Scheduled maintenance will be happening to the Doorway website on 16-02-2022 between 9 am and 3pm. During this time the site may not be available for around 10 to 15 minutes.
We are sorry if this causes you any inconvenience.
Free accessible educational activities that learners will find easy to use independently.
by Doorway Dev
Scheduled maintenance will be happening to the Doorway website on 16-02-2022 between 9 am and 3pm. During this time the site may not be available for around 10 to 15 minutes.
We are sorry if this causes you any inconvenience.
Doorway Online is designed to run on the following supported web browsers:
Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox (should be compatible).
If you are experiencing problems accessing our site or activities please check you are using one of the above browsers and that your browser is up-to-date.
If you are still experiencing problems please fill in an error report and we will get back to you.
Note: Internet Explorer is no longer supported by our site as it will soon be retired by Microsoft.
We have completed Text Type 3, the touch typing tutor for visually impaired learners that should suit anyone learning to touch type.
The new features are aimed at learners with very low vision:
We invite you to take a look at Text Type 3.
Text Type 3 phase 2, has been available on the site for over a year and will be available for three more months. It can be found here.
With the decline of Adobe Flash, soon some of our activities may not continue to function. The following activities have been renewed and will continue to work: Text Type 3, Speller 2, Letter & Number Formation, Cashing In and the First Phonics suite.
Fortunately, the downloadable version of our remaining activities should continue to run on Windows computers. All of our activities can be downloaded for free below!
The file is zipped and will need to be extracted before use (how to extract/unzip a file). For installation on a school network, a request will need to be made to the network administrator.
We would appreciate it if you would fill in the form notifying us of
your download and letting us know where you intend to install the
Doorway Activity Pack; in which schools or authorities.
Alternatively, to find out how to obtain the Doorway Activity Pack on a USB pen-drive (Windows users only) please use this contact form.
Doorway Activities were originally developed in Adobe Flash. This was a good way to develop such activities up to eight or ten tears or so ago. However, Apple decided not to support Flash and later tablets entered the scene. There was a solution in Puffin Browser. Our older activities still work on PCs and Android devices with Puffin Browser installed. This is no longer available on the Apple Store.
We have been able to re-code these activities to work with almost all computers and devices;
These have been developed in the modern format of html5 and JavaScript and there are no restrictions to their working on browsers on PCs and Macs. They also work on tablets although on iPads they do not enter full-screen mode as they do on Android tablets. For the remaining activities, we hope to convert more.
In the meantime, if you want to access the Flash-based activities on this site; – Do not use Chrome Browser. Firefox is more friendly to Flash-based activities. If you are using a PC you can buy the Doorway Activity USB pen-drive and install the activities directly to your PC, Pendrive or Network, or even run them directly from the USB stick. It’s available now at £ 10, below cost price from [email protected] There is no copyright restriction any more.
We expect that you’ll be able to download these activities directly from this site before too long. Watch this space ……………..
We are working on the final phase of Text Type 3, the touch typing tutor that can take learners from the home keys to mastery of the whole keyboard and typing sentences. This activity is designed to be as accessible as possible to visually impaired learners as possible. The final version should be accessible even to blind learners, after some initial guidance.
Learning to touch type.
There are some things that you need to know before supporting a learner on the road to touch typing
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Doorway Online does not collect any information about users.
Text Type 3 stores the results from a user’s last session on the computer it is accessed from, but we cannot see that data.
We use Google Analytics to give us usage figures for our activities. This is anonymised data that allows us to see which countries users are accessing our site from, which activities they access and allows us to check for bandwidth issues. It is not possible for us to identify a school or an individual user. We also get anonymised data from Google ads. These adverts are usually blocked in schools.
If you communicate with us by emailing [email protected], our mail server may store your email address. However, we will not use this address to communicate with you except regarding the issue you contacted us about. Your email address will be shared with no other organisation.
Email addresses will be deleted from our mail server when we no longer require them and in any case, two years after our last contact with you. You may send an email to that address asking for your emails and email address to be deleted.
A teacher in East Lothian has made up some very useful record sheets for students to keep track of their progress through the Speller levels. He has been generous in making them available to all.
They are in a compressed zip file which you may have to open using WinZip.
Thanks again to Darren Donnelly, PT Support For Learning, Musselburgh Grammar School for compiling these word lists.
The off-line version of Doorway activities for Windows PCs or laptops which had poor or no internet access has been the Doorway Activity Pack CD. This installs the activities onto your hard disc, server or pen-drive. Typically these were licensed by a school or LEA. We are no longer charging for this, beyond the costs of materials and copying.
We will be making the Doorway Activities freely downloadable. We must thank those authorities that licensed the Doorway Activity Pack CD when we started up. Those licence fees kept us going when finances were terribly tight. Now, it makes sense to make them freely available.
Coming Soon
Students from Glasgow University have been working on updating some activities to up-to-date web standards;
Doorway Speller. A teacher in Dundee has re-arranged and renamed the levels in line with current practice
The students have introduced a search feature which allows you to find a list with your target word in. This makes Speller a lot more useful for the casual user.
Speller now can speak the words, but there’s not a way of selecting the text to speech voice from within Speller. That’s to be added. Temporary address; http://tp3-2018-cs19.herokuapp.com/speller/
Letter and Number Formation has been programmed and it’s looking good. It’s important to stress that motor skills are easily learnt but hard to unlearn. That’s why getting the direction right in letters in handwriting is important.
This new version has been developed because it is usually run with an IWB. These are fitted at varying heights, that often do not suit pupils. Problem solved, we hope!
http://tp3-2018-cs19.herokuapp.com/letter_number_formation/
First Phonics, First Words and First Blends have been combined into one, neat package Doorway Early Phonics. Temporary address; https://jawadmahmoud.github.io/Early-Phonics/