Dragon Dictate and Grade Data Entry...

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.

Limited by its public nature?...

Each week as I think about the time in my placement, there are always a bunch of incidents/conversations/ideas which I need to think through, and would welcome the perspective of the rest of the cohort.  But, because I worry that somehow, someday, a teacher from my school will randomly come across this blog, I don't write about it.  Does anyone else worry about this?

Certainly this limits what I blog about to safer topics - and that also generally keeps it away from the topics that I am working and worrying about at any given time.