Voice Search enables you to use voice recognition to search just about anywhere online for almost anything.  To activate Voice Search, after visiting the Chrome Web Store and installing it, you click on the mic icon that installs on the extension bar just to the right of Chrome’s address bar.

This brings up a second microphone icon that must be clicked. The dropdown menu beside the mic, lists where you can search, but you don’t need to select this with the mouse.  If you wish, you can simply say where you want to search before saying the search topic.  The list of search engines is customizable via the extension options.  Options for Google Chrome extensions are accessed by right-clicking on the icon in the extension bar.

I’ve tested ‘Voice Search’ with the built-in mic on my Toshiba Tecra r700, and it has worked remarkably well.  I’ve been especially impressed by how well it has recognized relatively obscure search terms such as “Comox Valley”, where I live now, and “Mussoorie, India”, where I have lived in the past.

Here’s a video that does a great job of demonstrating the power of ‘Voice Search’ with a wide range of voices–male, female, child, adult….

It is worth noting that one of the settings in the Voice Search options is to add a speech input button (the mic icon) to all text boxes.  This works in relatively small text boxes, but not in larger text fields. For example, I was able to use voice recognition to input the title of this blog post, but I am not able to use it to dictate the content of the post.

It is also important to note a caution about Voice Search that is clearly stated in the Chrome Web Store:  ”This extension can access your data on all websites.”  I think this means that you probably will not want to use Voice Search when doing your online banking.

Speakit! is an extension that provides effective text-to-speech for selected text on any web page.  There are three ways to activate Speakit! and have it read the selected text

• Click on the icon that installs to the right of the address bar, near the top right corner of the screen.

• Use the context-menu by right-clicking the mouse

• Use a customizable keyboard shortcut.  By default this is ctrl + shift + s

Note:  Right-clicking on the Speakit! icon allows you to open an ‘Options’ menu in order to customize the keyboard shortcut or to make sure that Speakit! is enabled in the context menu.

Speakit! automatically detects and provides text-to-speech for all languages supported by Google, with the exception of Bulgarian, Japanese, and Arabic.

My dad, my son, and my grandson!

It has been way too long since my last post!  There are many reasons, but the biggest is really something quite wonderful.  I have new lenses in both eyes, and this has restored the fabulous long distance vision of my youth.  I’ve been tempted to say “…it was just cataract surgery”, but that would not be accurate.  It was an example of the many miracles of modern medical science.

There was, however, a price to be paid.  For more than three months–from the time of the surgery in my first eye, until I finally received a new set of prescription progressive glasses–there was constant strain in looking from computer screen, to paper pages, to people and back again.  The weariness never seemed to go away, and it was almost more than I could do to keep pace with the essential responsibilities of my day job.  So, I haven’t been blogging.

For what feels like my first post ever, I’ve decided to reflect just a little about fathers, and especially about my own dad.  This is an ‘edublog’, but I believe it’s imperative never to lose sight of the reality that education is supposed to be about far more than school!  When it comes to learning, families matter on many levels.

We’ll celebrate Father’s Day tomorrow in Canada.  I’m the proud father of two adult children.  Our daughter Anjali made me proud in a fresh way this week, as she flew from Vancouver to London, en route to a three month stint as a volunteer nurse on the ‘Africa Mercy‘, a hospital ship currently docked in Freetown, Sierra Leone.  This coming Tuesday, my son Aaron will be going out of his way to visit my dad, who lives 3000 km away from Aaron’s home here on Vancover Island.  That makes me proud, too.

We don’t choose our parents, but I am blessed to have a truly wonderful father.  My dad was a minister who went to his first church two weeks before my birth.  He has always modeled authenticity and integrity, living through the week what he preached on Sunday.  I have learned much of incalculable value from my dad’s example.

As  a boy, I learned much about our world from his answers to my questions.  On the verge of my own 60th birthday, there are still so many things I know because “that’s what my dad said when I was a boy.”  He was a veritable fountain of knowledge–about history, about how things like electric motors work, about how crops grow, about the reasons for seasons, and about countless other stuff.

Dad was always there for me, and I knew that, whether I wanted him to be there or not.  He never imposed himself on me, but I could always count on him to be there.  He was even there when I attended boarding school a thousand miles from him and our home in Calcutta, as I did for 10 years from the age of 7.  Without fail, dad wrote me a letter every single week that we were apart.  He wrote individual letters to each of his four children!

I could go on for a long time and never say it all.  Suffice it to say that my dad deserves to be honored, and I’m glad Father’s Day has brought this into focus again.  Here’s a video that I put together on the occasion of Dad’s 80th birthday in  2008.  I made the video with exerts from Dad’s own 8mm cinematography between 1952 and 1972–in Southern Ontario, in rural West Bengal, and in the Himalayan foothills.  The focus is sometimes pretty soft, but the film helps to keep the memories bright and warm.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.  And thanks for being who you are.  I could never have asked for anything more!

I wrote recently about Google’s new option for searching by reading level; and now I’ve discovered another option that is perhaps even easier to use.

Twurdy is a search engine (powered by Google) that indicates the reading level of each page in a search result. Pages are given a reading level score, and results are color coded to make it easy for a user to recognize which results are likely to be most helpful.

Twurdy’s goal is to provide web searchers with information that is most appropriate for them. This will mean that 10 year olds doing school assignments don’t have to click through difficult material to find something they can use. It will also mean that phd students do not have to click through websites designed for kids in order to find what they are looking for.

Here are the first four results of a search for ‘Vancouver Island Geography’.   Predictably, the Wikipedia article yields a higher reading level than the other 3 results.

I’ve long been fond of Voki, but I’ve never written about it here.  With the advent of ‘Voki for Education‘, I think it’s time to change that. The avatar in the Voki above illustrates the potential of Voki’s “talking animations” very well. [I found this Voki more than 2 years ago. Unfortunately, I don't know who the author is  If you can help, please do so.  I'd like to ask for retroactive permission/give credit/take it down/whatever the author wishes!]

Voki is a versatile and engaging free application that anyone can use to create customized talking avatars that may be embedded anywhere. What the avatar says can be entered as text and spoken by a text-to-speech engine.  It can be a recording of the user’s own voice that is recorded with a mic or even phoned in. Or, the avatar’s speech (or maybe even song) can be uploaded as an audio file.  The avatar itself can be personalized, clothed and accessorized in all manner of ways

There is no end to the possibilities, when it comes to possible uses of Voki in education.  Now the people behind Voki are eager to help.  They are offering a repository of lesson plans.  Vokis can be embedded anywhere.  Teachers can use them effectively to share information.  Learners can use them as a vehicle for creative expression or to show what they know.

]]> http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2011/02/24/voki-talking-avatars-for-education/feed/ 0 http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2011/02/22/microsoft-mathematics-add-in-for-word-and-onenote/ http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2011/02/22/microsoft-mathematics-add-in-for-word-and-onenote/#comments Tue, 22 Feb 2011 16:54:53 +0000 Paul Hamilton http://paulhami.edublogs.org/?p=3081 Continue reading →]]> [Please also see a related post that I wrote about this on December 28, 2011.]

Until recently, an autistic eighth grader I support had never handed in a math assignment that he had completed for himself.  It had always been necessary for an educational assistant to write out his math work for him.   Everything changed for this young man when we introduced him to ‘Equation Editor’.  Within a very short time, this learner was not only completing assigned math work for himself, he was eager to do so!

Equation Editor has been part of MS Word for a long time.  I believe it has been present in every version since Word 97.  Equation Editor enables the user to enter mathematical expressions right in the word processor, with all the required notation and symbols.  I think this is huge!  It really resonates on a personal level.  As a high school math student, I would erase my work until there were holes in my paper without ever making it neat enough to satisfy my teachers.

Unfortunately, the presence of Equation Editor has never been obvious.  As a result it seems to have remained relatively unknown.  I have assembled resources for installing icons on Word toolbars to make Equation Editor available in Word 2003 and Word 2007.

A few days ago, I had my first look at MS Word 2010.  One of the first things I looked for was Equation Editor, and I was disappointed.  Mathematical symbols are still available, but my initial exploration suggests they are not nearly as convenient to access as they had been in Word 2007.  (In my opinion, Equation Editor had also been far more robust in Word 2003 than in Word 2007!)

The long introduction above brings us at last to Microsoft Mathematics Add-in for Word and OneNote.  This is an add-in that installs directly into Word 2007 or 2010.  It adds a Math tab, and it more than makes up for any deficiencies of Equation Editor in Word 2007.  The math ribbon that is added is shown immediately above.

Perhaps the most helpful additional feature of the new Math add-in is that it will plot 2-D graphs in Cartesian and polar coordinates, as well as 3-D graphs in Cartesian, cylindrical, and spherical coordinates!

With the click of a button, Readability removes advertising, sidebars and other distracting clutter from webpages. Content is presented in a style chosen by the reader, with preferred font size, margin-width, and contrast. I’ve shared no other application with educators that has drawn more emphatic exclamations of amazement and appreciation.

Last week I was redirected to Readability’s new website.  Readability has incorporated two impressive new features–the option of saving modified web content to read later, and the opportunity to use readability on mobile devices.  For users who want to take advantage of the new features, Readability has moved to a subscription model, with a minimum monthly fee of $5.

[Readability will be paying 70% of revenue generated by its fees directly to the publishers and content creators of sites in a subscriber's reading list.   I'm not sure what to think of this, but it's an innovation that deserves further examination!]

At first glance, it looked as though the free application had been completely replaced by  the paid subscription service.  Some poking around, however, revealed that the original tool remains available without charge via a Firefox add-on. As well, the app can still be activated by bookmarklets in multiple browsers.

In actual fact, the free Readability tool has been refined and improved. The controls that adjust style, font size, margin width and contrast are now right on the modified page, and activated by slider bars.

The link to the Bookmarklet Page is found on Readability’s FAQ page.  The link to Readability’s Firefox add-on is at the very bottom of the new home page.

Readability – Enjoy Reading, Support Writing from Arc90 on Vimeo.

Qwiki‘s stated goal is to “…forever improve the way people experience information.“  Although Qwiki is still under development, I think they’re off to a great start!  There is nothing unusual about Qwiki’s search box.  It’s the multi-modal way in which search results are presented that is truly exceptional.

In response to a query,  Qwiki presents a slide show of related images, along with text that is read aloud in a high quality voice by a text-to-speech engine.  The slide show and scrolling text can be paused, and the source of an image is revealed by rolling the cursor over it.

When a ‘Qwiki’ ends, you are offered links to Qwikis about related subjects. There are also links to articles on the same topic in Wikipedia, Fotopedia, and Youtube, along with Google search results for the term.

Clicking on the ‘Contents’ tab of a Qwiki yields yet another way of accessing the information.  The text of the article is displayed next to the related images.  A convenient option for printing the article is available as well.  Qwiki articles can be embedded elsewhere, or shared via Facebook or Twitter.

Check out the Qwiki of the Himalayas that I’ve embedded below.

A screen reader is controlled by the keyboard via keyboard commands.  It uses text-to-speech to read what is on the computer screen; and it is text-to-speech that enables the blind user to navigate and know precisely where he or she is on the computer at any given moment.

WebAnywhere is a screen reader that has been developed to provide access to web pages.  It does not facilitate access to computer applications that are not online.  The beauty of WebAnywhere is that it is web based. This means there is nothing to install, and that it can be used on any computer–Mac, PC, or Linux.  It will even work on a networked or locked down computer where the user does not have administrative rights.

To activate WebAnywhere, simply click on the link below, or enter the URL in your address bar wa.cs.washington.edu

The WebAnywhere user can easily choose what he or she wants to read on a web page by using a simple set of keyboard commands.  There are other text-to-speech options for  web pages, but I believe that WebAnywhere is an excellent option for anyone who relies heavily on text-to-speech for any reason.

The developers indicate that WebAnywhere works best with the latest version of Flash, but that it will also work with Windows Media Player or Quicktime.  This means that WebAnywhere can be used on handheld devices that are without flash.

fotopedia defines itself as a ‘collaborative photo encyclolpedia’.  At present, there are 44, 764 articles illustrated by 661, 750 photos.  Registration is free, and any registered member can create articles and/or nominate photos to illustrate articles.  Additional information is from Wikipedia and Google Maps.

The quality of images on fotopedia is excellent.  That’s because you can only nominate photos to illustrate articles.  An image must receive 5 votes of affirmation before being fully accepted for the article.  Photos can be uploaded from your computer, or imported directly from Flickr.

A desktop client (Mac and PC) is available to download so you can have fotopedia available on your computer’s desktop. You can also use a customizable widget to  embed slide-shows of fotopedia images.  I’ve illustrated this below with a slidewhow of the images that accompany the article on India.