Application: Dragon Dictation
What it is: Dragon Dictation is a speech to text application. To use it, students speak into the microphone and their speech is converted to text. The accuracy is impressive, even with difficult words or background noise. Students can use Dragon Dictation to compose notes, email messages, or status updates for a Twitter or Facebook account. Tap on a word that was misunderstood to get other suggested words or to delete it and type in the correct word. Highlight text and paste it into another document (Pages, Keynote, Notes, etc).
How Dragon Dictation can enrich learning: Dragon Dictation is an outstanding accessibility tool. It is a great tool for those who are sight impaired and struggle with typing on a touch device or communicating through text. Dragon Dictation can be used in the primary elementary classroom to help students spell and write. Often, young students who struggle with spelling have limited writing. This isn’t because of a lack of deep thinking, it has more to do with the hesitancy to write what they can’t spell. As a result the writing is limited. Dragon Dictation can help students write to their full potential using the breadth of vocabulary they know and not just what they can spell. Students can dictate an entire story, or they can dictate the words that they need help spelling. This keeps the students from constantly raising their hands requesting help with spelling. Dragon Dictation is a fantastic tool for brainstorming, students can talk through an idea and have written notes with their thoughts to refer back to.
Devices: iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
Price: Free (iTunes Link)**
This looks great but can’t seem to get it on the AU app store