Dragon Naturally Speaking Quick Sheet

I am hearing more and more teachers interested in speech to text applications for struggling writers.  Speech to text applications allow a user to speak into a microphone, and have the application convert your speech into text on the computer.  Two of the more popular programs available are SpeakQ and Dragon Naturally Speaking (also available as a free iOS app).

Anyone who has used a speech to text program knows there is a fairly steep learning curve, at least initially, to get the program to be functional.  If you are currently using or interested in using Dragon Naturally Speaking, I have created a Quick Sheet that will help you with many of the basics of the program, as well as helpful hints to speed up the program by disabling parts of the program you don't need.

I hope this helps!  I would love to hear feedback in the comments section on how to improve this quick sheet.

Google Docs training resources

I will admit it, I am just barely becoming familiar with Google Drive, which is a free online file storage and sharing system, and Google Docs, which is a powerful online word processor.  If you are new like me, and would like some help getting started, please click here for great getting started tutorials and training videos.

Uploading Word files to Google Drive or Docs

Please check out this great video explaining how to upload your existing Microsoft Word documents into Google Drive, and convert them to Google Docs format.  This will allow you to take advantage of Google's great tools to share and collaborate on documents online.  It will also enable students with reading disabilities the ability to take advantage of the new Read&Write for Google Docs toolbar, which has great study tools and text to speech features.

Read&Write for Google Docs: Free screen reader and study skills toolbar

I was so excited to learn today about a free tool called Read&Write for Google Docs. Read&Write for Google docs is a free extension that can be added to your Google Chrome browser. It
reads and highlights any text in a Google document, along with providing textual and visual definitions, highlight collection, and a nice feature to make a vocabulary list from highlighted words in the doc.

NOTE: It will ONLY work with documents that are in the Google docs format, but it is a fairly easy process to convert existing Word documents and PDFs into Google docs format. To learn more about that process, click here.

To see some good images and videos about Read&Write for Google docs, click here

The second video will how you how to install the toolbar, the first one will go over features in detail.

Switch Prompting Training Video

If you have ever worked with students with severe motor and cognitive disabilities, you have probably had some who used those colorful plastic switches to play games on the computer, speak messages, activate toys, etc.  While switches can be a great way to help students access leisure, communication, and academic activities, it is not always easy to get students to hit those switches when we want them to.

I eventually came to learn, after visiting several different classrooms and working with several different students,  that many of the things I did to try to encourage kids to use their switches was actually making them dependent on ME to prompt them through the activity, rather than doing it independently because THEY wanted to.

Our AT team made a brief (less than 6 minutes) video last year as a training tool for new people working with switch users as well as a RE-training tool for some of us who have been making mistakes along the way.  The idea behind the video is to prompt students in a way that will encourage INDEPENDENT switch activation, rather than be DEPENDENT on us.  This is a great tool to use with paraprofessionals and peer tutors.  The video will never win any film making awards, but the content is solid, and I hope it helps you evaluate the prompting we give kids.