Upcoming Course: Learn How to Use Speech Recognition

Posted by Shirley Lawson on the 12th January, 2022

Each year we create a Professional Learning calendar based on the training needs of teachers, Learning support staff, Pupil Support Assistants as well as professionals such as Speech and Language Therapists. We use our course evaluations to determine what further training is required as well as identifying gaps in training provision in local authorities. Sometimes we get it right and get a lot of people signing up and we deliver a successful ourse which hits the nail on the head, providing relevant, practical tips, ideas and strategies on how to best use assistive technology to support learners with additional support needs. That feels good!

Other times we get only a handful of sign ups and we wonder why that is. An example of this is our Online Learning workshop on 27th January  'Talking to technology: Speech to text for learners with ASN' which currently has three people signed up for it.

We know a few facts:

• This topic is of great interest to teachers who want to be able to support their pupils who have writing / literacy difficulties / dyslexia.
• There is a move away from providing human readers and scribes for assessments and with the provision of a digital exam paper and a device, pupils can become more independent by using text to speech application to read the questions out and speech recognition to input their answers.
• There are many learners who are very able orally but when asked to write or word process the work they produce does not reflect their cognitive ability. Teachers crave a technological solution to this frustrating issue.
• There are a wide range of possibilities on a variety of devices and there is some confusion on what works best, how to use it, when to use it and how to introduce speech recognition to pupils to give them the best chance of success.

So maybe the course information has been overlooked in the run up to the holidays and we know that everything is stretched resource and energy-wise in school just now. That is completely understandable.

It is not too late to sign up so please take a look at the course description, share the information with your colleagues and join Paul Nisbet and I for a valuable and informative Professional Learning session on 27th January.

And for those who are completely new to Assistive Technology then our first Online Learning workshop on 20th January is perfect for you.

'Back to basics: A complete beginner's guide to using AT to support learners with ASN'.

By popular request, this online learning workshop will go back to the very basics of Assistive Technology and is designed for someone with no experience of it or who feels bamboozled by all the technology terminology and just needs some straight, simple answers!

There will be simple step by step guides on how to switch on accessibility settings, how to use assistive features such as Text-to-Speech (TTS) and speech to text and how to introduce these features to the learners you work with in the same, easy to understand manner.