Listening to Research as MP3 Files on Your iWhatever
by Samuel Sennott
I have been listening to PDF research articles converted to MP3 files on my iPhone on my early morning walk, in the car, and in the evening working out. As teachers of many kinds, we work hard serving our students. We work tirelessly preparing, teaching, caring, and assessing. Many of us are working on degrees at night and on the weekends(Ya Simmons AT). Do you ever resent that professional journal that comes in the mail? I really love sitting down and reading research in my interest area when I have the time and space. Yet, as my teaching interests call me deeper into my academic pursuits, I find myself facing a crunch. Leveraging knowledge of assistive learning technologies to benefit ourselves is very helpful.
There are many different software solutions for this task including:
- Kurzweil 3000
- Texthelp’s Read and Write Gold
- TextAloud
- iSpeak It
- iThomas (That’s when you get your friend to read it to you as your falling asleep)
I have been digging around for few weeks and finally found a free resource that is working quite nicely. Thank you very much spokentext.net .
This free resource has a decent sounding voice and is sent to you in your email in a timely manner. There is much to speak about this terrific Read/Write Web application. From busy parents receiving the newsletter as an MP3 attachment to a cool way to help kids access articles on the web to graduate students being able to read and incorporate those stereotypical five research articles for their review, this technology can help. What other applications do you use for this? Ideas for use?
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Hi Sam. Thanks for the reminder about this great resource. (When I went to register just now, I discovered that I was already registered!) This service has great potential for individuals with learning disabilities and reading challenges. I’ll probably do a blog post about it soon, and I’ll reference your post. Thanks again. –Paul
Paul, Right on. I think the readers of your blog would like to hear about that technology and that freeware in particular. -Sam
Sam,
Great to know about this resource. This is great for UDL – what benefits students with print disabilities (vision, LDs) benefits all of us.
Thanks once again for sharing all you are discovering!
Sam,
The link to spoken text needs to be changed – take out the www. – it didn’t work for me so I just typed in spokentext.net
Thanks Karen!
I use GhostReader by http://www.Assistiveware.com . I have my non-verbal kids use it to create podcasts. I even take it one step further and use picture symbols in OverlayMaker, send text to Ghostreader that converts it to MP3 files which are used to create podcasts. Fun stuff!!!
A more direct link to GhostReader
http://www.convenienceware.com/ghostreader.php
Mark. That is a right on idea about how AAC users can create podcasts. I definitely want to get the GhostReader. I will download the demo to check it out! Thanks for the idea. Are there any examples of that on the web to check out? I would love to share that next week in a presentation.
I have a video I made of a classroom of older students making a podcast using GhostReader. I will see if I can get that to you. Also, a nice feature of GhostReader is you can set a hotkey and have GhostReader read text in almost every document or the Web. You just put your cursor over the text and hit the hotkey and it reads it. Cool.
Great post Samuel!
You really summed up my site and its value to students, teachers and busy people.
You might be interested in our podcast features. Each member gets a personal podcast URL. We have been doing research around using an account for a whole class to share and also for students to share with each other. We also have the ability to easily add your recordings to your blog or website using Badges. This way you could record a file and then share it on the web page for your class.
Thanks again for the great post
Mark McKay
Designer/Developer of SpokenText.net
[...] I wrote a post covering online text to speech recording called Listening to Research as MP3 Files on Your iWhatever. Today, I got word of a very powerful tool of this genre called ReadTheWords. It not only is [...]