Over the course of this school year, I have had the opportunity to journal with a first grade student who struggles greatly with the physical act of writing. I journal with this particular student at least three time each week (on average), and, on most occasions, he displays rather strong phonemic, phonological, and sound/letter awareness skills, but is consistently unable to connect his strings of "pseudo-words" into coherent thoughts. In addition, this student's handwriting is very much illegible, and, therefore, it is difficult for either my CT or me to interpret this student's journal entries. For this student, even with consistent scaffolding from his instructors, writing is a definite (and constant) challenge.
With this being said, based upon my experiences with this student, I can tell you first hand that, in comparison to other children his age, this student's ability to conjure up ideas and verbally articulate them in the form of a story is second to none. From a super-hero washing machine who miraculously learns to fly in an attempt to save an entire village from a fire, to a clan of penguins who learned to play hockey through their discovery of eggs, this student has an amazingly brilliant imagination that is always evolving. However, his current inability to legibly document these wonderful ideas truly hiders his success as a student-author--my CT frequently urges him to "push for more writing", but, as I often tell her, this student's ideas are there, we are just unable to see them because he cannot write them down. Over the course of this week, with this student's dilemma in mind, I searched for an assistive technology that would assist students who possess imaginations that are a bit too advanced for their physical, "traditional" writing abilities.
I came across Dragon Natural Speaking 11, an amazingly applicable speech-to-text technology that can be easily applied in the classroom. After reading the wikipedia excerpt regarding the TPCK model, I realized that, in order to effectively implement this specific technology within each of our respective classrooms, as instructors, we must possess strong "Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge" (TPCK). TPCK can be defined as the knowledge pertaining to how technologies can be integrated into the learning environment in meaningful ways; eventually, this TPCK, and the strategic implementation of technology, serves to directly enhance the target curriculum. For example, upon choosing to allow my students to utilize "Dragon" in the literacy classroom, I would remain cognizant of the specific stage of the writing process at which they currently reside (i.e., Which curricular standards, benchmarks, skills, and expectations have my students already mastered?--Are they informally drafting? Are they simply generating ideas, or are they beginning to formulate a final draft?). In this respect, my students' always-changing curricular focus would have an enormous impact on the ways in which I would utilize the technology during my future instruction. Essentially, depending upon which "writing stage" the students were working to develop and become comfortable with, I would implement "Dragon" much differently (i.e., the level of precision that the students would be expected to work at would be altered; low precision when generating ideas, high precision when composing a final draft, etc.). Upon initially beginning to use the technology, the students' individual use of "Dragon" would, obviously, need to be highly scaffolded and closely monitored, but, as the students' collective comfort level would begin to strengthen, this speech-to-text tool would be an extremely effective technology to implement when using an interactive writing pedagogical technique in your classroom.
In regards to the student who I described earlier in this post, I believe that a speech-to-text technology such as "Dragon" would be a highly effective tool for him to utilize for one, specific reason--the focus of his writing would now be placed upon his generation and documentation of meaningful content, and not on the (often frustrating) process of attempting to linearly hand-write his ideas on a piece of paper. Through the use of "Dragon", this student's confidence and motivation in the literacy classroom would likely sky rocket. More importantly, this student's use of this tool would, hopefully, alter his overall perception of the true purpose of writing--to express one's ideas in a creative, unique, and personalized manner.
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