Group items tagged

This morning President Obama gave what I would call his 'We're-Going-to-the-Moon' speech at the 146th Annual Meeting of National Academy of the Sciences. Earlier today I wrote a post, Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity for Our Children, on a comment by Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan about the need to challenge the educational status quo. After listening to President Obama's speech, I realized it was a Part 2 to my earlier post so I retitled the post 'We're-Going-to-the-Moon:' Part 1 and titled this post Part 2. Please listen to the entire speech and read the full text, but here I quote the President's comments on STEM education.

In these visualizations, a given text-the "specimen"-is compared to some larger group of texts-the "normative" text-using the Dunning log likelihood statistical analysis, which gives weight to words in a text according to how their frequency of use in the specimen text differs from the norm. All visualizations feature a cloud that varies from gray to blue. In this cloud, the size of the word corresponds to the number of times the word was used in a given address. The word's color depends on how statistically unlikely the word is in the normative text; in other words, a blue word was used more in the given speech than in the others it is compared to.

Full Text of President Obama'a state of the union speech. Date: 02-24-2209

Weclome to SpeechWars, a great way to see what the candidates are saying. Simply type in a word, click "Go", and SpeechWars shows you how often the candidates used the word in their speeches. You can also compare two words by using both text boxes.

The United States Library of Congress has selected SpeechWars for inclusion in its official historic collections of Internet materials related to Election 2008. The United States Library of Congress preserves the Nation's cultural artifacts and provides enduring access to them. The Library's traditional functions, acquiring, cataloging, preserving and serving collection materials of historical importance to the Congress and to the American people to foster education and scholarship extend to digital materials, including Web sites. The Library will make this collection available to researchers. The Library's vision is to preserve these Web materials about Election 2008, and to permit researchers from across the world to access them.

Easy 10-Step Setup Guide for Text-to-Speech Conversion for Blogs

Create MP3 'text to speech' files from websites to 'read' on the go. The site makes an audio file using a voice synthesiser. Combine with a simple notepad site and add your own text to read anything you like. An email address is required. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Text to speech for free

Nice article at edweek about the informational texts versus great works of literature debate and what Common Core will do to lit. The one important, practical issue that all parties to this discussion MUST recognize - the classroom time is FINITE. Teachers would love to cover EVERYTHING but it just isn't practical. So, if one thing is emphasized over another, it may push something out. Unintended consequences are happening as people "align" their curriculum to common core standards. As all of the pundits and advocates argue this, it would be telling to sit down with an actual aligned curriculum to SEE what happens where the standards meet the lesson plans and what is actually pushed out - until then - it is all, rhetoric. Give us practical application, we're teachers, after all. From the edweek article: "Until recently, the closest we'd come to a major speech on the nonfiction-versus-fiction question was a piece in the Huffington Post by the English/language arts standards' co-authors, David Coleman and Sue Pimentel, insisting that literature "is not being left by the wayside." The message to rally the troops must have gone out, however. Because since the Coleman/Pimentel piece appeared, the common core's defenders have stepped up to counterbalance the literature-pushout crowd. The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation's Kathleen Porter-Magee, for instance, posted a piece arguing that it's a misinterpretation of the standards to say that teachers will have to teach less literature. In a recent email blast, the Foundation for Excellence in Education-led by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of the common core's biggest backers-declaimed the "misinformation flying around" about what will happen to literature under the common standards. "Contrary to reports," it said, "classic literature will not be lost with the implementation of the new standards." A glance at the standards' own suggested text lists, it noted, "reveals that the common core recognizes the importance of b

"Listen or download audio of 100 characters of text in many different languages. Perfect for language students engaged in self-directed study."

Speaks as you type

Podcast any electronic text to yourself for free with the world's best text to speech technology!

for the chrome browser.

An easy to use online dictation tool. Just speak and this site types the words for you. Requires Chrome. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

There' s a group here in Tassie gathering to learn this software- the video reveals an adaptable resource that automatically forms sentences with clearly audible speech, images and text simultaneously. Clicker is a writing-support tool for any subject area. Build sentences by selecting words, phrases and pictures; hear words spoken by realistic software speech before you write; and hear completed sentences spoken back to you!

A useful site that allows users to dictate and generate text. A great resource for children with writing difficulties to get their ideas written quickly. It works with a range of languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and more. For mistakes, the site offers alternative words with similar pronunciation. Only works with Chrome. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Apple app to make and publish beautiful interactive magazines and documents quickly and easily. It has a wide range of themes, fonts and you can add your own images. Students can type or use the speech-to-text function, which make it accessible for a wide range of abilities.

ReadTheWords.com is a free, web based service that assists people with written material. We do this by using TTS Technology, or Text To Speech Technology. Users of our service can generate a clear sounding audio file from almost any written material. We generate a voice that reads the words out loud, that you request us to read.

SpokenText.net allows you to record PDF, Word, plain text, PowerPoint files, ,RSS news feeds, emails and web pages, and converts them to speech automatically. You can download your recording as an iPod book or mp3 file.

Assistive communication software for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Includes text-to-speech voices, and 7,000 word vocabulary.