Handheld Learning

Hi can anyone help me please I am trying to persuade my college to take on a PDA or something so that students who have problems hearing or with SEN can get the lecture etc notes into written format?  I saw something being used in a student many years ago before I became a teacher so didn't think to take on the information. I would like pointers as to which PDA and what software - many thanks for your help

Adele

Hi Adele

Putting my accessibilty hat on for a moment I am not sure that a PDA is going to do what you want it it to do. I think you might be thinking about handwriting recognition software. This comes on various PDAs, a few smartphones and tablet PCs. This can be a boost to accessibility for SENs but still requires meaningful notes in the first place. For Deaf students its only going to make a difference if they can get hold of the lecture information in the first place.

The solution is going to depend on your colleges approach to it's legal and moral obiligations to students with disabilities and learning difficulties. I would suggest that realistically each student would need to be assessed and then the right support package selected, which would include whatever technology was identified as helping.

I've done a lot of work on accessibility, so let me know if you want to talk about this more.


Cheers

Stu

I've tried both spinvox and dial2do and in concept they are great but they both really struggle with accents and I use dial2do a lot. However I don't think they have the consistency that would actually help students, they are just to error prone. Its still going to be very hard to beat the likes of Dragon Naturally Speaking in this respect.

...30 seconds is a big improvement on my past experience! But once set-up I have found Dragon to be very good (NB Mac users the engine is used in other non-Window apps as well).

Stu