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All right. Hello, everybody. Welcome to our last iPad app webinar of the year. We've shown
a lot this year. And today, we're going to look at a couple of apps from some pretty
well-known companies in the software side of things and take a look at what they do.
We're going to look at Texthelp's iReadWrite, which is supposed to be similar to Read and
Write Gold. And we're also going to look at Kurzweil's Firefly, which is their answer
to an app for what they're doing there.
We'll start with iReadWrite from Texthelp here. This is an app that costs $19.99. It
doesn't need internet access to run, and it bills itself as helping benefit struggling
readers and writers.
So I'll go ahead and open that up. And what we're going to see is that it's going to show
us that it helps with struggling -- we're going to start this over because it still
hasn't even opened. This is way behind. It's still -- I opened it, and then it's sitting
here, and it still hasn't opened. We have to stop the recording.
Well, hi, everybody. Welcome to our final app webinar of the school year. We've had
a good time doing this and hopefully given you a lot of good information this year. We'll
continue doing it again next year.
But, for now, we're going to end the year showing you a pair of apps from pretty popular
software developers. We're going to look at the iReadWrite app from Texthelp, also known
for their Read and Write Gold software. And we'll look at the Firefly app from Kurzweil,
also known for their text reading software there.
Let's start with the iReadWrite app. This is an app that they bill as benefitting struggling
readers and writers. It definitely benefits struggling writers. It's more so a writing
app, I would say, than a reading app. It costs $19.99. We'll open it up here and take a look
at it.
So this is what our interface looks like. Folks that are familiar with the Read and
Write Gold will be familiar with some of the reading aspects of this; also, some of the
writing aspects. I think the biggest benefit of this is when we get into writing and we
get into spelling.
What you see over here on the far side, this is where our word prediction list is going
to be. So, when we start typing, it's going to start guessing what we're trying to write
up here. Now, when it does guess, it uses context, textual and phonetic spellcheckers.
So, if you have a student that has a learning disability that struggles with writing because
they're just a poor speller, if they can get close, iReadWrite does a pretty good job of
guessing what they're trying to write.
Just for example, as you can see here, I've written something out. And we'll show you
what another key piece to this is, and then we'll go and practice some of our spelling.
But, if we tap near the beginning of this, we look here now, we've got a play and stop
button. We can hit play, and we can listen to --
Hi, everybody. Welcome to our final app webinar of the year. We've done several this year.
We've had a good time doing it. We hope you've learned something from them, and we're going
to continue doing it next year.
But, to round out the year now, we're going to look at a pair of apps that come from some
pretty popular software developers. We're going to look at the tool iReadWrite from
Texthelp, who's also known for their Read and Write Gold software. And we'll look at
Firefly from Cambium Learning, also known as from their Kurzweil software. So we'll
take a look at those two today.
Let's jump right in and start with iReadWrite. iReadWrite is similar to Read and Write Gold,
and it's billed as a tool that can help struggling readers and writers. I think it's probably
more beneficial for the struggling writers' angle of this.
What you see here is when we open this up. Also, this app costs $19.99. We open this
up. You've got your area for writing here. This tab over here, this part of the frame
is for word prediction. This word prediction's really nice. It predicts contextually; it
also predicts phonetically.
So, if you have somebody with a learning disability that's just a poor speller but can get close
phonetically, it's probably going to be guessed over here.
As you write, you've also options here to read what you write. You see the play button.
That'll play what we've written. It'll play out loud what we've written. We also have
a stop button there, and we've got jump-forward, jump-back buttons. I'm going to hit play,
and you can hear kind of what I've written here, so we can hear the voice that this is
using.
Recorded Voice: Hello. My name is Jim. I am a struggling writer. This app helps me through
the use of word prediction and reading my writing back aloud to me. Let's try spelling
a few words that confuse me.
Male Speaker: So there you go. You can hear that that uses a pretty good voice. We've
got the dual highlighting there, just like Read and Write Gold does, so that you can
follow along with what it's reading, and you can hear where your mistakes might be.
Now, let me show you some of the word prediction and how it works here. So let's say I'm a
phonetic speller; I struggle with spelling words. And I want to write the word, "giraffe,"
and I spell it J-I-R-A-F.
And, by the time I get to the end of the word, there you're going to see, over on the far
side here, here's what it's trying to guess, based on what I've written there, and we have
the proper spelling of "giraffe" there.
Now, the way that this word prediction piece works, if I tap on "giraffe" --
Recorded Voice: Giraffe.
Male Speaker: − it reads it out loud. If I tap it again, or if I hit this arrow, it's
going to add that into my document in place of what I've typed there −
Recorded Voice: Giraffe, giraffe, giraffe.
Male Speaker: − or it's supposed to anyway. Now, it's making a liar out of me.
Recorded Voice: Giraffe, giraffe.
Male Speaker: Let's try holding it down, and then we'll show you one other thing. If we
hold it down, we get the dictionary.
Recorded Voice: Giraffe: Noun; tallest living quadruped; having a spotted coat and small
horns and very long neck and legs; of savannahs of tropical Africa.
Male Speaker: We get the dictionary, and we have that read out loud. We can listen to
it again by hitting the play button, or if we hit the select button, it's going to add
that into our document.
Let's try another word here, just to see how this works. Let's try, "gymnastics." So let's
say, "gymnastics," I'm going to spell it J-I-M-N-A-S-T-I-K-S, not really anywhere close, but I spelled it
out phonetically. And look up in the corner here. We've got, "gymnastics" spelled properly.
So, if I tap on that arrow --
Recorded Voice: Gymnastics.
Male Speaker: − it should add that --
Recorded Voice: Gymnastics.
Male Speaker: − into my document for me.
Recorded Voice: Gymnastics.
Male Speaker: Let's double-tap.
Recorded Voice: Gymnastics.
Male Speaker: And it looks like, today, it's making me hold it down. Yesterday, if I was
hitting the arrow or double-tapping, it was adding that for me. Let's try it one more
time, see if we can get an image in that as well. Let's try, "elephant," E-L-L-A-F-I-N-T.
And that's not spelled correctly; but, again, it's able to guess. So let's hold down, "elephant"
Recorded Voice: Elephant.
Male Speaker: − and there, you'll see --
Recorded Voice: Elephant: 1.) Noun.
Male Speaker: And there, you'll see not only does it give us the definition, but over here,
it uses images, and it gives us two images of an elephant, so that we can kind of see
what that looks like, too, if we struggle with reading that, or we don't want to listen
to what the definition is. So, for some words that it has an image for, it'll plug an image
into what you're doing. For others, it won't do that if it doesn't have one.
But it is a really nice word prediction that helps those students that struggle with spelling.
As you can see here, it's done a pretty nice job of picking up things that I've spelled
incorrectly.
So we do have the reading piece. Again, it'll read out loud; it'll highlight -- dual-highlight,
so it highlights the sentence, and it highlights each word as it goes through and reads. We
also have a spellcheck here. If we hit spellcheck --
Recorded Voice: Spellchecking.
Male Speaker: − it's going to do a couple of things. It's going to go through, and it's
going to highlight misspelled words in red. And, here, it just doesn't recognize, "app"
as a word. I'd probably spell that out as, "application."
The words you see highlighted in blue, that's similar to Read and Write Gold's confusable
word checker. So anything that's confusable, it's going to highlight in blue.
So you see it's got my name, Jim, highlighted in blue. That's a homophone with G-Y-M, so
it's got that there as well. If we didn't know which one we wanted, when we were checking,
we could highlight -- hover over one and have it read back out loud, give us the definition.
If we kept going through this, we went to the next word, "me," we'll see, "me," M-E
or M-I; "through," T-H-R-O-U-G-H or T-H-R-E-W. Here, we see the word, "to." If we tap on
that, there are three options for the word, "to."
That confusable word checker is a nice piece that's built into that spellcheck, and it
makes everybody check and make sure that they've done what they've intended to do there.
Now, if we go to that double-A button over here, we can change up our fonts. We can make
that bigger if we want. It's 20-point font right now. We can crank it up a little bit.
We can also change our font style. And, just like some of the other ones that we've seen,
this app has the open dyslexic font. So we can change that font to open dyslexic to help
our students that have dyslexia, if they need that option there.
We can also change the color of the text. Right now, it's black. If we change the background
color, we may want to change the color of the text as well.
If we look at the settings area, here's where you change the background. So we've got a
white background. We can change that background color to anything in that color range there.
We'll leave it at white right now. We have it set for our spelling-error color to be
red and our sounds-like color to be blue. We can change that if we want.
Voices, we can change, and we change that by just tapping on that box, and it cycles
through voices for us. So there's Jill; there's Samantha and Tom. Those are the three voices
that we get.
We can change the color of the highlighting, the background and the foreground. We can
choose whether we want this to continuously read. If we don't, it'll read word by word.
But we'll leave it at continuous. We can choose our speed, and it can be fast, slow or medium.
So it's very limited in kind of what you can choose, but you do have some options there.
We can take off the sounds-like, take out the predict-the-next-word if we want.
We can add user spellings also. So we'll see -- I'm going to just try something here and
see how long -- see if it's picking up my last name, since we've done that a few times.
It may take a little while to pick up user spellings that they've added in this.
So this is kind of how our iReadWrite tool is going to look. It does a really nice job
with prediction. It does a really nice job with the spellcheck. It does a nice job reading
out loud. It has a good voice to it, too.
The one thing that's a little disappointing with this is you wish it would do a little
bit better job of reading outside documents. You can get outside documents into this, but
it's not quite the way that you would think it would have to be done.
Typically, we can pull something in right from this app. To get something from another
-- another type of document into this, we'd have to go into another app and send it from
that app. And there are very few apps that'll actually do that.
One of them is Dropbox. So, if we go into Dropbox, this is how we would send something
to be read in iReadWrite. We go into Dropbox; and, from Dropbox, we'd have to find a certain
type of text. There are only two that you can open in here. You can open RTF files and
TXT files. That's it. Nothing else will open into iReadWrite to read out loud.
But here, we've got an RTF file. If we go up and hit the arrow coming out of the box,
you'll see one of the options -- no, the arrow coming into the box, rather -- one of the
options is "Open in," and if we choose, "Open in iReadWrite" here, then it's going to go
back in the Read and Write Gold, and it's going to open -- or iReadWrite, and it's going
to open up that document that we've saved in here. Again, it'll only work with RTF or
TXT files.
And I will tell you, we did save one -- I forget which one it was, whether it was an
RTF or a TXT, and one time when we did that, this is how it opened up in our document.
So there are some little quirks to it, but we should be able to open those up. And then,
once you have that opened, then you can go to where you want to read, hit play --
Recorded Voice: Better future for Iowans: The Iowa Assistive Technology --
Male Speaker: − and it'll start reading that out loud, but, again, kind of a pain
in the neck to get either a TXT or RTF file in there.
If you look at that file folder, if we open that up, anything that we've opened from somewhere
else is going to be located in there. We can tap on it and open it again. So, once we've
sent it from Dropbox once, we shouldn't have to do that again. The other option here is
a blank sheet of paper. That opens up a blank document for us to start writing in.
So this really is a nice app for writing. It's a great app for writing. It leaves a
little bit to be desired on the reading angle, I think, but as a writing tool for a student
with a learning disability, this is a fantastic tool.
Take a look at one other one here today. We're going to look at a tool called Firefly for
Kurzweil 3000. Firefly is a free download, but it's not going to get you very far unless
the area that you work has a site license for Firefly or for Kurzweil. That's the only
way you're going to have access to this because, once you download it, you need a username
and a password to get in. So that username and password comes as part of the site license
for Kurzweil. So, even though it says it's free, don't be fooled. You have to be part
of a certain group to be able to use it.
Once you log in, you'll see here you've got access to all different types of files, all
different folders. We can open up folders for different school districts. There's one
for myself right there. If I open that up, it's going to show me what I have as private
or public. I'll go into my private folder there, and you'll see we've got one document
that we've scanned into this. Now, if we open that up, here's what it looks like. And, across
the top, I can hit play, and it should start.
Recorded Voice: [Inaudible], Lilly's teacher, M-R Slinger announced to the class that he
was going to marry M-S --
Male Speaker: So you can hear some of the issues it has with the reading right now.
The nice thing with this, this is just like reading a document we've scanned in the Kurzweil.
If you're familiar with Kurzweil, you can scan documents in. And then, on Firefly online,
you can load them into the folders and then access it through the app this way on your
app.
So you can get full color pictures in here. You get your text in there. You get the Kurzweil
audio, the Kurzweil audio voices. If you hit "Options," you can change your voice. You
can change your speed there. You can have it highlight by the line, sentence or paragraph,
and you can choose whether you want best speed or best clarity in the reading.
As you heard, it had a problem with this decorative type of font, as is part of the beginning
letter. It had problems with "Mr." It read it as M-R. It had a problem with "Ms.," read
it as M-S.
It does work well. It allows you basically to access your Kurzweil files. But, again,
we can't get anything into Firefly from Firefly. It all has to be done on a computer, and it
has to be hooked up to the Firefly online account as well. So you would scan something
in through your Kurzweil software on the computer, then load it into Firefly; then you could
open it on your iPad, using the Firefly app. You have good access to lots of different
libraries on here.
But, again, it's going to cost you. Even though it's a free app, you have to have the Kurzweil
site license to be able to access this at this point. I don't know if they plan on changing
that where you can buy a license at Firefly to get this or just buy the app, but currently,
it's part of a site license.
So those two apps we showed today, both good; both have their drawbacks, but it's nice to
see these two companies that are so good at their software products diving into the mobile
app game as well.
That's going to do it for the app webinars for this school year. We'll be right back
at it when you guys get back to school in August.
But, for now, if you have questions throughout the summer, please feel free to email me at
james-stachowiak@uiowa.edu.