Initial Trial of Voice Typing

Soon after researching the effectiveness of voice dictation I decided to introduce it to my Year 11 PE class. As majority of the class were in favour of using 'voice typing' it was time to see if students could manage using the tool effectively. I gave them a quick demonstration and then let them experiment with the tool. The aim of the lesson was to become familiar with using the 'voice typing' tool so there were no problems when it came to using it for their assessment.

Below is an example of me using the 'voice typing' tool.

At the conclusion of this lesson I knew it was going to take some time for students to become familiar with using 'voice typing.' Like every new tool that is used, it does take time to adjust to the basic functioning and this was no different to my students. 

Innovation Research

Due to majority of students being in favour of using 'Voice Typing,' I wanted to find out more information about the tool. While researching I realised that the tool was in it's initial stages and had only recently been developed. Google had released numerous voice typing/dictation extensions that could be used on a google document, but due to poor functionality a lot of people voiced their frustrations while using these tools. However, Google's Voice Typing has recently been added as an available tool within a document and can easily be accessed by anyone. Due to the tool being in it's trial phase, I decided to research how effective voice dictation/activation had been.

 

Speech recognition has been available for many years but due to better functionality, people are choosing to use the tool more frequently. 

With built-in software on smartphones and better functioning microphones on devices, more and more people are actively using voice commands. With the absence of keyboards and relative ease of communicating, people find the convenience of talking to a device a lot easier than typing. This is no different to what I have observed from my students. They are orally capable but struggle to put their thoughts down on paper/documents. For them talking is a far more natural way of communicating, as pinpointed by the quote above. Therefore I believe that using voice typing as a tool while I scaffold questions, would be a good way of capturing evidence for their assessments.