In class #3 we had the opportunity to play with Kurzweil and work on our assignments. I had no idea about all of the features this program has to offer!!! One feature that I thought was interesting was the zone editing - what a great way to disregard certain things and also make sure other things are read in a certain order. This would help when you wanted a student to read the text that accompanies a picture before proceeding to the next section of the text. I also like that it has different dictionaries that can be used. What a great tool especially when you have EAL (English as an Additional Language) students in your class.
My partner, Ellen, and I dove right in to the use of the various applications of this program. We learned that the program does not always read what is written on the page. One problem that we encountered was the program was reading "I" as the number one. Another problem occured when we wanted to ask a question using a bubble note. For some reason, the program read the sentence and then the first few words of the next sentence (the last on the page) before asking our question. As a result, we recorded the sentence to read the way we wanted prior to asking the question and then corrected the next sentence as well.
We had lots of fun playing with the program while keeping in mind the student for whom we were designing the assignment as well as the MPTT. While there is a slight learning curve, the tutorials are very helpful. This program offers so many opportunities that I was unaware of. What a great tool to use in an inclusive class!! Two thumbs up
1 comment:
You brought up some good points about the advantages and pitfalls of using Kurzweil. There is a lot of prep work to be done before documents are easily accessible to students. Besides the pronunciation problems, I found that the program will attempt to read any sort of mark on the page. If there is a blurred letter or there was a piece of dust or hair on the scanner when the text was scanned in, the program tries to read it. I know zone editing and the pronunciation tool can help with some of this, but it is quite time consuming. This is definitely not a program that you can use without a lot of advance preparation, particularly for elementary school students.
Post a Comment