Text to speech

 

There is some really bad text to speech  out there and the upshot will be that people will abandon whatever it is using  a bad voice synthesiser. You get it on news clips, how to clips, automated phone messages. It is awful. Digital voices are as unique as human voices so I am not sure why they seem to pick the most annoying and horrible ones for public consumption. There are some reasonable voices out there and they are improving all the time. Text to speech does have its uses especially in terms of accessibility , literacy and mastering a new language. The video clip gives you some ideas as to how to manage text to speech effectively and this clip on another text to speech option shows you too how effective it can be. The tip from both clips is to try the different options to get the best one for your purposes.

Keep calm and use technology

Technology helps you problem solve

This is a follow up to the last post so you can see how we finished. I didn’t quite finish how I said I would in the post, but we ended up on a learning high. I added a slide to my presentation with 5 different ways to ask for something in a shop. We practised those at the beginning of the lesson and they could say them really well. I went through my slide presentation of one sentence of the conversation at a time in big writing on a colourful background and they could say the sentences and they knew what they meant. I played the recorded version of the conversation and moved the slides forward one at a time as we heard each line. I put up a screen shot of just the conversation from the book which I had shown them last Thursday and which they had found too hard to understand and too hard to tackle. We had a little chat about how that had been hard and how we now could do it. We had 15 minutes on our language learning site on our iPads learning the vocabulary list I had made them from this conversation. 100% focus. I can check the participation rates and scores on the language learning site. They all got themselves into the 80% accuracy or more in that 15 minutes. They loved seeing that on the board. We had evidence they could learn. They then had 30 minutes to do their own version of the conversation. It is quite complex for year 9s. After 30 minutes they were ready to do the partner presentations and they did well. They did not falter over saying it and they did not hesitate. Technology had allowed them to master something difficult and we are now ready to branch out into another conversation which they can record. When I get stuck like that in class I do move on until I have replanned the delivery of my lesson. I can fast forward and skip that bit but I don’t think it helps if you ignore a learning block. My job then is to look at what apps, tools, sounds and images I have to master the content. How can I break it down? How can I reinforce it? How can I get students to take on the content in a way they feel in charge? They know from game playing they sometimes have to go back and start again. They know from game playing they need talismans, energy, cheats, repetition to get to the next level. They could not master the level as I presented it to them. It made no sense, so what I did was a game walk-through using a slide presentation to hold a narrow focus, oral activity to increase engagement, learning site vocabulary which trained them in pronunciation and meaning and then a complete run through of the level from start to finish so they had evidence they knew it all. We have so many resource choices these days. We need to make good use of the options to scaffold learning and inspire confidence.

Keep calm and use technology

Use technology to problem solve

Image : ClipartPanda

It was the lesson after lunch last Thursday with the year 9s. We had been practising shopping and what to buy in different shops . I then put a conversation from their book up on the board and said I’d give them 15 minutes to look things up they didn’t understand. About 5 minutes into this it was clear they could not do it. First time for everything. This conversation has always come after the other things and been straightforward. Not last week. The students were simply baffled and unable to get a hook into it. It was the last lesson of the week. I did not want them going home for a weekend and thinking French was hard and horrible. We then spent the rest of the lesson learning numbers and shopping vocabulary on their language learning site. Perfect. I had the weekend to solve the problem. I could just leave it. Skip over the conversation and move onto something else. We have the whole French language to learn. Not hard finding something else. No, I decided I would use technology to present the material differently. I set the conversation up one line at a time on Powerpoint slides. Big writing. Dark text on a colourful background. Monday last lesson I started with this. We did the conversation one line at a time. We pronounced it. We worked it out. So far, so good. I had made a list of 40 words of the conversation and put it on their language learning site. They loved it. They spent 20 minutes getting to grips with the vocabulary and were learning it quite quickly. There was a lot for year 9s to learn. We stopped. I put the original conversation up on the board and I played the sound file of it. All eyes were on the board following the conversation. We then went back to our language learning site to do more vocab practice on it. No feeling of failure. No confusion. No disenchantment. I used technology to get them into learning something they had found incomprehensible. Now, next lesson, I can play the conversation, I can get a couple of students to read it out and then we can do our own version of the conversation. Familiarity does not breed contempt. It breeds success. If you are on familiar ground you will take the risks necessary to learn a bit more and push yourself a bit more. These students could have felt like failures but using technology allowed me to refresh and repeat in a way they could understand. I now have a PowerPoint I can dress up even more and make an even better learning tool. Students who were born in 2000 and after like interactive learning. I am learning I have to become part of that as a teacher.