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Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 for Education
Empower Students
With continuing hardware and software improvements, speech recognition is becoming an increasingly cost-effective accessibility tool for a wider range of students. Speech recognition tools can generate a new excitement for writing and learning for students who were previously unable to write or produce written work due to problems with learning disabilities, physical disabilities or other challenges.
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Students with language-based learning problems, such as dyslexia, can benefit from using voice recognition software to transfer their ideas into print. Since dyslexic students have trouble expressing their thoughts on paper, they often convey less sophisticated thoughts in their written work, use a simplified vocabulary, or avoid writing tasks altogether. Learning disabilities researchers have consistently found that use of speech recognition software can make a significant difference for dyslexic students because it enables the students to communicate more efficiently and effectively. |
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In fact, research suggests that the use of speech recognition by dyslexic students has actually generated significant improvement in reading, decoding, spelling and comprehension. It gives students the opportunity to practice their reading skills and can positively influence sound-character awareness.
You talk, and it types. Tools such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking can help students quickly and easily transfer ideas from their minds onto paper – a basic task that is often painful, or even impossible, for some students. But when students can dictate their papers and examination responses to a computer, they’re more likely to exploit their full language capabilities. Students who have used speech recognition tools to independently produce typed essays can complete assignments with results that are indistinguishable from the work of their non-disabled peers.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking also offers speech output capabilities so that students can have text read aloud to them. The system works with most popular screen readers, such as JAWS, helping visually impaired students to work more effectively. Installed on a laptop computer, speech recognition can be used by students at home as well as in multiple classroom locations throughout the school day.
A Great Tool for Teachers
Teachers can receive hundreds of essays, reports, exams or homework assignments from students every week. Each paper requires timely review and detailed feedback. With Dragon NaturallySpeaking, teachers can read and respond to students' essays quickly and easily. They can add more comments and detailed notes because they’re not constrained by time-consuming hand-written feedback – not to mention poor penmanship!
For example, one secondary school history teacher who uses Dragon to comment on student projects decreased the amount of time that he spends grading papers by 40 percent over the alternative method of hand-writing comments. In addition to saving time and improving the quality of feedback, Dragon provided this teacher with a permanent electronic copy of all of his comments, a critical resource when it comes to writing both end-of-semester evaluations and college recommendations.
With a wireless headset, teachers reviewing assignments and providing dictated feedback are no longer tied so closely to the desk and computer. They can move around as they dictate notes to students or sit back and relax as they add comments to papers.