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Showing posts from December, 2015

Note Taking- Marrying Pen & Paper with the Cloud

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One of the really important skills that students need to develop is their ability to take notes in class. While many students have access to digital devices many still rely on traditional pen and paper for note taking.   While the research would support ( The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking , Psychological Science ,    Pam A. Mueller &    Daniel M. Oppenheimer   first published on April 23, 2014)  the use of pen and paper- wouldn’t it be great to be able to marry both the ink with digital technology to take advantage of the best of both worlds. In this post I'll share with you a couple of different strategies that students might find helpful to marry ink with their digital world. One of my favorite note taking tools is Evernote which I have been using for some time now. Evernote is a great way to capture ideas, notes, images, audio and store it on the web for easy access. Not to...

Speech Recognition - Coming of Age!

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Ever since I've been involved in the field of assistive technology there's always been the hope that speech recognition could assist students with the writing process. While speech recognition has been effective for some of the students we work with, it hasn't always worked out for the majority of the students that we work with. In the last six months there's been some new developments that make speech recognition a reality for many students. For many of us that are using smart phones we find ourselves using speech recognition more and more on daily basis for text messaging and for writing emails. Now students can take advantage of speech recognition on mobile devices such as iPhone's, iPad, Android phones, Windows tablets as well with as within Google Docs. With the advent of machine learning the speech recognition engines keep getting better and better and do not require initial training. This has made it a very easy entry for students to trial speech recognition....