The human brain 🧠can recognize images in a matter of milliseconds, according to research at MIT. This information can be useful in helping students (and adults!) in quickly finding information by color and emojis in Google Drive. For example, science folders could be in green and social science folders could be in blue. An emoji of a microscope 🔬 could be added to the file name of the science folder and a globe 🌎 to the file name of the social science folder. Have an important file about organization? Add a file cabinet 🗄️ to it! These colors and pictures can help trigger memory in the blink of an eye đź‘€ when trying to locate files plus they add an element of fun! These strategies can help students organize their information in a way that they can quickly access later without the need to rely on text. Check out this video from Specialized Instructional Facilitator – Assistive Technology Jean Garrett to learn how to color code and add an emoji from emojipedia.org.
Monthly Archives: October 2021
Immersive Reader Integration into Nearpod
Nearpod is an interactive, multimedia presentation tool. Immersive Reader is an embedded feature created by Microsoft. Immersive Reader provides text to speech, text display options, syllable and parts of speech support, and more! Explore the integrated features that Immersive Reader provides by watching this brief video below.
Google Keep Voice Notes
Have an idea on the go? Don’t want to forget a task you just thought of? No time to type it all out? NO problem! Use the Voice Note feature in Google Keep! Voice notes taken on your phone are great, but then they just sit in an audio file, on your phone, until you put it to use or type it out somewhere else. Why not have Google Keep do that for you? With the Google Keep iOS app, you can record voice notes on the go and it will put that recording into a sticky note on your virtual wall. What is even better, is that it will translate your audio note into text, in the same “sticky” note! Prefer to jot down notes, but not type? You can also write out a note with your finger or stylus. Google Keep will put that into text as well. Then you can color code, move around, label, and search for your notes like usual. No more forgotten ideas!
Voice Note in Google Keep
Voice Note Listening in Google Keep
90 Different Languages for Voice Typing
You can use Voice Typing in Google Docs in 90 different languages! Students who are learning a new language can speak that language and see it instantly turn into spoken text! Here’s how it is done:
- Open a Google Doc
- Click on “Tools”
- Select “Voice Typing”. A microphone box will then appear.Â
- Use the dropdown menu above the microphone to select a different language.
To view the full list of languages available, check out the Google Voice Typing Support Page.Â
Three Ways to Use Text to Speech with Read&Write for Google Chrome
Click on the purple puzzle piece to install the Google extension Read&Write for Google Chrome.
Or click here for installation instructions in English
Or click here for installation instructions in Spanish.
- Click the play buttonÂ
to listen to text being read aloud in Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Forms, Google Sheets, Schoology, and the Chrome web browser. Try it now to listen to any text in this blog post! - In Google Meet, click the Hover Speech
 button to hear the text in the chat read aloud. Place the cursor over text in the chat…no need to click! - Do you see text within a picture? Use the Screenshot ReaderÂ
to draw a box around the text to have it read aloud. Try it with the text in the image below.