Transcript

Many of my students have difficulties with written output. They have wonderful things to say, creative ideas, their articulate and their eloquent. But as soon as it's time to put it on paper, a lot of that gets lost. A big game changer for them has been the use of the iPad and this, the Retro Phone. What they do is they talk into the Retro Phone like a regular phone and it records their voice. It can transform their voice into text, or it can just take a voice recording.

One great activity we used it for in writing workshop is brainstorming. Often times, brainstorming is just meant to be a quick lesson to get down all your ideas. But for students with written output difficulties, sometimes that can be a huge task when it's not supposed to be. So we use the Retro phone and the iPad to record our ideas for brainstorming. It takes students maybe 15 minutes and then they have a bank of ideas that they can use as anchors when it's time to start their writing project. This feels really good for them because they can see the results of their work right away and they can hear exactly what they wanted to say. So it's a much better reflection of their thinking and a truer reflection of their real capabilities.

We can see the brainstorm box. Each voice clip is an idea he had to make sure he had enough ideas for his book. Here's an example:

Student: Say I was in white belt and I wanted to move all the way up to black belt. So you have to get your yellow strip to get your yellow belt. You have to get your orange strip to get your orange belt.

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