Blabberize

eTech Ohio Convention

Mr. Adams, Ms. Furlong, Ms. Lundy, and Ms. Staten attended the eTech convention this last week. They had their own booth to show off some of the new equipment they have received as part of the ARRA grant.

Yes, Mr. Mann was there too. I even went down on Tuesday when most of my students were sleeping in due to the bad weather. It took me a while to get there, but I made it before 8:00 for session one.

I love these conventions. They can be exhausting, but I am always intellectually stimulated and many times even moved by the content. Some of the sessions are not particularly interesting because I have already been exposed to a lot. One session on News Broadcasting even made me mad because the presented didn't know a whole lot of what he was talking about. His school's show was a joke.

On a more positive side, one presenter made me think more about what I plan with my students. These presentations help me to throw off the tendency to be conservative and to try and risk more with my classes. Teachers can so easily fall into the pattern of doing things the same old way. This conference always gives me confidence to try new things. It has always been worthwhile to go to these conventions. I just wish I could talk more teachers into attending.

Try Dictating Instead of Typing

I've mentioned the program Dragon Naturally Speaking version 10 on my website, so I thought I would give you a more in-depth review of this product here on my blog. I am actually using Dragon to compose this blog entry.

Dragon works great with Microsoft Word if you have this program. I have not been able to test it on other word processors to see how effective it is. The price sure is right for this product, and I might mention that for $37.95 you get the program as well as the headset that has a microphone built into it. Some of you may prefer to do your writing with pen and pencil before transferring it to the computer. This program would be excellent for that because all you need to do is pick up the paper you have written and talk it right into the computer. I am actually writing this entry by just talking into the microphone. I did not do any pre-writing.

So far the only corrections I have had to make are for the money amount above and just three or four other minor corrections. There isn't a lot of difficulty in setting the program up on your computer. It took me less than half an hour to get things set. You do have to read in initial narration piece when you first start up the program. Over time the program is supposed to learn how you talk and become more accurate.

On a technical note, this program will require at least one megabyte of RAM. I am running the program on Windows XP. If you have a really old computer, you may have some problems with this program. I think my PC is at least five years old, and it is running quite well.

I have found with this program that I can spin out a lot more words, but I'm not so sure that I am doing my best writing. I should say composing instead of writing because I'm not actually writing it all, I'm just talking. Although the program does make some mistakes it is so cool to see how many words you can so rapidly put down in your word processor. It just doesn't seem to be quite as hard work to do as typing on the keyboard.

I don't think we’re there yet, but I think that in the future people will not be typing in text messages to their cell phones. They will just talk the text message into the cell phone and send it on its way. Imagine how much faster this could be then texting is even now.