Text-to-Speech Editing

Text-to-Speech features are a great way for students to edit their work.  It allows the author to hear what was written and to adjust common errors that are often overlooked in spelling or word choice.  It is also handy to turn this feature on when reading other digital texts to provide extra reinforcement of the material.  The more senses one uses while learning, the better they remember the material.  There are several free downloads for text-to-speech applications, as well as built in programs in Windows and Mac.  The software is a great editing devise, however, it cannot catch all errors.  For instance, it does not catch missing quotation marks or capitalization errors.

I have never used text-to-speech as an editing process, but I have used it to read digital articles for me while I took notes.  This was handy as I was able to multitask and get finished sooner.  I feel this would benefit my students tremendously in their writing.  I see all sorts of errors in their writing that would be easily caught using this cool feature.

References:

Janowski, K. (n.d.). Free Text to Speech. Free Technology Toolkit for UDL in All Classrooms. Retrieved January 28, 2012, from udltechtoolkit.wikispaces.com/Free+text+to+speech

Murphy, N. (2011, July 14). Editing with Text to Speech | K23 Detectives.K23 Detectives | Home of the Fantasy Thriller. Retrieved January 28, 2012, from http://k23detectives.com/2011/07/04/editing-with-text-to-speech/