Transcript
The area of writing is a very complex area. You have students who need to come up with their ideas, you have to have students organize those ideas, you have to be able to take ideas and expand them in to sentences and paragraphs, you have to edit your work, you have to be thinking about spelling along the way, and in the end you have to come up with a final product. So we have technology that hits in all those different areas.
One of the new areas that we have right now for brainstorming is thought generation technology. Where students are able to put in a word or phrase, their topic, and through using natural language processing algorithms it actually generates ideas that are associated with the theme or topic the student has entered in. Some of the programs out there will then take the student to related websites so that they can develop some background knowledge on that topic so that their ideas start to flow.
In organization of those ideas then we have graphic organizing software that kind of creates a map, a visual map of what they're writing about, or structural organizers which is more of our linear, kind of point form notes. Again, knowing the students is really important on which of those types of strategies or technologies you are going to use.
When it comes to composition, traditionally we've used word prediction software as one of the areas to help out with spelling. But voice recognition, just talking to your computer, is increasing in its power these days, and so we're seeing it becoming more and more as a first line tool for many students.
Once we've got our paragraphs written then editing is a real challenge and most of the times we rely on teachers, parents, friends to kind of do the editing for students but again we have new software that allows us to actually examine the sentence and the paragraph structure at this point, giving the students feedback about their grammar, their word usage, and looking for homophones. So we have new editing assistive software that can help with that.
At the very end, it's always good to have someone else read it out loud and that's when we drop back to our good text-to-speech software and have it read sentence by sentence to a student so that they can hear what they've actually written on the paper, or computer screen in this case.
