Getting New Computer W/ Dragon Naturally Speaking Installed

Is this for you? What are you hoping to be able to do that is difficult for you to do now?
If you are in college, many schools offer assistive technology for their students with disabilities. Go to your Student Support center and try out the software first. The training doesn’t take long and you will get a sense of how it works and if it will be beneficial.
In addition, the recommendation among those who use DNS Preferred v.7.0 (the latest version) is that your computer have 512MH of RAM especially if you are running Windows XP.

Well it all depends. I think that the technology is not quite ready for prime time, but it certainly does work and depending on the person (certain factors a drive to train the thing, voice quality, free from allergies that effect voice and nasality, a really good reason to use it, etc.), people can do ok.

The reason I say it si not quite ready for prime time is that it is a bit of a pain to use with the training and keeping at the thing. A good reason to use it, as in carpal tunnel, very poor typing or typing speed, etc. helps as you will be motivated. Since you are out of teen age this will be helpful, since your voice has stabilized (probably), and you are less impulsive (probably). Go with it and let us know how you are doing.

—des

Dragon Naturally Speaking might be a good thing for many people including your 7th grader but I haven’t found it to work well. Weak readers such as your student often have difficulty with writing as well and in the ideal world, your student would be able to dictate his thoughts to Dragon Naturally Speaking and it would type for him.

In the real world, I just haven’t found the voice activation programs to work well but I’d be happy to be wrong about that.

Good luck.

Well though a 7th grade reading level isn’t all that bad. I’d say most written stuff is on a 7th grade reading level (or less)— though might have trouble with college texts that tend to be a bit thick. OTOH, I am inclined to agree that writing on the fly like that is hard for many people, not just weak readers.

Another possibility is a word prediction program. They predict a word based on the first (or more letters) and sentence structure. I used one for years. One of these is “CoWriter4000” which now has a nice feature which will correct your spelling if you spell phonetically, ie write “kunstrukshun” and it will spell out “construction” (not sure of that word, per se). There are others out there varying in price and complexity. They aren’t fast, but they are very good at easing up the typing/ writing.

—des

If it sppeds up the writing process this is good. I can write well it just takes a long time and is realy big. Does this program let you print and save your work? BTW my computer has Windows ME.

Teddy,
Since you write well, I would practice with DNS Version 7 Preferred or Professional. Did you try it at your college? If you have a diagnosed learning disability, your school should let you try it out at their support center for students with disabilities.
(My personal experience is that word prediction slows down many students - it’s especially good for students who need to limit their keystrokes and for younger writers).
Windows ME will probably be a problem as you need the most stable operating system available for DNS.
Does this help?

I am still in HS & we are getting a new computer. I don’t know the operating system name yet.

As it turns out my dad didn’t get that computer that has Draqgon on it. That’s OK though. can anybody explain the process of long division? My special ed math teacher is trying to teach me and I don’t understand it! :?

Oy, long difvision is a pain in the butt.

Think “Daddy, Mommy, Sister, Brother” for “Divide, Multiply, Subtract and Bring Down.”

That helps with the steps — but it’s awfully hard to describe or teach without seeing it ;)

I’ll be posting a thorough article on the speak-to-type stuff … maybe tonight but if I don’t get to it it’ll be after THanksgiving. This is from a guy who’s worked with it with a lot of people (a federally funded grant thing) — the gist of it is that you definitely want the higher-end software, and a good computer with lots of memory, and then be willing to train it and, even more importantly, for the first few hours of things you write after that, be really meticulous with training the computer on your corrections — but that after those few hours, especially if you are a pretty good writer but it’s your handwriting that’s the problem —it can just be awesome. Ask at school if you can be a guinea pig, if you think it would be worth it. A lot of people, though, prefer typing to speaking because that’s enough easier and faster than writng.

Oh, and by the way, lots of the folks that I tutor don’t do well with long division and they’re in college. You actually *can* get along without it & pass college math… but if you don’t know your times tables, they’re worth learning for things like factoring and fractions. (If there’s a computer at school there’s practice online and maybe you could do that as an independent project if you don’t know ‘em yet).