Re: Has anyone tryed any of the dragon software.

[Anonymous]

Trashman, I don’t personally have any experience using Dragon Speak myself but my school board (we’ve got 150,000 students) has used it for students with LDs. The issues/problems that would crop up repeatedly were getting the software to recognize their speech.

Since the purpose of it is to make writing easier for someone with an LD, who had difficulty writing on their own, it was important for the speech to text function be workable. Otherwise, it was just an exercise in frustration for the kids.

My school board is now making a big push towards the Premier software system which can really do some fabulous things. Speech to text, text translated into spoken word, it can also scan passages of text and shorten it down into a little paragraph if you want. Then you don’t have to manouver your way through a long piece of writing to know what the message or story was about.

It’s getting to the point where we won’t even have to think anymore. This stuff does it all.

The other big software push is the ‘Kurzweil’ software and I believe it does all the same stuff. In fact, our board was offering a bunch of seminars on its usage for teachers in some of their ‘contained’ special ed classes. I stupidly didn’t sign up thinking my class of kiddos didn’t fall into the right category to get me the training. Wrong. At an after school meeting with my psychologist (well, the class’ pscycologist) and SpecEd coordinator, I found out that our behaviour people have pushed to get our little guys supplied with the software too.

My class is ‘special’ because of behaviour concerns. Big behaviours that make it unsafe for them to be in a regular classroom at least until they get all their other issues sorted out. Anyway, when they’ve finished with all the testing on the kids, most of them are found to be also saddled with at least one LD, to go along with their other diagnoses.

I’ll see what I can find out about Premier and Kurzweil. Premier is available to any of our families to use at home on their computers. (something about the writer/designer feeling literacy should be available to everyone, not just a privileged few). It could also be that our board paid hefty fees to make it available to everyone. Any teacher that I’ve talked to about has raved about it.

Kurzweil comes with awesome accolades (I think it’s now thought of as much better than Dragon Speak which is much older) but its main issue could be that it has a heft price tag attached to it which is why my board has used it more ‘sparingly’, shall we say.

I’m not a techie type person. Computers are fine but I don’t like having to learn software programs with all kinds of ins and outs.

Other possibilities (if you don’t want it to read articles or stories to you but just need a word processing program that will do predictive spelling for you, there is also CoWriter and WordQ. I’ve started my guys using it this year (kicking and screaming I might add. They only want to play on the computer, not do work on it!).

One of my boys was so excited when he used it on Monday to write all about his weekend. He would sound out the first letter or two of a word and then the predictive part kicks in. It then lists words that it thinks you were trying to spell. One, two’ or three letters and it comes up with a list of words that would be reasonable suggestions according to whatever topic you’re writing about.

Anyway, this student of mine was so thrilled to use it for his first time. “It makes me do really smart work!!!! How does it make me so smart???” He was so happy and pleased with himself. That is what this software is all about!

BTW Trashman, is it getting cold out there in Wpg yet? 😆

REPORT ABUSE