Spoken Text

My new favorite website...at least for the week is spoken text. This site allows you to upload any e-text, and in a few short minutes it is converted to an MP3 file...all for free! Too good to be true? Let's take a look. First, you do have to register (that's easy enough). Then, you need to select the e-text you'd like converted. (The site indicates it will convert pdf, doc, ppt, txt, RSS feeds, emails, html, web pages, ...is there anything left? ) I choose a book from Project Gutenberg, which is in public domain. Two minutes later I had a MP3 file. The computer generated voice was of fair to good quality, I adjusted to it within a minute of listening. (But like I tell the teachers I work with, if you have difficulty reading, any computer voice is golden!)

This site was created by Mark McKay and the Carleton School of Psychology Human-Oriented Technology Laboratory (HOT Lab). Mark himself, has a visual impairment and reportedly wrote most of the code for this wonderful tool.
Hats off to you Mark and the HOT Lab!

Voice recognition ups and downs

The You Tube video linked in the title is a taped live demonstration of MS Vista's voice recognition. Unfortunately, this clip was shown in many places but not in its entirety, and with a definite negative slant. I am not going to enter into the MS Office Speech-to-Text vs. Dragon Dictate debate, because I believe both have their place in the large assistive technology picture. I have used both with students/clients and had great outcomes and not so great outcomes when the match wasn't good.
I love Microsoft's tool for my students who need some support with homework and long assignments. It's easy to access, train, and most individuals already have it on their home computers. These student's often edit with their keyboard as well as their voices. On the other hand, if I have a student who has limited use of his/her hands, or needs to use speech-to-text for the bulk of his/her assignments, then I favor Dragon.

But the real intent of this post is to question why technology acts up when we present it? How many times have you been presenting and some unexpected glitch pops up? The link you've used a dozen times, or the video that ran in your power point for two weeks solid everyday leading up to the conference presentation... Why? Are there technology gremlins running amok? Do the butterflies in our stomach produce some sort of magnet field that causes the technology to crash? Or, is the technology having it's own identity crisis, since only the piece being showcased usually acts up, not the other 6 gadgets you've got running simultaneously.

Beautiful

This interpretation of Christina Aguilera's song Beautiful is very inspiring. In our district we have a couple of campuses where the majority of our students with hearing impairments attend. I can invision this being video cast on the morning announcements. How wonderful would that be! I'm sure every high school student could relate to this.

Handwriting tips

I'm convinced that teaching handwriting is a lost art. That makes me sad on a number of levels, but mostly because I see students who are drawing their letters instead of writing them and this takes an incredible amount of energy.
In an effort to support teachers and students in this area I and a couple of OTs I work with have created the following slide show.
http://breeze.neisd.net/handwriting/