Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Speak it!

     Earlier today I received an email from a colleague that was searching for a way to display text on the computer screen by simply speaking to the computer. Enter the Dictation&Speech feature under system preferences! Before trying out the feature, make sure your computer is updated to 10.8-Mountain Lion, a newer version of Mac OSX in order to access the Dictation&Speech features.
Speech to Text can be used in the classroom for a variety of ways! Students can retell a story without having to struggle with finding the letters and spelling words on a keyboard. They can simply focus on the goal of the lesson and details they remembered from the story. They can respond to questions on a particular text, produce answers for a quiz or test and simply produce more legible assignments. In math, students can also practice math facts by reciting a math sentence and watching it appear on the screen!  
Check out my "What's Up Dude?" video to see Dictation in action! Note that in order to include punctuation when dictating a sentence, you specifically need to say the name of the punctuation mark you want to use-to produce a question mark, simply say “question mark” at the end of the sentence for it to appear! 

Follow these steps to launch the Speech to Text feature:
Open System Preferences > Double Click Dictation&Speech (under System) > Set Dictation to the On button > Select the shortcut to enable Dictation > Set Language > Open up Pages or Microsoft word > Press shortcut key > Say your word/sentence/paragraph > Watch as the computer types the words. If you want your computer to read back the sentence, simply press Opt+ESC and voila, the computer is speaking to you! 

OR

Visit this youtube clip for a detailed explanation on how to turn on Dictation on your MacBook computer.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHlZ9DTnC70

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