One new tool that I have been using in my classroom recently is a Google add-on called speaked. As I mentioned in my previous blog post my students are currently working on writing opinion essays. One challenge that my students how often have with their writing is clarity. I often ask my students to whisper read their writing to themselves so that they can hear whether or not they're writing is portraying their ideas clearly. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, many of my students decide not to do this , and the quality of their writing is lowered. Speakd is an add-on for google docs which reads the writing in the google document out loud. Well editing and revising the last essay they wrote, my students used speakd to hear their writing read out loud to them. I found that many more students were willing to listen to their writing using the add-on then we're willing to read their writing to themselves. Many students told me that this helped them to improve the quality and clarity of their writing before turning in their final essays.
It did not take long to learn how to use this add-on as it is very simple to use. I realized that part of my students enthusiasm for using this tool was due to its novelty and that some of their enthusiasm might decrease in the future as it becomes more normalized in our classroom routine. One limitation of the tool is that the prosody of the reading done by speakd is very mechanical. As I am always encouraging my students to improve their reading prosody , I thought it was important to explain to my students that this was a writing to all and not an example of how they should read out loud. Other than that I thought that this add-on was an excellent addition to my students editing and revising tool bucket.
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April 2018
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