Text-to-speech

Prior to this assignment, I had never used this feature before. I used this feature on a document I created that had a student's IEP goals in them. I have done a numerous amount of IEPs because all of my students' meetings are now expiring at the end of the year, so they were all starting to run together in my mind. With the text-to-speech feature, hearing what I typed actually allowed me to catch some grammatical mistakes that were in my document. For example, I typed his instead of her for a female student. I also forgot to enter a piece of criteria for a goal, and noticed it when I did not hear it played back.

Students who have learning disabilities can also benefit from this feature. In an article from ldonline.org by Dianne DeMott Painter, she explpained how she had a student who had difficulty with decoding. She had the student use a program called Talking Text, which used a speech synthesizer to talk as the student typed each word. If the word was not the one that the student wanted, he had to sound out the word until he heard the correct one or he had to use other references such as a dictionary or an outside spellcheck device.

Using text-to-speech features in word process tools can greatly benefit students of many different populations.

Reference
http://www.ldonline.org/article/5762/