The range of students that I work with directly have mild to moderate learning and health disabilities. Many of the students in my special education resource classroom come from disadvantaged homes who have very limited resources at home, including computer access.
Imagine the frustration for students with learning disabilities who have reading and writing challenges, when presented the task of producing a research paper, an essay, or writing entry via Google docs.
Overcoming the stress of spelling grammatical errors and finding precise vocabulary words alone are enough to slow the writing process for them.
My Project
Computer based programs are useful to students as they are interactive and fun, there are still challenges to using computer-based tools to their fullest potential. Speech-to-text software is an amazing tool when it is available in the classroom. Gone are the days where everything is written and submitted by hand.
In our classroom, we use Google docs and its embedded tools for nearly all of our writing projects.
For some of our young learners, the simple task of typing a sentence, paragraph, or five-paragraph essay can be both daunting and overwhelming. Some of my students, especially those with reading and writing deficits, struggle with typing their responses or projects into Google docs, and the reasons vary from spelling, grammar, and limited keyboarding proficiency. Thankfully, Google docs has a voice-typing tool which is quite useful in the right environment. I say "right environment" because if the classroom is noisy, the voice-typing tool also picks up neighbor's conversations and background noise.
We do not have microphones in our classroom, and so background noise and student chatter within the classroom presents challenges to accurate dictation into this program. If we had noise-reduction headphones with built-in microphones such as the Califone set, the writing via speech-to-text would greatly speed up the writing process, improve spelling and grammar, and allow students to work swiftly and more efficiently.
Having access to these headphones significantly levels the playing field of in-class writing.
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