Using voice technology to aid spelling.

17/3/2017

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

7 Comments

Hayden Vick

21/3/2017 08:55:56 pm

Rob,

I am interested in the rise of technology in the classroom. My own classrooms - especially early on - of course had very little technology, aside from maybe two computers in each class. What are your thoughts on the drawbacks, if any, to the increasing prevalence of classroom technology? Can there be too much?

Cheers,
Hayden

Kerry

22/3/2017 07:21:41 pm

Hello, this is very interesting. When you say that STA will accept the use of voice-aided spelling if it's part of normal practice for assessment purposes, I wondered whether you could elaborate? How did STA tell you this and should we expect that they will update their guidelines to reflect this?
Thanks.

Rob

24/3/2017 01:16:43 am

As I said in the blog. It was delivered by a group of LEA advisers from Wolverhampton who assured us that they had contacted STA via email and they had responded positively.

Amy

24/3/2017 06:28:43 pm

Having read this, I have contacted the STA asking for confirmation in writing. They have acknowledged my request but stated that it may take up to ten days to respond.

4/4/2017 10:25:30 pm

Let us know how you get on!

6/4/2017 08:38:45 pm

They've still not got back to me! I've contacted them again with my question reference number. You'd think that if they'd already told an LA that it was acceptable, then it would be an easy one to answer! Will keep you updated.

19/4/2017 02:22:23 pm

I have a response:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwM0xNlhVDk4VXFoaTExcjZqUVk/view?usp=sharing

Thanks for helping to promote consistency between LAs.

The Literacy Shed Blog