Years ago, I helped a woman with MS figure out and customize Dragon Dictate so that she could control her computer by voice alone. Her voice was erratic to be sure, and Dragon Dictate was amazing for its ability to learn her voice, and reliably understand it. I know that there is a Dragon Dictate app for the iPad, but it also comes built in with Windows, and can be started from control panel (as "Start Speech Recognition").
I helped grade 100s of 8th grade science and math tests this week, and entered the grades in the spreadsheet, which is truly a tedious business. I wonder if it would be less tedious if you could just position the cursor at the start of 2 column table and speak the grades: "Ella tab numeral 3 tab Joe tab numeral 3.5 tab Armando numeral 2.75" etc. Then you could take the resulting table, sort it by name and paste it into whatever spreadsheet you use to keep your grades. I tried this with Word with no trouble.
The beauty of dictating is that you can train the computer to recognize your voice very reliably saying the names of your students. I imagine the difficulty is if your class roster doesn't exactly line up - say you have a new student, or another who is absent. I need to think on this a while longer.
I helped grade 100s of 8th grade science and math tests this week, and entered the grades in the spreadsheet, which is truly a tedious business. I wonder if it would be less tedious if you could just position the cursor at the start of 2 column table and speak the grades: "Ella tab numeral 3 tab Joe tab numeral 3.5 tab Armando numeral 2.75" etc. Then you could take the resulting table, sort it by name and paste it into whatever spreadsheet you use to keep your grades. I tried this with Word with no trouble.
The beauty of dictating is that you can train the computer to recognize your voice very reliably saying the names of your students. I imagine the difficulty is if your class roster doesn't exactly line up - say you have a new student, or another who is absent. I need to think on this a while longer.
It's interesting that we're often thinking about how to modify our classrooms for our students (and I could see Dragon Dictate helping here) but as we start down what will hopefully be a life career as teachers, our bodies will change in their capacities as well. Or we may simply want an easier way to get through the more tedious bits of work. At any rate, it's good, I think, to keep in mind ways to modify our classroom experience for ourselves. If we want to go the long haul, anything that makes the the job more streamlined seems like something to consider. Thanks for sharing :)
ReplyDelete