Using voice technology to aid spelling.

Today I had the pleasure of delivering a keynote at a conference in Wolverhampton today alongside some great speakers and the team from Wolverhampton LEA. 

One thing I will take away is using technology to aid spelling in writing.  Mark Smith and others demonstrated how Siri can be used to aid those children whose spelling problems stop them from using a dictionary properly.  His example was with children looking up 'mystery' in the dictionary by searching in the m-i-s- section and being unable to find the word they want. 

Here is a video of Noah in Y2 asking Siri to spell 'Caterpillar' for him:

As you can see in the video as well as displaying the written spelling it also reads the spelling to the child. 

We then tried it with a homophone 'allowed' with mixed results.   There is also an option on Google Search using the microphone button there.  Here is what happened: 

So as you can see it may be that homophones confuse the situation, but it could still be a useful tool for some children. 

We were advised today that if this is normal classroom practice that STA will accept it as independent writing for assessment purposes. (when used for single words and not whole sentences) 

​Even if you do not think you would like to use it in independent writing it could be useful for novice writers in other year groups who can write but struggle with spelling. 

Comments welcome as ever. 

​Rob