For students who struggle to get their thoughts down on paper, homework and other writing tasks can become a challenge. Issues such as dyslexia or dysgraphia, both of which make reading and spelling difficult, can make writing a complex and frustrating task.

While the challenges for these students may be greater than most, the ever-increasing availability of technology solutions offer these, and countless other students, creative ways for homework help.  Tools from iPads to speech recognition technology, where students can dictate homework assignments versus typing by hand, afford an opportunity to unleash student learning.

The Foothills Academy, based in Calgary, is just one example. According to Cathi Graveline, the Academy’s Assistive Technology Specialist, students as young as 8 years old are using Dragon and their iPads to dictate homework and classroom assignments, which is increasingly beneficial to the Academy’s population of students with Learning Disabilities, says Graveline.

“Students are experiencing increased independence, success and confidence, as Dragon helps to eliminate or minimize barriers that interfere with the writing process, such as spelling and handwriting. Dictating their work helps to free up cognitive space so that students don’t lose their thoughts and ideas while worrying about the mechanics of writing.”

Speech recognition solutions, like Dragon Home version 15, which we just released today, offer students of all ages and ranges a myriad of benefits over writing by hand.

• For those who struggle with getting thoughts down on paper, the ability to better articulate their ideas through their words provides a much more fluid and creative writing experience.  Instead of manually typing – or writing by hand, they can simply speak their thoughts out loud and watch their words appear on the screen as they dictate.
• Because high recognition accuracy goes together with today’s speech recognition solutions, users do not need to worry about how words are spelled. The vocabulary in these intelligent systems are very expansive – mitigating the need to worry about spelling altogether, delivering recognition accuracy of up to 99%.
• Because users speak instead of worrying about the manual process of typing itself, they are better able to capture thoughts down quickly – in fact, 3x faster. This free-flow of ideas offers the user the ability to speak their mind without thinking about the mechanics of typing.
• With new features, such as the ability to playback dictated content, editing becomes easier still. Users can ask the system to playback their dictated text and edit as they go for faster and more efficient proofreading.

While speech recognition and other tools students may use won’t eliminate the hours of homework they’ll have to complete throughout the school year, they can provide a better way to capture their thoughts in writing in a faster, easier and more creative way.

For more information on the all-new Dragon Home version 15, visit here.