Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 2nd April, 2014
Recently there has been renewed interest in the potential of speech recognition for learners with writing and literacy difficulties (partly as a result of the restriction on use of a scribe for assessing writing at National 3/4 Literacy). Dragon NaturallySpeaking is we think the best speech recognit...
Posted by 14 on the 19th March, 2014
I've become interested in a communication app called SPEAK all! designed by researchers at Purdue University specifically for children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder who use PECS. SPEAK all! is still somewhat in development, so I don't want to mislead by over-laud...
Posted by Allan Wilson on the 19th March, 2014
[This is the first blog in an occasional series considering different aspects of the use of speech recognition] We had some interesting feedback today from a school about a recent loan of a laptop with Dragon NaturallySpeaking software installed for trial use by one of their pupils: "J&nb...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 3rd March, 2014
Literacy is a mandatory Unit for all learners at National 3 and 4 and assessment covers the skills of reading, writing, talking and listening. Where reading is being explicitly assessed, the use of human reader is not permitted, and similarly, where writing is being assessed, a scribe cannot be used...
Posted by 14 on the 28th February, 2014
Had a great day yesterday on the CALL course 'iPads and Communication - fully featured AAC apps from symbols to text' . It can be hard work ploughing through a range of complex apps that all look somewhat similar but actually have a wide variety of different features, strengths and weak...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 7th February, 2014
Text-to-speech is one of the most useful accessibility tools for learners with and also without literacy or access difficulties. Pupils with dyslexia or reading difficulties can use text-to-speech to access digital text; pupils with English as a second language, or with language or learning dif...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 3rd February, 2014
Thanks to Marie Lawson from the Vision Service in Shetland for contributing a new 18 point Large Print copy of New Maths in Action S22. It's available as two parts and you can find them on the Database by clicking the links below: New Maths in Action S2-2 Part 1 New Maths in A...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 6th January, 2014
The SQA Question Paper team have added 'answer boxes' to the National 5 specimen papers and these can be downloaded from the SQA Digital Question Paper pages. Feedback from students is that it is much easier to type in answers directly on the paper, than to use a separate digital answer book...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 19th December, 2013
Yesterday a teacher called to ask for advice about using Texthelp's Read and Write Gold with the SQA Digital Question Papers. She had two problems and the suggestions I made may be of interest to others who use Read and Write Gold: The first problem was that the PDF Aloud text-to-spee...
Posted by 14 on the 13th December, 2013
Maybe others already know all about this already but I just stumbled upon a really useful online sign dictionary (search for videos of BSL signs). As both Makaton and Signalong are based on BSL, this site can offer rapid support to staff and family who may not have instant access to ...
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