Recently had a teacher email me about using TextAloud with her students on StudyIsland. I knew I had hear of the site, but just couldn't place where, until I realized it was the same site my 5th grade daughter uses for some of her school studies. So, with the help of my 10 year old, we check out how TextAloud could make StudyIsland and other online sites like it talk. Turns out, it is really neat.
Many of the new products out there for students are done in HTML as online sites instead of the older traditional method of writing windows programs to provide the functionality. This has a lot of advantages:
- Works with any type of computer the student may have
- Allows for quick updates of the content without new downloads
- Makes management of users and licenses much easier
Because the content can be viewd and answered directly in Internet Explorer, TextAloud's built-in toolbar for IE makes listening to the text a snap. One of TextAloud's IE toolbar options, available with the little arrow just to the right of the speak button, is speak from cursor. With this option selected, a student simply double-clicks the first word in a question, then clicks the play button, and TextAloud will speak the question, highlighting each word as it is spoken. This listening while looking at each word as spoken, combined with TextAloud's ability to speak slower of faster to fit a students needs brings amazing capability to StudyIsland's great content.
Screenshot of this process in action is below:
A free trial version of TextAloud is available at
http://www.nextup.com/TextAloud
Site licenses and volume discounts are available to schools.
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