Has anybody had experience using some of the technology that reads text to students who can’t read it for themselves? What if anything have you liked? What has been a failure.
I work with a 3rd grader who is severely LD. He can keep up with class discussions, and learn when he doesnt’ have to read—but he doesn’t have the reading skills to do grade level work? It would be good if he could use technology to help him read in areas like science and social studies—if it exists. This is a new area for me, and I would welcome help in learning about what if anything works well. Thanks!
My daughter is an older teen, who has LDs including reading difficulties. We have worked and worked on her reading for years, but although it is functional, I recently spent time investing scan and read technologies to see if this would help her get through more advanced materials. The options range from the expensive (although quite good) such as Kurzweil and WYNN systems, to much lower cost and reasonably good such as “Scan and Read” or just using the read-back voice built into speech to text software such as ViaVoice or Dragon Naturally Speaking. The voices all tend to be a little robotic, but most of them can be adjusted for speed and pitch to find what suits the listener best. If you want to try it out WYNN will send a 30 day free trial CD (the software disables itself after 30 days) http://www.arkenstone.org/wynn/. Also Scan and Read has a downloadable version and a trial CD offer too. http://www.premier-programming.com/ScanNReadlite.htm
You do not need to have the scanner function set up yet to try out how the student reacts to the computer voice reading - just use any interesting text that is already in a word processed form - something you create or find on the wed should work. If it seems to to have possibilities you would then need to investigate scanner technology so that all school needed text can be scanned into a computer document type file. Good luck.