After this week’s readings regarding assistive technology to benefit special education students I decided I wanted to dig a bit further and find some resources to use with my own students. This year I am working with a number of students who struggle with reading and writing specifically so I started looking into some of the speech-to-text and text-to-speech software programs available to see if any of them would be feasible to use with my students. Currently I am primarily working in science classrooms and I have 5, 7th grade science classes a day plus one reading and one English class. In those 5 science classes alone I have 15 students with IEPs that require text be read to them (either in its entirety or selected portions) and 12 students with scribe. This can make for some very interesting classes because I can’t be everywhere at once and there isn’t always time to get to everyone. I thought it would be great if I could convince the school and/or teachers to employ some of these technologies to help better assist these students. So with this in mind I set out to find some (reasonably priced) software my kids could use.
What I discovered amazed me there are actually a few free software downloads available. Of the ones I tried out the NaturalReader seems to be the best and has downloads available for both Mac and PC, also it only took me about 5 minutes to install it and start using! Here is the website if you want to check it out http://www.naturalreaders.com/index.htm. One of the best features of this software I discovered it that you can easily slow down or speed up the text. In addition it has what they call a “floating bar” which won’t block the rest of the screen but allows the reader to move between programs. All the user has to do is click on a program highlight the text they want read aloud and click the play button on the toolbar. It was amazing I played with it for a while! The voice isn’t perfect but it could allow some of my students to be more independent while still getting the help they need. Which is a big deal at the middle school level when reputation is everything and some students don’t want to look like they are getting extra attention from the teacher.
I can’t wait to see if it would be possible to use this with some of my students and I will definitely post an update here sometime next week letting you all know how it went.
How exciting, Michelle! Please do keep us posred.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like a great idea. Good luck using it in the classroom.
ReplyDeleteIf students use them I would assume they would have headphones but would this distract them from listening to the rest of the class?