Dana

It’s new — but the next evolutionary step in a good line of technology products. Keep us posted!

We were going to get my daughter a laptop for this year, but the AT specialist wants us to wait - to which we agreed.

She called me a couple of weeks ago to tell us about the Dana and asked us to try it since “we were looking for something more than the AlphaSmart”. The Dana seems pretty good; however, it isn’t and will never be a laptop. It does has palm pilot features.

My OT said one of the other students in her graduate class was using it.

Currently my daughter uses draft builder, which has the auditory spellcheck (a godsend!) but what I would like is a situation where the text from the Dana could import into draft builder so she could check her spelling auditorily b4 she printed.

Oh well, I guess we’ll settle for this right now and see how it goes. I can always buy the laptop if it’s not meeting her needs.

The school is not willing to provide a laptop and are discouraging me from buying one for my daughter to use. I could probably fight them and get a lawyer (I work for one), but it’s really not that important, at least at this time. I think they are afraid if one student shows up with one they will get beseiged with requests. My biggest concern with the laptop is if someone steals it.

The Dana, as you may already know, has the to do list, the calendar, and several other features. It will be interesting to see if my daughter wants to use it - she got really tired of the AlphaSmart b/c of her experience with the computer. Plus the fct that with the computer you just hit “print” and that’s it, whereas with Dana and AlphaSmart you have the cables, etc. But the other features might be enough to keep her interest. Yeah, she’s pretty proficient with it. Types 25-30 wpm.

She used a computer in her gifted resource room last year (after a long, hard fight). It seems teachers are just not open to use of the computer, especially in elementary school. We’re going to try the Dana with an open mind. We’ll have to wait and see how it goes.

You don’t know pathetic. We went to orientation yesterday. I am so mad, I could spit nails. Fortunately, my calm, direct, rock of a husband was with me and prevented me from losing it. He stayed to talk with the principal, I took my daughter to tutoring.

We were supposed to have a computer for her use in both of her classes, i.e., gen ed and gifted. (She used these all of last year, however, she gets a new gifted teacher this year and she didn’t have a computer - how’s that for gifted - that’s another story) We discussed this at the IEP last May, I wrote a reminder letter in July asking them to contact us if there was any problem, and made two phone calls last week and this week regarding this issue. They assured me at the IEP meeting “not to worry” and that she would get her computers.

Well, of course, we arrived and guess what, no computers. To make a long story short, the principal states that “this was not my understanding of our discussion at the IEP meeting”. I was livid (good thing I wasn’t there)

My husband told the principal he would donate one of our home computers for my daughter’s EXCLUSIVE use in her gifted classroom. His response to fighting the school is “The bottom line is our daughter gets what she needs, even if we have to provide it”.

I plan to take a tape recorder to my next IEP meeting. Geez, what a mess. What really irks me is the fact that they had several opportunities to tell us there was a problem over the Summer and we would have donated the computer then and my daughter would have the computer ready for the lst day. They had the nerve to tell my husband he could meet a janitor at the school at 8-9 p.m. to let him in to install my daughter’s computer.

I feel like I don’t have a valid FAPE point, b/c she can do the work without the computer, but she is exhausted at the end of the day. It is not Necessary for her to have it to keep up, but to excel and not be exhausted, she needs it.

WHat a bunch of hooey!.

You might also want to send a little letter describing the expectations you’re agreeing on, including the steps you took to get that computer in place and your various contacts and the fact that despite the previous years’ use of computers, and their ‘assurances,’ that there was this little “misunderstanding” about them, and that you hope that they will work to communicate effectively wiht you throughout the year to avoid further unnecessary problems (maybe even suggest a monthly/quarterly meeting).

Honestly, I wasn’t that nice. .

I wrote a letter, told them “allow use of word processing/computer for writing assignments” was on her IEP and we’ve had an AT specialist attend IEP meetings since 2nd grade. They told me we are supposed to provide my daughter’s computer.

I said, “It appears we have a disagreement as to whose responsibility it is to provide appropriate technology for my daughter’s use in the public school system. Because of this “miscommunication” regarding who bears the responsibility to provide technology for my daughter’s use, we have decided to research this area and discuss this matter with some experts in the field of special education law. If, after research, we find that it is our responsibility to provide the “word processing/computer” that is addressed in her IEP, we will do so. If, however, we find that the school bears this responsibility, we will expect a computer to be provided immediately.”

I also told them that there would be no further miscommunications b/c we would be tape recording all future meetings. Told them we would contact them for a formal IEP meeting after research had concluded.

I cc’d the super for the district and the florida dept. of education. We are SO tired of getting the run around - it will be interesting to see their response.

Honestly, I think we both already know where the responsibility lies….

Why can’t you pour the text from the Dana into Draft Builder. Is this a Draft Builder limitation? The Dana just produces text files, so they sohould be readable by any text program.

I just talked to Alphasmart yesterday, though, and they told me that the Dana may or may not be ready for distribution by the start of school. The party line is that it will be, but the last new model didn’t come out until several months after it was expected to.

So I’m on the fence. I would like to have him start using SOMETHING day one. But it’s unlikely that we can have a Dana in our hands by then. He doesn’t like working on an Alphasmart… the screen is too small for him. So we’ll probably start him back to school with the Toshiba notebook that we have, and see how it works. The big disadvantage to a “really” computer is the slow boot time, and the short battery life. But I guess we just have to give it a try and see.

Karen

Hi Leah,

My understanding is that any program that will operate on a palm will operate on the Dana. I may very well get one for myself. I used to use a Palm, but as my eyesight has deteriorated, I find the tiny screen too hard to read. I
d also rather keyboard than write on the small screen, since I damaged my hand. We have a keyboard for the Palm, but it needs to be opened up and attached. It works well on a table top, but you can’t balance it on your lap, which is something I have to do pretty frequently. I was actually going to buy myself an Alphasmart last year, until I heard the Dana was coming out. I think for my purposes, this will be the most useful blending of both machines.

For my son, what appeals to me are it’s sturdiness, quick start up and long battery life. The low price tag doesn’t hurt either. When I was talking to the rep the other day, she told me that at one point while they were testing the Dane for durability, they were throwing Dana’s out a second floor window onto the parking lot. One of them hit her car and dented it, but still worked when then went down to retrieve it. I told her that if my son threw a keyboard out a second story window, I was throwing him out right after it! She told me that they are actually guaranteed to withstand a drop from 4’.

The Toshiba Portege that he’ll have to use until the Dana is available is a very nice machine, and extremely light weight. (under 3 lbs.) But it is not anywhere near that sturdy. But the biggest drawbacks are that it’s a “real” computer, with a substantial boot up time, and worst, has a fairly short battery life. If you’re lucky, you can get about 4 continuous hours of operation out of it. That’s probably just barely enough to get through a school day if he remembers to turn it off when he’s not using it. But those transition times are already the hardest part of his day, and to remember to either plug in the computer or shut it down will add to his problems. I think what will happen is that he’ll forget, and then it will leave him in the lurch when he needs it.

Karen

Karen,

If you bought a second battery and taught your son how to put it in, that would solve the battery time problem. That’s what we are doing with my son and his laptop. Also, if you put the computer into sleep or hibernate mode, it will stop draining the battery but boot up back to wherever you left off, without going through the whole start up process. Its a lot quicker. Some notebooks will do this automatically when you close the lid.

Andrea

We actually have a second battery. But they don’t hold a charge well, and they were expensive enough that we are reluctant to buy another. (we’ve had 3 batteries, and one got to the point that it was so poor at holding a charge that we chucked it) AND they need to be in the computer to recharge, and it takes a long time to charge them. So it is time intensive to get two batteries ready. I do it before I take it on a long flight, but even that’s a PITA. It is set up to hibernate, but the batteries don’t hold a charge even when they’re not hooked into the computer, so it’s not just an issue of the computer draining them.

I’m not surprised that there are notebooks with better battery life now… the Portege was one of the first of the real light-weights. But we own this one, and don’t want to go buy another at this point until we see, first, how the computer meshes with his needs, and second, what the Dana looks like when it finally hits the street.

Karen

I contacted alphasmart and they told me the Dana did not import into DraftBuilder. I don’t know why.

I got a call from the school yesterday (!) They told me the box for AT was not marked for this new year so therefore she didn’t qualify. I mailed another letter certified mail RRR today and will send a third one on Monday requesting another IEP meeting to address this, as per the advocate I talked to.

What a nightmare. THey count on you getting tired and just providing everything yourself. At this point, it’s the principle of the thing. It’s their responsibility, let them provide it. We are, however, putting our personal computer into her classroom until such time as we find out from the powers that be exactly where the responsibility lies. I don’t want my daughter penalized b/c of the problem.

We are thinking about a laptop for middle school, unless of course, the Dana meets all our wildest dreams - which I doubt. Of course, we’ll provide it ourselves, but as long as it meets her needs, I don’t care. If they would just find a way to get auditory spellcheck on it we’d be in business!

What about importing it into Notepad or Word and then and moving it from there to Draft Builder? If you can’t import Word doc’s into DraftBuilder, it’s not a very useful program!

Karen

I hadn’t thought of that Duh! I’m not so teckkie on the computer - that’s my husband and daughter. I’ll have him try it tonight.

I hadn’t thought of that Duh! I’m not so teckkie on the computer - that’s my husband and daughter. I’ll have him try it tonight.

I have read with interest this ongoing conversation about Dana. However, my daughter has just gotten the Alpha Smart from the BVR to assist with her work in college. It has certainly helped her with taking notes because she can type what is on the board and take notes and not have to worry about spelling. She is still trying to find the best solution to working with this program. Since there are so many files that she can keep notes in, I don’t see the need for the Dana, since it doesn’t have a sound card. When they come up with one with a sound card that can read downloaded MP3 or text like the “Daisy”, then they will have something! Until then the A;pha Smart has been very helpful for her…. Thanks for listening.

Just to add to the PDA discussion, I was surprised to learn that it is possible to purchase (for about $60) a floppy drive that will plug into a PDA. It seems to me that this makes a well-equipped PDA a very useful choice. They are very small and lightweight. The battery life is better than a laptop, but worse than an alphasmart. You buy add on keyboards, voice recorders and MP3 players. I’m not sure about whether a Palm OS PDA would run the Dana applications, but I’m guessing yes. We opted for a laptop for my son, but I seriously considered going with a PDA.

Andrea

The Alpha Smart is only one tool and that is one that is just beginning to show a benefit to her. She also carries a small tape recorder but hasn’t really used it much yet. Sometimes you need a mentor with you for a while to use some of this technology stuff!!!!

The most important piece of technology she uses is the text to speech technology from Freedom Scientific, WYNN (what you need now)! Without this she would not suceed, and I speak from experience. If she had this software before in her elementry and secondary school years, in her formative years, the benefits would have been unlimiting! Now she is playing catch up, and succeeding for the first time in 22 years.

WYNN works on your computer and assisted with a scanner to turn any text from a book, or any printed material and READS IT to her. She can also change voices, fonts, backgrounds, rates of speech, take notes written and voice, everything one needs to read a darn book, something we(I) take for granted. What would be most helpful is to have the ability to buy textbooks on CD or MP3 instead of hard bound, or in addition to; it would eliminate the time needed to scan (a few seconds) each page and turn it into text. Boy, we always want something more, don’t we! I am not complaining.

Wondering how old your child was when you went with the laptop? My daughter was just given a laptop for use in her gifted classroom (4th grade) by the district. She uses the Alphasmart and/or pen and pencil in the general ed classroom. The Dana has the palm features, organizer, calendar, etc., b/c she struggles greatly with organizational skills and which is why I wanted to upgrad to that and try it. Currently she doesn’t need the text reader, as she is reading at grade level. At home, for written homework she uses our computer for English and spelling. I am seeing the middle school years looming and am thinking about a laptop for those years. She will still not be able to take notes and listen at the same time. The AT specialist has already told me she will need a note taker. Also, we may get books on tape if she cannot handle the volume of reading necessary. Even if you read on grade level, if you read too slowly, you can’t finish.

I am one of those “planner” moms who likes to have the support in place before it’s needed.

Thanks, AA! You really have this stuff down. I’ve got a Visor Neo, made by Handspring, for which it is possible to purchase a voice recorder and MP3 player. It runs on the Palm OS. Like you though, I think a laptop offers more, if you can afford it and if you trust your kid not to lose it, break it, etc.

Andre

To try out the WYNN 3 software simply email [email protected] to request a free WYNN 30 day/30 hour CD. The CD includes sample files … so until your scanner is working … just open any of our sample files & enjoy all the tools WYNN 3 offers.

Peggy

Hi,
I am interested in speech recognition software for our daughter who is 10 and does not have “efficient” keyboarding skills. She used an alpha smarth with co-writer in 3rd grade and it was an improvement but too slowfor capturing her oral stories.

Our daughter is a great oral story teller and would like to capture some of her adventures in print but likes being independent, so having mom “word process” them is not the first choice. Does anyone have experience with digital tape recorders and/or speech recognition software. Thanks Vivian

Vivian, I have heard the voice recognition software is hard to train -honestly we haven’t tackled that yet.

Have you tried draft builder? I don’t know what your daughter’s weaknesses are, but my daughter (10 in Nov) is using draft builder and kidspiration with success. Kidspiration will allow her to put her ideas down, then click a button and they are in outline form, so all she has to do is correct and “spruce up” her thoughts. Draftbuilder has an auditory spellcheck, which is a lifesaver for us.

We just purchased voice recognition software for my 9 year old son. He had a week to train before school started and he’s into his second week of school. At this point, he’s only using the voice recognition software at home, because classroom background noise often makes it difficult for the computer to recognize the speaker’s speech, and the child talking in the classroom is often distracting to classmates. This has been successful for him so far, although he would like it to recognize his speech faster. It worked great for the summer reading project. It’s the most independent I’ve ever seen him. We’re still working on improving his accuracy, so that he doesn’t have so many corrections. Time does need to be spent training.

which program did you purchase? I have a 9 year old daughter who I just bought a tape recorder for so she could dictate and then type what she says (her ESE teacher suggested this). Just wondering what you got, for future reference.

We purchased L&H VoiceXpress Professional Version.

I haven’t heard of that one. WHere did you get it?

Amazon carries it, but we purchased it on Ebay. A much better price.

How difficult is it to dictate the voice model? We bought IBM ViaVoice and the required reading/dictating model was college level. It really disapointed me and my 10 yr. old. I wrote IBM and asked them if they had developed a voice model for kids and my email was politely sent off to the developers black hole.

I don’t remember that reading the voice training material for Dragon Naturally Speaking was too hard for my (then) 10 year old, but he was reading at a high school level at the time. (as an NLD kiddo, reading is not a problem area for him) OTOH, when I think about it, I doubt that my younger son, who will be 10 in December could have read the material, and he is on grade level with his reading.

But it didn’t help that my son had no problem reading the passages required… it still couldn’t make heads or tails of what he was saying.

Karen

Like Karen, my son also has NLD, and reads at least at a high school level. I would agree that the passages are at a college level. He is not pronouncing every word correctly when he is training, but the majority of them. However, the speech recognition is working for him. He did more training with it this weekend at his own initiative, and has used it more this week for homework. He’s getting more comfortable with it. He’s had the program for about a month and a half. It still makes funny and sometimes frustrating mistakes, but the more you use it the easier it gets.

I have used this software with one of my previous students, and after having that experience, I made sure to get the best microphone system we could. We bought a Plantronics microphone with a USB adaptor (I think I have the terms right), and I think that helps to improve the recognition. Getting the correct mic position is also important.

Also, what I did with my student who was not reading at high school/college level was that we would pause at each training page pre-read it together and than he would train the computer. Slow, but it did work better that way.

Great idea to write to IBM. The companies really do need to come up with training modules for kids. If they could also get the software to recognize a kid’s pitch along with an adult’s, I think kid’s would have a much easier time training. Certainly no perfect answers to this problem, yet, but the technology is getting closer.

Cathy

Hi
I posted a similiar message elsewhere on this board. I bought Dragon’s Speak Naturally for Windows XP and Via Voice for Macintosh this summer. I have a just turned 11 year old dyslexic daughter. Dragon product was hands down teh easier to train. My daughter was dictating emails with Speak Naturally after 2 voice training seesions and a couple of kid training sessions. Via Voice, I am sorry to report, is very frustrating to use. Reading passages are too difficult, software gets stuck a lot during the readign process, recognition is still lousy. We do not like Via Voice at all.

Dragons products manual discusses decreased accuracy using digital recorders attached to pda’s so it must be a common application. I’d take dragon speak with decreased accuracy over |viaVoice anyday.

By the way, I am an IT teacher and I found Via Voice’s setup/trianing frustrating.