LearnShifting

I have purchased Dragon naturally speaking in the past and spent time training the software to recognise my voice which it did a reasonable job of. When I first purchased the product it cost quite a few hundred dollars, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw it for free on the Apple app store. It is called Dragon Dictate and a company called Nuance owns it.

Naturally I downloaded it and tried it out. It did a wonderful job and if you inject words like "full stop" "new paragraph" it will carry out those formatting commands for you.

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This entry was posted on September 15, 2011 at 6:34 AM and has received 408 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

Quizlet.com is a cool tool that allows you to create flashcards, quizzes and learning games for free. You can of course get the plus version which costs a little, but there are some great things to note about Quizlet. Thanks to Roxanne and her son's teacher for finding and using this tool.

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This entry was posted on February 28, 2011 at 11:55 AM and has received 654 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Someone asked me today how to spell check in Moodle, our Learning Management System.

I have been using a spelling solution (sometimes) in my blog which can be used in any web page solution.

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This entry was posted on June 2, 2010 at 4:32 PM and has received 337 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

This article is taken from http://www.openculture.com which contains fantastic open source resources for you, me and our kids. By way of example, it was World Water Day the other day which I only knew because there was an offer by government to subsidise the purchase of rainwater tanks. Now,  if you go to http://www.openculture.com/2010/03/our_thirsty_world_a_free_national_geographic_download.html there is a free resource available until April 2 on the subject.

At a conference last year, over one third of the participants had an iPhone. Half my nieces and nephews have an iPhone. Half the people in the lift at work who want to avoid i-contact, look at their iPhone... so here is the borrowed article...

Since the release of the iPhone App Store, numerous sources have commented on the potential of educational apps. While these apps can’t compete with the general popularity of gaming and leisure apps, there are a number of educational apps that mobile learners will find handy.

Continue on to view the top free iPhone apps for education.

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This entry was posted on March 26, 2010 at 5:39 AM and has received 436 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

I had a request the other day from one of our teachers who couldn't get Japanese to appear in Adobe Connect after it had been created successfully using Adobe Presenter. The answer is here http://ourcomms.ntschools.net/japanesetest but I have to share with you that it was troublesome to set up for testing...

One machine I used had a licensed version of Adobe Presenter but I couldn't install the Japanese fonts because I didn't have the Windows XP disk and didn't want to go hunting through the Microsoft website for the required files. The other machine had the Chinese and Japanese language packs and Input Method Editors installed but no Adobe Presenter. I chose that machine as it was easy to re-download a trial of Adobe Presenter. Now I don't know if this is policy at Adobe, but the three patches to Adobe Presenter 7.0, namely 7.01, 7.02 and of course 7.05 have all been around since August 19 last year, but when I downloaded from Adobe my trial of Adobe Presenter - it was still 7.0 which meant that I still had to apply the three patches to make more font and language friendly.

Having said that, once all the bits were installed (and the process is demonstrated in the adobe connect/ adobe presenter presentation in the hyperlink above) - it all worked wonderfully.

So, as a wrap up it is fair to say that if I, as a Chinese speaking IT professional felt that I had to jump through a few hoops to make this work - no wonder teachers are encountering challenges.

This entry was posted on February 22, 2010 at 1:02 AM and has received 336 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

http://yyy.sederet.com/ Indonesian Dictionary - My brother Grant recommended this one.

www.nciku.com Chinese dictionary and training site (I love this one)

Please comment and leave your favourite dictionary (Japanese and Spanish dictionaries?)

This entry was posted on August 18, 2009 at 12:13 PM and has received 276 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.