In the continuing saga of the issues with my wrist, I've discovered that it's nearly impossible to keep up on all of the teacher required paperwork. When you cannot type and you have trouble writing. Out of desperation, I stopped at Best Buy on Monday evening and purchase Dragon NaturallySpeaking preferred version 9. This was after spending most of Sunday trying to figure out how to use the built-in speech recognition that comes with Vista. Although others have managed to get Vista's speech recognition to work with many programs, all I was ever to able to do was use WordPad, Windows mail, and commands to navigate. I don't think it was my microphone, because the command features worked beautifully. Dragon, however, was not real fond of the microphone I used with Vista, either. Since getting Dragon on Monday. I have written an entire IEP(not without some frustration and not appropriate for public language), since many e-mails, and even managed to move some text boxes around in Microsoft Word. We still have several glitches to work out, but fortunately, I can mouse with my left hand. I don't think that I have the skill to do any kind of photo editing or graphic work, but we'll see later.
As I said in the other posts where I talked about using Word prediction to help my typing. I can definitely see some of the frustration that my students have when they have to use technology to help them. But they don't know how to use the technology yet. There is a definite learning curve when it comes to using these tools. I wonder if we would be better off teaching the students to use the tools before we expect them to use them for academic work?
4 months ago
2 comments:
I have long thought that it was unfair to have to learn *both* technology and content at the same time!
Good luck with the Dragon... sounds like it's working :)
I tend to agree with you. But, even now, there is resistance to teaching children how to use assitive technology. I cringe when I think about the students we are losing to reading disabilities because they aren't ever taught to use something like Kurzweil or Read & Write, or even just Acrobat with the read PDF file. The kids just give up on ever reading by the time they hit the high school.
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