'll see accessibility. It's the third one from the bottom. And now I've got some additional choices. So here, it's really kind of breaking it down by vision, hearing, how I'm interacting in terms of those choices. So if I look at the vision, it's going to let me adjust text size, visual effects, et cetera. We don't have time to go through all of them today, but again, I just like to let people know that when you click on those accessibility settings, you have a lot of things that you can play with, adjusting the cursor of your mouse, looking at how you're using your keyboards, et cetera.
So always when you get a new computer, it's the first time you're working on a device, definitely check out the accessibility settings. There's a lot of good stuff in there for you.
Okay, so I know we wanted to talk about contrasting, so let's talk about that first. And what this does here is it will essentially make everything that you see, it will change those things based on your selection. So right now, I'm at none, so I want to put it onto a different contrast. So I'm going to set it to desert. Okay, so it didn't make too much of a change. I think I might have actually had it set to that before. So let me switch it over to night sky, apply that. So there we go.
Now, how do contrast themes help with focusing? For some of our students, especially if they're having to stare at screens more and more as their virtual tasks increase, having those bright screens can be very not distracting, but can hurt their eyes or make them uncomfortable when they're looking at it. So some people really do prefer to have that Dark Mode or to switch the contrast around. So instead of seeing a white screen, they're seeing a dark screen with white text.
Now, what's nice with Microsoft is you can actually edit these contrast themes as well. So maybe I like the background, but maybe I don't like the hyperlink color or I like the hyperlink color, but I don't like the background. So you can really tweak this to whatever specifically you want.
There's a person called Tori Clark, has done some great work for us for AccessU, and actually did a session talking about dark modes and things like that. And she actually has created contrast themes based off of if you're somebody who has a head injury, there are contrast themes that she has found to be useful for people with those types of injuries and that they feel like they can work better using those contrast themes. So she breaks down the colors, which ones you need where, et cetera. So you can make all of those different edits under the contrast theme.
Okay. The next thing I want to show you, and this was just more because when Neil and I were walking through these, I just found it fascinating and wanted to point it out to you all. So if you go right above the contrast themes, there's a color filter.
Now, what's nice about this one is it's designed to help you see the screen easier and to differentiate if you are colorblind. You can set it to whatever setting you prefer. So if you are red-green, it will make adjustments based off of your red weak or green weak, blue-yellows. So it just helps differentiate a little bit better on what you're going to see on the screen, or you can always do inverted as well. So I just thought that was a neat feature that, again, could assist people in those.
There's also where you can just go to colors, and that's under the personalization. And again, this is where you can make some adjustments, but because I'm in that high-contrast mode right now, you won't see those changes. I'm actually going to go back to the other setting, back to accessibility in contrast themes, and I'm going to put it back to desert. Oh, no, desert. There we go.
All right, so that is contrast themes. And again, please take a peek at those accessibility settings. Play around with the colors. Sometimes you don't know what's going to really work for you until you try it out for a little bit. I found that dark screen's fine for me, but what I actually like are more of a tan color. So instead of being a stark white, more of an amber hue to things is what I prefer. So everybody's different.
All right, I'm going to go ahead and exit out of our settings. And next I'm going to look at Word. So I just pulled a sample from War of the Worlds. I went to Gutenberg Project, which is always a great place if you need to grab some public domain texts so you can play around with things.
So here, I'm looking at a Word document, and there's a couple of views that are built into Word that I can use to help me focus a little bit better. So if I go into view up at the very top, you'll see that over on the left side where I have a couple modes. So this first one says Read Mode, and this is great. So if you just need to do reading and not any kind of writing, when I press it, it makes it look like a book. So I had two pages of text, so now it's kind of laid it out as a book. It's taken away all the other tools from Microsoft Word, so all I see is the book in front of me, and now I can just flip pages and read.
Now, the next one I want to show you is the Focus Mode. So this one's nice because I could still type, but again, all of those ribbons and buttons and things have gone away. So if I just need to type, I don't want to see anything else, this is another good way for me to look at it. So again, it's that idea of taking away all the distractions. Oh, I think I clicked it too many times. There we go.
So the next one I want to show you is Microsoft Immersive Reader. Some of you may be familiar with it. There are some tweaks between if you're just using it on your desktop versus if you're using Microsoft 360. And then again, it's also available through Chrome. So we're going to look at the desktop version, and then I want to show you an additional feature that I was able to get through my 360 version.
So I'm going to turn on my Immersive Reader and hopefully, the way I have shared this, I think I have to share again, but we'll try. Let's do that.
Okay, so Immersive Reader. As you can see, it looks like it's just here to help me read the passage. I'm not getting to type anything. I do have some options so I can optimize how it looks, so I can change the column widths. I'm going to keep it moderate. I think that's fine. Page color, like I said, I always like a good page color. I think because my settings are still tweaked, it's not going to do it, but I could change the colors of my background to better suit my preferred palette.
I have Line Focus. I'm a big fan of Line Focus. It's a really nice way, especially with your students who, if they lose track easily when they're decoding or when they're reading independently, this is just a way that helps keep them focused. So as you can see, it's grayed out everything except for one line of text, and I can actually adjust that so maybe instead of just one line, I can do three lines, or I could do five lines. And depending on the size of your text, things like that, you may decide what what's going to work best for you. So I'm going to go ahead and put it back on one line for now.
I can also adjust the text spacing. So here, now it's reduced the amount of space between my lines and between my words, and when I press it again, it increases it. So it's just putting more space between the words and also between the lines of text. They also have the option to break it into syllables, so if that's something that your student will find helpful as they're decoding or reading the passage.
And then lastly, of course, we want the Read Aloud. So I'm just going to put my cursor back at the beginning here, and I'm going to press read aloud and hopefully it will be heard.
Speaker 1: No one would've believed in the last years of the 19th century...
Jay McKay: Okay, so was that coming through for everybody? Yes, perfect. All right. Let's see.
Do these same things, capabilities apply not only to Windows Word, but also Android? So every operating system and device is different in terms of how many different types of settings they have available. I'll actually have some links that talk about, if you're using a Chromebook versus a Mac laptop or a PC, where you can find some of those settings as well. So some things, if it's browser-based, it's off of the browser, but a lot of the settings are coming from the device itself. So it's really varying on what's available, what they built in, and ultimately, because they all decide to change the names on them. There's never one naming convention for all of it. So it's really, you've kind of got to poke at all of them individually to see what's there.
Okay, any questions so far on Immersive Reader?
Okay, I'm going to close. Oh, not close. I'm going to move over to, should be my... Oh no, let me find it. There it is. Ta-da! Okay.
So here I have the same passage. I put it on my OneDrive through my Microsoft 360 account. So because I have Word, I paid for Microsoft Office, I have 365, so I created a Word document. So I'm on the online version of Word. And so here's my document. Again, I still have the Reading View is still there, so I can just have that Reading View available. And then if I scroll over a little bit, you'll see where it says the Immersive Reader.
So I'm going to go ahead and select Immersive Reader, and my display looks a little different than it did on my Microsoft Word for my desktop. So instead of all of the choices where I was getting the syllables and the breakdowns and all of those, I have some different choices this time. So I have some text preferences that I can make changes to. So now I can adjust the size of the font. I can change some themes around. I can also look at labeling the parts of speech in addition to just the syllables. So if I wanted to make all my nouns a certain color, all my verbs, again, because I still have that setting turned on, you're not going to see all of those changes, but I could have it so each word could be labeled. So I mean, it's a nice tool, especially if you're working on parts of speech and things with your students.
And then lastly, we have, again, that Line Focus, and then also the ability to do translate. And if you notice, this feature called Picture Dictionary. So it is using symbols from Boardmaker software. So if anybody's familiar with Boardmaker, they do a lot of symbol boards, different types of communication systems. So that's where they're pulling their pictures from. So with my Immersive Reader on this version of Microsoft, I just press play at the bottom.
Speaker 1: The eve of the war. No one would have believed in the last...
Jay McKay: And then you'll see, I have some voice settings, so I can adjust if I want female or male, and I can adjust if I need to go faster or slower.
Now, the Picture Dictionary is a great tool because again, it can help your students who maybe are second language learners or students that they just want to check really quick to make sure they understand the word, make sure they understand what it means. And so if they click on a word, you should start seeing pictures pop up. So I clicked on the word study. Because my Picture Dictionary's on, it automatically popped up these pictures for me. So it's not giving me a definition, it's just giving me a picture.
Emma, you've got your hand up.
Emma: Just a couple of questions in the chat. Someone's asking, do these setting capabilities apply not only to Windows Word and Mac and iOS, but also to Android, the operating system for inexpensive tablets?
Jay McKay: Yeah, I talked a little bit about that one. Every device has its own variety of settings that are available. So mostly, they'll all have the same thing, but they may not have every single thing the other one does.
Emma: Awesome. And then how are quotation marks addressed by the automated speech? Are quotation marks a problem for automated speech readers?
Jay McKay: Oh, in terms of if they see quotation marks in terms of somebody speaking? Typically, they won't read them as, "Quote, such and such." They'll just read it as a passage. So here, let me see if there's a part here. I don't think I got anything in this. Oh, here we go.
Speaker 1: ... Squirted out of the planet, "as flaming gases rushed out of a gun."
Jay McKay: So it just reads it as somebody would read it when they're reading a book to someone.
Now, I will note that sometimes when you click on the Picture Dictionary, it doesn't give you everything. So it gave me squirted; colossal, it did not; flame, yes. So again, it's not extensive, it's not going to give you a picture for everything, but it's a good place to start for your students. And again, for some people, because it's built-in, it's one less thing to pull you away from what you're working on. So I'm not having to exit out, go into another source to pull up a dictionary or pull up a picture to help me relate what that information is. I can just click on something or click on a word and have it there, and then I'm right back to task where I was. So that that's another good feature of that Focus Tool.
Okay. You're just going to have to trust me, but you all have the slides anyway. Oh, no, actually I need to switch back out. So any questions before I move on?
Spellcheck? So yes, there is spellcheck available. Usually when you're looking at a Microsoft Office, it'll either say like spell or grammar check, and they're available in different places. So here in Microsoft Drive, I just go to review. They'll have... Oops, where is it? I know it's in here somewhere. My layout's all turned around on this one. Apologies. There we go. Nope, that's my word check. Check changes. Let's just ultimately do a spellcheck. There we go. No, that's my accessibility check.
So it depends on your system, but usually if you just type in spellcheck or go to the review, it should be there. Like I said, I think because my settings are a little wonky right now, it's not pulling it up where I typically will pull it up from the 365 version of Microsoft. If I go to this one, it should have it. There we go. So here, when I'm in Microsoft Word, again, you'll see those different types of word count, spelling and grammar. There we go, right there.
Okay. So I'm going to move over to my other screen and then we'll look at some things on Mac and on Chrome.
Okay. And I'm back. Ta-da! It's like I'm traveling through space. All right, so now we're going to look at some things on the Mac specifically. We're going to look at the Mac Display settings, the spoken content, Dark Mode, Focus Mode, and Safari Reader Mode. We'll have a link to it. We may not get to it today.
So the first thing I want to do is actually stop sharing the screen. And there we go. All right, so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to swap out what I'm sharing with everybody and share my other screen. There we go. Okay, I'm just going to put all these away so they're not distracting us. There we go.
So what I'm in right now is the settings for my Mac. So you just go onto that little gear that you typically see on your Mac. What's nice with the Mac OS, it's going to be very similar to what you see on your iPad or your iPhone. So the first thing we're going to look at is the Display setting. So I'm in my Mac and then I'm going to the Displays. So over on the left side of the screen where it says, "Displays," and then I see some options here.
Now, what I'm looking for is the ability to... I can change some of my colors around. I can invert, I can adjust for brightness. What I really like out of this one, again, because I like those ambient tones, I like to do the true tone. They also have the ability to do the night shift. So here, it will adjust the colors of my monitor over the course of the day. So it's kind of nice that way. So this is one way that you can adjust your colors for brightness. You can also go to... Let's see. Oh, there it is. Go to the accessibility.
So when I click under the accessibility settings, now I have some additional options. So now under accessibility, I have display here. So it's a little confusing. We have displays and then we have display under accessibility. So again, this is why it's important for you to play around with those different settings and learn whatever system you're on because it may not be in the exact same spot as it was on your previous device. So under accessibility, I'm going to click on display, and here I have several choices. I can invert my colors, so now everything is kind of not quite a dark mode, but it's flipped everything around. I can reduce motion, so it'll change kind of how it looks when things are going across the screen. I can increase the contrast, reduce the transparency, et cetera.
But what I want to look at is, again, down at the bottom, we have those color filter types that we talked about, the ability to... Sorry, my Zoom bar got in the way. The ability to play with those different filter types. And then also, again, I can make my pointer on my mouse larger, et cetera. So just some really quick, easy ways to make those adjustments on your Mac device under the accessibility display settings.
Okay, so again, under accessibility, I want to show you something called spoken content. And this is Mac's ability to read things to you when it's being selected. So when I go to spoken content, again, I have some choices. I can choose the language system, the voice, speed, et cetera. What I want to look at specifically right now is this item of speaking the selection. When I click on that little eye, it gives me some more information and options to play with. So I can select what it's going to read or how it's going to highlight the content when it reads it to me. So either I could just have the word, the whole sentence, or I could have words and sentences. So I'm going to select yellow for the word, and then I went blue for the sentence, and I want it to do it as a background color as opposed to doing just an underline. And then I'll just leave the controller to show automatically.
So I have that turned on, and if I remember, it said option plus escape is my keyboard shortcut. So I'm going to open up my War of the Worlds document here, and I'm just going to put my cursor at the beginning of it, and option+escape. I always have to remind myself. Oops. And I don't think it's reading for you either. Let me re-share. Okay.
Oh, apologies. I know why it's not coming through. There we go.
Speaker 1: No one would've believed in the last years of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences.
Jay McKay: Oh, and you're not seeing the right screen. Apologies. Too many devices today. There we go. All right. Now, last time.
Speaker 1: No one would've believed in the last years of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences.
Jay McKay: Okay, so nice and easy. It's working on Word. I can use it on just about anything. I will say when I was playing around with Google, like a Google Doc, it was reading it, but it wasn't always highlighting the right way. If I put it through Safari, had no problem with it whatsoever. So I don't know if it's because Google has its own ability to do things like that through Chrome. That's why it was giving me issues. But then I have this little control bar, so if I want to start it up again, I can.
Speaker 1: Intelligences greater-
Jay McKay: Okay, I can start somewhere later down the line.
Speaker 1: Than man's and yet-
Jay McKay: Oh, I think I clicked on the wrong slot.
Speaker 1: No one gave a thought to the older worlds of spaces as sources of-
Jay McKay: So there you go. So you don't have to always start at the top. You can start wherever you want on the document, and that is speech selection.
The next thing I want to show you is the Dark Mode or night mode, and that's going to be under appearance. So right now I have it under light mode. I can switch it to Dark Mode. So now you can see everything's gone into this darker mode, or they have an auto mode, which again, it's that idea of it's going to adjust the menus and buttons throughout the course of the day. So as day turns tonight, it will shift the colors of my screen.
Now the other thing to note is I can, again, kind of mess with the accent colors, the sidebar icon size, how big do I want those to be, et cetera, in the appearances. But if you just want it quick, how do I get to Dark Mode? Go to appearance.
Focus Mode. So this is a really neat feature. I use this on my phone quite a bit actually. When I am out or doing something, I will put on a do not disturb, and you can just very easily set it by your location, by what you're doing, what you actually want to be blocked or stopped from disturbing you, so to speak. So I go in, again, still in that settings, going to focus, and let's play around with do not disturb. I can select if certain people get to bother me or not, or if certain apps get to bother me or not. So maybe I'm going to set this up for some work focus time. So I'm going to set some things where every time I'm at work a certain time of day, I just need to get through my emails and I don't want anybody to bother me with anything else. So I could do that by time, where I'm at, or if I open a specific app. So it really kind of walks you through very easily how to set this up.
So I'm going to do a time of day, and from 8:00 to 10:00 AM Monday through Saturday, I am going to have it set to turn on my do not disturb. And I can also add some filters on how I want those apps and things to behave during that time. Maybe I will allow my Slack. Well, I definitely don't want my Slack coming through because that's always the big distractor, but maybe I want my calendar to be able to tell me something just in case I forgot a meeting or something like that. So calendar's, okay. I'll let the calendar poke through, but nothing else is really going to be able to do anything.
Now, this is kind of a nice thing where it's saying time-sensitive notifications. So let's say I didn't want my calendar, I didn't want anything on, but if I have something that's time-sensitive, it's allowed to give me that immediate notification. So that is do not disturb. So if I were to turn this on during those times, and I'm working on something, nothing else will notify me. So it's not that I can't get in there, it's just they can't pop up any notifications, et cetera.
Emma, your hands up and I've lost my chat box. Is there a question?
Emma: Yeah, just two questions.
Jay McKay: Excellent.
Emma: Going back to when you were doing the screen reading, someone said, "If possible, can you please explain the responsiveness of the website to different screen sizes, length times, width? For instance, when a user turns his tablet from vertical to horizontal, are most websites optimized for this or do they fail and part of the screen reader disappears?"
Jay McKay: Okay, so that's actually going to be a different set of people you need to talk to. I'm not well-versed in screen readers like JAWS or NVDA, and that's not really what we're covering here today. If we have time, I might be able to pop some resources over to you later though.
Emma: Okay.
Jay McKay: So all right, let's go ahead and move on to... So that's focus mode. And then when you go through Safari reading mode, again, very similar to the reading mode in your Word document. It's just that idea of if you're on Safari, you're on a webpage, there's lots of ads and things, when you open it up, it will make all of those disappear.
Okay, so next, I want to talk about just a couple of things on the Chrome browser. So I'm going to open up my Chrome browser here.
So first thing, there are some settings that we can adjust on our Chrome browser, and you'll notice on the slides, I also gave you some links to a Chromebook. So Chromebook is a little different than Chrome browser in some of the setting options. But what I liked about the Chrome browser that I wanted to show you is the way to get to the settings for your browser is you go to the little triple dots up here at the top right, it takes you to your settings, and then I'm going to click where it says accessibility. Again, I have some options in terms of how to highlight on focused objects, how to navigate with text cursors, et cetera.
But what I really liked was it had a quick way for me to get to some accessibility features that I can add from extensions. So where it says, "Add accessibility features," it's taking me to that Chrome Web Store where I can upload extensions for my Chrome browser. So things like Google Translate; Dictionary; Postlight Reader, we'll actually try that one out; Open Dyslexic, so if you like that open dyslexic font; SwiftRead Darkness, I know a lot of people really liked this one that will turn a dark mode for Facebook, Google, et cetera; Grammarly. So this is just kind of like a top hits of accessibility and useful tools in Chrome extensions. So definitely play around with a lot of these. I'm familiar with most of them. I can't speak to all of them.
BeeLine Reader, I wanted to show that one to everybody today, but it is not a free one or not as free as I wanted it to be. What it does is it does color gradient over the text. So it really does help keep people on track and helps it make it easier for them to read. So definitely check that one out.
So now that we're in the Chrome Store, I wanted to show a couple of extensions that I found to be useful on my Chrome browser. And again, these will definitely be available on a Chromebook because again, it's just running off that Chrome browser.
So the first one we're going to look at is a color overlay. Make sure mine is turned on. Oh, there it is. And what the color overlay does is it just turns... Oh, it's not turning on the right screen, but that's okay. Let's see if I can re-share. There we go.
So what it's doing here is it changed the color of my screen based off of what I selected. So I just go up to that color overlay and maybe I want it to be green or I want it to be teal. I can also adjust how opaque is. So maybe I don't want it to be super, super dark, but I just want it to be a little bit. And the reason why this might be useful is I had several teachers that were teaching students with dyslexia and they found these to be really helpful ways to keep their students on the screen. It helped with their reading. And again, some people, it's just a little easier to look at the screen if it's in those different colors. And as you can see, it's just adjusting the Chrome browser. It's not affecting my desktop. So that's color overlay.
Let me swap this out over here.
All right, so the next one we want to look at is the Postlight Reader. So I'm just going to go and find a new story because those are nice and exciting and lots of stuff on a screen. Maybe not. Let's see. Let's try to... Oh, here we go. There we go. Let's read something about Alabama. I don't even know what this is, but we'll read it.
So when you're reading on a website, you'll see lots of ads and other things you can click on and it can get very distracting trying to figure out what you're actually looking at and what you want to read. Is it actually going to get me there? Okay, let's try this link. There we go. Okay, so I don't want to deal with all of these things. I don't care about the markets. I don't want extra links. I just want to read this article.
So this Postlight Reader takes it all away. All I see now is the article. I see the text. Depending if there's images, sometimes they will pull those images and plop them in there really nicely for you as well. It will still have related links that go to that article, but I'm not having to deal with the ad links and the other links that look like I'm supposed to go there, but it's not actually related to anything. So it only gives me what's related to the article as opposed to what it looked like before, which was all these other things that can get in my way. So I love Postlight Reader, I think it's a great tool.
The Tomato Clock is just a simple tomato timer. So we talked about having those tomato timers in our lives. So here, I could just turn on my tomato, I can have a short break, and then I turn on my tomato. So it gives me 25 minutes, and at the end of the 25 minutes, then I prompt my short break or if I want a long break, and I can also reset it. And then I have some stats too, so it'll tell me how many tomatoes did I earn that day. So if you're somebody who likes to see their progress that way, it gives you those quick stats.
Another extension that I found really useful for focusing is called Strict Workflow. It's similar to the tomato timer, but it gives you a little bit extra protection, I guess, is a good word. But basically, you turn on your timer, your timer's on just as you would anywhere else. However, you can block certain sites. So I've turned on my tomato timer, I'm going to go to my options, and so now I can edit all of these. Because I accidentally turned it on first, I don't get to edit these, but I could edit all these and block them from my site and then it'll give me a little timer when it changes.
Now, if you have younger students, if you want to just fix it for them and just don't tell them, just tell them to press on the tomato, but our kids are always smart. They know how to get into things. So best of luck if you're trying to block them from things that you never ever want them to go to. It won't always help, especially if they figure out how to adjust those options, but again, I find if you're working with your students and kind of walk through that process of why you're doing something, and it's not that it's always going to be blocked, just while you're working, it helps give them ownership to make those choices on their own as well. So maybe they get to decide which sites do I really not need while I'm working or which sites are going to be helpful?
I've also had it set to only certain sites are available to you while you're working, so that's another way to work it. So instead of blocking things, you just say, "These are the ones you get." So that can be a helpful way.
Oh wow, this took longer than I thought. I'm glad. I'm glad we were able to get through all of them though.
I did want to just mention if you are using Chromebooks with your students, I did provide some links on how to get to those accessibility settings and those display settings on your Chromebooks. Definitely take a peek at those. They will be helpful to you. And Neil had a couple other apps that he thought was useful to add and to provide to you all. Looking at how to annotate webpages or highlighting, so these are just a couple articles for apps that you can go to learn more.
All right, so we've got a couple of minutes left. Let's see if there are any questions.
Okay, so we've got something about the operating systems. I haven't. So the question is about going into settings of the operating systems or browsers to block, just to block a lot of websites except for a few. I know that there was a way you could do that through parental controls for Chrome browsers. I didn't do a lot of extensive work using those, but I know that there's some options. I couldn't tell you how effective it is or how well it blocks things. I find that students usually will find a way though, but it's always good to try.
All right, any other questions?
All right. Well, hopefully as we wrap up, these were just some things, like I said, maybe you knew about some of these tools and you just forgot about them. Maybe you've heard about them but didn't get a chance to dig into where they are. Hopefully you got to take something away from today. So just a reminder to invite you, we have our AccessU, that is our annual tech conference happening in May. If you have IT directors or web designers or HR people, I would say anybody who touches a piece of digital content will benefit from coming to this conference because they will learn how to make that content accessible to people with disabilities. So looking at your forms, your infographs, PowerPoint slides, so it's not just all about websites or mobile design.
And then lastly, we encourage you to come check us out at Be a Digital Ally. This is another monthly workshop. We'll be looking at planning inclusive events. So that will be with myself and Erica Braverman. So we'll see you there.
So thank you, everyone. Last thing, please, if you have a moment, we appreciate your feedback. It really does help us to plan, know what's working, what's not working, how we can provide you with more helpful, useful information for your classrooms.
So last one, of course, is Toolkit Tuesdays. This is where we will post all of our videos. So if you are never able to make one of them, or if you want to check out the backlog of our videos, we encourage you to check them out at Toolkit Tuesdays. So that is bit.ly/KnowbilityToolkitTuesdays, capital K, capital T, capital T.
All right. Thank you, everyone.