10-dragon Naturally Speaking-plan School Work-user Manuals

Introducing Speech Recognition in Schools CALL Centre

Dragon NaturallySpeaking v.5 Session 10 Plan using speech recognition

Session 10 Plan using speech recognition for school work

In Session 10 the student will: ‰ ‰

Use speech recognition for another classwork exercise Discuss and plan how speech recognition will be used for school work from now on

Review Discuss how the last session went with the student and staff.

Complete the exercise from Session 9… If the last session did not work out, discuss why. Was it the task, something about NaturallySpeaking, or was the task not suited to dictation? Try to find a solution to any problems and repeat the activity.

Or start another one… If the last session was completed successfully, repeat the process for another piece of work. Carry out the preparation with the student - collecting the paper and files on disk, analysing any text, and doing and checking the work. If you have a scanner, try scanning in a simple worksheet, save it as a 'RTF' document, and then open it in NaturallySpeaking. Or, copy and paste the text into NaturallySpeaking. Then use NaturallySpeaking to read and complete the exercise.

Check accuracy Find a passage of text of 300 words or so (about 5 paragraphs). Start a new document, and then ask the student to dictate the text. Don’t correct any errors. Select the errors and mark them (underline, or make them bold) so you will be able to count them easily. Copy and paste the text into Microsoft Word, or another

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Introducing Speech Recognition in Schools CALL Centre

Dragon NaturallySpeaking v.5 Session 10 Plan using speech recognition

program that can count words. Click on Tools > Word Count in Word to count the number of words. Count the errors and divide by the total number of words to get an accuracy score: Accuracy = (Total number of words - Number of errors) Total number of words

For example, if you have 10 errors in 300 words, this gives an accuracy of 96.6%. Don’t count unknown words, or proper names as errors if they are not in the dictionary; a short phrase with a couple of errors counts as one error; and so does a word split into two words. Type the score in and save as StudentsSession10.

Plan how you will use speech recognition from now on Discuss how the student has found the speech recognition program and training. Some questions to consider are: 1. Will the student use speech recognition for school work from now on? 2. For which subjects and assignments? 3. Where will the student work – learning support base, library, ICT suite, classrooms? 4. Where will the student obtain printouts of work? 5. Will the student use speech recognition for homework – if a laptop computer is used, can the student take it home; or is there a home computer that can be used (some students in the project commented that it was very helpful to be able to practise dictation at home); 6. Does the student need access to speech recognition in several locations around the school? If so: x speak to the network or ICT coordinator or technician to discuss how the program can be made available on different computers. Remember you will need multiple licences to install it on several machines. Also note that the program saves the user’s voice file on the desktop computer, not the server, so you will either need a smart technician to copy voice files between computers, or buy Keystone Roamer (see Appendix 2); x or buy a laptop computer.

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