Day 6

I had to play a bit of catch up today as I needed to watch the Kurzweil videos.  I was really impressed with how it works.  I have never used Kurzweil, in fact, I had never heard of it before last week.  There are a huge number of features that seem to make it user friendly.  Firstly, the interaction between the student and the reading document is so important.  If you’re dealing with a reluctant reader there is a lot of different options that you and he/she can look at using within the program. 

I thought the translation function was interesting, would be great for ESL students.  When I initially heard about having to pre-set the document with the image links I thought that it was a whole lot of extra work.  I soon realized that anything you do as a teacher requires a whole lot of work to begin with – be it a lesson plan, classroom activity; however, after you’ve done it once you have the document and can then use it again, or alter it slightly. 

An excellent feature of Kurzweil is the definition option.  If a word is not understood you can click on the word and get the meaning right away.  I can imagine that a huge turn-off for reluctant readers is the fact that they may not understand a lot of what they’re actually reading.  This seems like a great tool where they can simply click a button to get a definition, as opposed to the big hulking dictionary!

Some of the features, like the ability to drag text reminded me of Notebook software.  I use that program fairly regularly for quick little classroom activities, that connects word with definitions, or main points and topics, etc. 

I didn’t use my ipod too much today.  I did have it docked and the music going for a while.  The main usage was to use  Webmd, to try and figure out what’s wrong with my young fella.  He’s not feeling well.  No luck, hopefully he feels better tomorrow!