Voice+Recognition

When you have a student who is able to communicate orally at grade level, but cannot write at grade level you have some options for differentiating with technology. Choosing the technology that is right for the situation and for the student is the key.

Choose [|Vocaroo] if you want to assess something like the student's ability to summarize, re-tell, and what their literal comprehension level is. Students can record their thoughts at any pace and save the recording for you to listen to and mark. Students can embed their recordings on a wiki, email their recordings to the teacher with their gaggle email account, or save the file on the computer in a common folder the teacher can access. This requires no training, no practice, and can easily be a one time thing or be done without assistance. media type="custom" key="3326578"

Choose Microsoft's speech to text recognition inside Microsoft Word if you require a written final product from a student who is able to enunciate clearly enough to be understood by a computer. This generally requires some time training the computer to understand you - which requires the student to either be able to read or be able to repeat what you have whispered in thier ear. This takes around 45 minutes initally to get close to 80 % accuracy by the computer and if you do the training a couple more times, you'll get a vastly improved accuracy. To try this out, open MS Word. Click on the Tools menu and click Speech. A new language bar will display at the top of the screen. If you dictation, it appears to do nothing, but it is listening to you. Talk, it will type. If it is inaccurate, then click tools on the language bar, and choose training. This is where you train the computer and select users.

Here's a link that describes some [|ways and reasons to use technology to support writing].