For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—
From Emily Dickinson's poem, The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
http://poemhunter.com/poem/the-brain-is-wider-than-the-sky/
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| photo: ssa, Stillwater, August 2011 |
UPDATE 2/28/12: Discovered that Dictionary.com starts charging for this voice-to-text feature after a limited number of uses. (They sell the feature in batches, 300 voice to text searches for 99 cents.)
iPod/iPhone/iPad and Android users: Dictionary.com has an app that allows voice-to-text entry. Your child can speak into the device and the entry will appear, correctly spelled, definition and all. (If your child has as much difficulty spelling as mine does, this may feel life-saving.) The apps also include audio pronunciation.
Voice-to-Text Experiment:
A quick, non-scientific test of the following 10 words resulted in 90 percent accuracy.
After two minutes finding and downloading the app (using an older iPhone 3GS), I spoke these words directly into the phone (no headset used).
auditory
falling
questions
dyslexia
(success)
successful
creativity
significant
actually
hope
The Dictionary.com app correctly pulled up nine of them. Ironically, the app failed to bring up the word "success." 90% accuracy? I can hardly wait to show this to my daughter!
Here are some other computer tools that I've heard about in the last few days.
We have not tried any of these yet.
Tools to Try:
Brainware Safari
"Award-winning BrainWare SAFARI builds 41 cognitive skills in 6 areas: Attention, Memory, Thinking, Visual Processing, Auditory Processing and Sensory Integration."--description from the website, http://www.mybrainware.com/who-we-help/parent/
"Because every brain is the result of uncountable reactions between us and environments, each brain is self-created and unique. While the parts of our brains specialize in certain kinds of tasks, we acquire skills to greater or lesser degrees. That means that each individual is likely to have some strong areas and some weaker areas among all the mental processes that make up our cognitive functioning."
--quoted from the Brainware website, http://www.mybrainware.com/who-we-help/parent/child-development/
To help with Math:
1) Timez Attack by Big Brainz (good for helping with multiplication facts)
(free and paid versions)
http://www.bigbrainz.com/
2) ALEKS (fee-based) Reading the "Success Stories" at ALEKS.COM (under the Independent Use section) made me think that we will be trying this one eventually. (It costs a lot less than paying a tutor.) The stories are listed by state--one child in New Jersey likes it so much that he begged his mom to allow him to pay for ALEKS himself.
Here is their description:
"What is ALEKS? Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces is a Web-based, artificially intelligent assessment and learning system. ALEKS uses adaptive questioning to quickly and accurately determine exactly what a student knows and doesn't know in a course. ALEKS then instructs the student on the topics she is most ready to learn. As a student works through a course, ALEKS periodically reassesses the student to ensure that topics learned are also retained. ALEKS courses are very complete in their topic coverage and ALEKS avoids multiple-choice questions. A student who shows a high level of mastery of an ALEKS course will be successful in the actual course she is taking.
ALEKS also provides the advantages of one-on-one instruction, 24/7, from virtually any Web-based computer for a fraction of the cost of a human tutor."
from ALEKS website, http://www.aleks.com/about_aleks
To help with Keyboarding:
Dance Mat Typing
(free, online, no download required)
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