Free Assistive Reading Tools

I've been working with a special education teacher today trying to find some solutions for some of his students with reading disabilities and vision impairments. Mostly, looking to find ways to do both text to speech and speech to text.

As far as I can tell, there are only two real viable options for speech to text: the speech recognition tool that comes free with Windows 7 or Dragon Dictation which for the PC or Mac is still relatively expensive but for the iPhone or iPod Touch is free. (for a real good description of this visit Ira Socol's post, Writing without the Blocks).

As for text to speech, there are plenty of tools out there that will convert movable type to a spoken word mp3 file:

• - convert text to speech
• - convert text to speech (spoken by a cartoon avatar)
• vozMe - convert text to speech
• - convert text to speech

or to a more multimedia output:

• - If you can type, you can make movies. Text-to-Movie
• - text-to-speech talking avatar generator
• - Oddcast makes fun and interesting multimedia generator widgets. One of which is the Etrade talking babies widget.

These are all great, but they require two things:

1. That the student have access to an electronic typed version of what they need read to them, and
2. That the student have access to a computer in class.

Problem is, what the student needs read to them looks more like this:


than this:


The solution we came up with was the use of free optical scan tools like:

• - Free online tool that converts text from image files or PDFs to movable text in a DOC, PDF, RTF, or TXT file.
• - Free online tool that converts text from a picture file to text that can be copied and pasted.

First we take the pages of the student's textbook and scan them into a PDF file on our copy machine:
Then upload those files to one of the free OCR tools listed above to convert it to text. Then we take that text and convert it to an mp3 file using text to speech. From there, we can load the files onto an MP3 player that the student can use.
But, if we want to take this a step further, we could create QR codes for the audio files we created that the student could access with their own mobile device. We simply paste a small version of the code on the page that is read in the file. To do this we could use any of the following free tools:

• - QR Code reader
• - QR Code Creator
• - QR Code Creator
• - QR Code Creator
• - QR Code Creator

I wonder how long it will be before textbook companies will offer this accommodation themselves. Wouldn't it be great if a real book could be an auidobook?

Collaborative Storytelling

About a month ago our 5th graders started a collaborative project with a school 100 miles away. They have been taking turns writing a story using 21classes. This is not simply a story though. We have framed this project for the students as a game. Each student is paired with a student from their class. While one student is writing the other is out taking a picture. The student whose turn it is to write has to read all the blog posts in the story and find a way to incorporate the last picture added into the story. When they are finished they post the photo their partner took for the next group to write about. Their photography goal is to find a picture that the next group will struggle with finding a way to incorporate into the story. I predicted that this would force the students to be more creative and ultimately come up with more interesting stories. This project also promotes reading because to do the assignment they have to read the whole story that has been written so far. This project has, from what I observed, increased the engagement level of all students involved at both schools. Seeing that this has been successful in its trial run our next goal is to do this project, perhaps next year, with more than one school and hopefully on a global scale. Such a project could potentially involve as many as ten different schools granted that half are from Europe, Asia, Africa or Australia, and the other half are from the Americas.

To read these students blogs you can go to Grade 5 Collaborative.

jott.com

I read about this service on Dangerously Irrevalent today and it got me thinking of it's application in the classroom. My immediate thoughts are that this would be a great speech therapy tool. It might also be a great tool for students with reading and writing issues. Students could speak and see how their words should appear. I have to experiment with it a bit to see what other potential benefits it might have. If anyone has any other ideas please post a comment.