Kurzweil

I am pretty excited about learning how to use Kurzweil, because it seems like it has a lot of applications for the various populations of students that I have worked with, from children who have ASD, children with intellectual disabilities,  children with learning disabilities, to children who have hearing impairments. All of the populations of students I have worked with want to be learning the same things their "typical" peers are learning, and technology like Kurzweil is one of the tools that will enable children who are unable to access  information from unaltered print to learn grade-level information.

Kurzweil is a text-to-speech software that enables teachers to upload texts to be read out loud to their students, at various speeds, and teachers can also supplement this text with bubble notes, footnotes, highlighting,  magnified text, directions, and teacher-recorded voice-notes. Students can also alter the text, by highlighting in different colors to enhance their comprehension and take notes in the document. Although it primarily reads documents out loud for students, it can also be used for children who a are hard of hearing because of the ability of a teacher to highlight and annotate and add bubble notes to text. Additionally, students can use Kurzweil to  type  their papers using word-prediction technology so that the actual task of writing is not so laborious that the children focus more on the production of the words, and not on the meaning of what they are writing. Also, Kurzweil will read back to students what they have written.

I think Kurzweil has potential for Jack, because of his limited working memory and fine motor difficulties. Jack can use Kurzweil to compose papers if typing papers is difficult for him, because of the word prediction function, and the bubblenotes, spoken note recording, and footnotes can help him organize his thoughts. Also, teachers can alter the text for it to be more comprehensible for Jack and they can help him interpret the material by adding notes and highlights to the text to help him isolate main ideas. Kurzweil can also be useful for Rebecca, because she reads far below grade level and can be aided by visual cues in her reading. Rebecca can have grade-level text read to her, and teachers can include definitions embedded in the text for words that she is unlikely to know. Also, Rebecca needs help comprehending what is being read to her, so Kurzweil notes can help her access teh meaning of the material, and predictive words and a word bank will help her compose papers, Kurzweil is also useful for Luke because he has dsylexia, and if his assignments are read to him, he can focus on the meaning and not expanding all of his energy on trying to access the written words.

I think Kurzweil could be great to use in one of the current classrooms that I am volunteering in, a room for students who have very limited mobility. Many of the students are quadriplegics, so a technology that could read the words to them, without them having to turn cumbersome pages, could be very useful