Five winning stories will be selected by a panel of judges, and the winning entrants will each receive an Amazon Kindle 2 as well as Dragon NaturallySpeaking upgrades for three years.
I've been a public school teacher for fourteen years. I teach reading and writing to 100 students every year, and it is a daunting task to say the least. When I assign a two-page written assignment, I have suddenly given myself 200 pages to read and on which to comment. I am a firm believer in practice. Students need to write if they want to get better, just like they need practice playing the piano or stay after practice to shoot free throws if they want to improve their performance. Writing is no different. It's my firm belief that EVERY student can learn to write...that every student can get better and feel successful as a writer.
But the practice that they get must be accompanied by teacher feedback...specific, detailed feedback. And therein lies the problem. In the past, I would be forced to make just a few comments here and there in the margins of the pieces that my students had written. The comments that I made were difficult to track, too. After making the comments on the students' work, I would need to create another document where I recorded all of my observations. This process doubled my work, making me a less-effective educator. My frustration level was rising every year. How could I streamline this process and help my kids be better readers and writers?
Enter Naturally Speaking!
A colleague and I discussed the possibility of using voice recognition software to speed the commenting process along. I found Naturally Speaking at a local office supply retailer, and half an hour later I was connected to my PC and creating Microsoft Word documents simply by speaking. It was incredible to be able to bypass my awkward typing skills and to be able to create such lengthy documents in a fraction of the time it would normally take.
With my new program in place, I dove head-first into the new school year, assigning my kids more writing than I ever had in the past. When the kids submitted their projects, I sat at my desk reading their work, and then I simply spoke into my microphone and gave my thoughts and suggestions. Aside from making about TEN TIMES the number of comments that I had made before using Naturally Speaking, I realized that there were even greater benefits to using the program. The first and most surprising thing that I noticed about my new commenting procedure was that my own personal teacher voice was much more evident in my comments. Why is that a benefit to the kids? The comments sounded friendlier...they sounded like a conversation that you would have with a friend rather than a teacher's observations. I also found that since the physical effort of typing was removed from the process, I was much more likely to quote pieces of the students' work in my comments and then to use those quoted passages to make my observations more concrete. Finally, another enormous benefit of using Naturally Speaking was that each set of comments that I made and saved on my computer became a detailed running record of every student's progress across the entire year. During conferences with the students, I could pull up my old comments and use those as the guidelines for how I wanted each child to progress with his or her writing. There was a detailed record of the strengths and weaknesses for each child. It makes the challenging process of learning to read and write more concrete...more fact-based. These extensive comments have removed the mystery from reading and writing and have empowered kids to make real improvements that they can see. They report feeling better about reading and writing than they have in the past, and that improvement in their attitude has paved the way for further growth.
I can't say enough about what Naturally Speaking has done for my teaching, and I can say with certainty that this program will be an important part of my teaching for years to come. Thanks, Dragon, for helping teachers help kids to realize their potential!