I’ve introduced several LD middle and high school students to Cowriter 4000 - a word prediciton program that can be customized for beginner to advanced writers. In extreme cases of written output need, voice recognition software (dragon dictate) has been helpful but it can be tedious to progam and work the kinks out. These programs have allowed students increased independence with writing and they were better able to keep up with the writing demands in 8th through 12th grades. Has anyone else had experience using these programs and were they helpful to you? Any other software?
Re: Software for written output needs
Draftbuilder and Inspiration are good for organizational issues.
We have had success with Dragon Speak Naturally. It does require one-on-one time and several hours of it to really be effective. but WOW. It is effective. Easy to use, easy to correct, goes right into Word.
On the other hand, I have not one good word to say about ViaVoice-ineffective, way too many errors, clumsy to fix errors, frustrating, expensive. Yuck all around! In my book, no comparision between the two. Unfortunately Dragon is not for Macintosh.
Be sure you use a good headset microphone with any speech recognition software. Makes a big difference.