My educational need that I was looking to meet was a way to allow for students to better understand the content that they are reading in the blended science program, particular students that are struggling readers and ESL students.
For my wicked problem of needing a good program that can read and translate text for students I actually chose 2 programs, White Smoke and Natural Reader. I chose these two programs because together they achieve my goal and offer both free and paid versions of the software.
I chose these programs enhance any student’s learning because they offer many different options for facilitating learning of content. These programs work with multiple types of students with multiple needs. For students with ESL needs White Smoke provides translations for all types of text including more complicated texts that can occur in high school courses. It also gives all students another way to proofread their work. Natural Reader in its free edition of the program offers a basic reader that works well with many text based programs such as Microsoft Word and Adobe.
Both of these programs help supplement teaching strategies that may already be in place in a lesson. They can enhance teaching strategies that involve reading text out loud to students. It will allow students to have materials read to them multiple times without a teacher or para-pro that would normally read text to them. It will also help students better analyze texts for content and for research purposes.
Overall, both of these programs enhance any student’s learning of content because they offer many different options for facilitating learning of content. While using these programs the learner will be able to experience material on more levels because of the options that both programs provide. It can enhance their experience by offering pronunciations of words that may be difficult and translation for ESL students they still are struggling with English.
At Union High School (where I currently teach) we get a lot of refugee students from Africa that speak French and a lot of Hispanic students that know very little English, these are the students I had in mind when trying to solve this problem. Feel that they will benefit the most intellectually because they will be able to understand the content even if their English isn’t the greatest. The other students I had in mind while trying to solve this problem are my struggling readers. Science curriculums are full of new vocabulary terms and words that may look and sound “weird” to an inexperienced student. Natural Reader can help both my ESL and struggling readers (and most of the time they are one in the same) with pronunciations.
Here is a link the screencast of the Prezi about my project.
Here is the Prezi itself.
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