My students need headphones with a microphone--I am fully flipping my classroom this year and students need to be able to watch videos without disturbing others. The microphone will facilitate speech-to-text for students with disabilities.
Here's what I love most about teaching high school English: sitting next to a student, one-on-one, and listening to them tell me about their writing. So this year, I'm doing a real writing workshop in my sophomore classes, and flipping instruction so that writing lessons are on-line and accessible when students need them.
These urban students come to me with the love of writing stripped right away from them; I want to bring it back.
Students need to know that writing isn't just something they do to practice for the state test (and years upon years of test prep have not boosted their scores anyway). So, I am trying in as many ways as possible to make writing accessible, inviting, and authentic in my classroom.
But being from a struggling district with tight budgets and no love from the state, technology for flipping classrooms is difficult to come by. And when it's available, a cart with 32 Chromebooks does not even provide one device for all of the 40 or 44 students in my sophomore classes.
My Project
The "flipped classroom" has long been a goal of mine--minimizing whole-group instruction in favor of a student-paced curriculum. This coming school year, I think I finally have everything in place--I've got Chromebooks, Google Classroom, Google Docs, YouTube, Read & Write for Chrome, and other resources all lined up to allow students to learn and submit evidence at their own paces.
Only one piece is missing--headphones with microphones; they would keep classroom noise down and facilitate speech-to-text.
The need for headphones with a video-heavy classroom is clear. But why the mics? Read & Write for Chrome is an amazing tool that students can use to have text read to them or to speak their own words and have them turn into text. With more than 25% of my students having IEPs, the availability of speech-to-text is critical to their writing success.
These Cyber Acoustics headphones are the perfect balance of economy and quality, and should allow all my students to write--sorry SPEAK and write--with ease.
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