TIC & Educación

Over the weekend I posted a note on the Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page about using voice typing in Google Documents. There were a lot of questions posted about how to access and use the voice typing feature in Google Documents. To address those questions I created the short video that is embedded below.

Thanks to their wide range of applications and tools, Google is quickly becoming a treasure trove for eLearning professionals. You can create surveys and quizzes in a flash with Google Forms, or keep your learners up-to-date with Google Calendar. Now there is even a way to get more out of Google Drive by using Google voice commands that save time and boost the effectiveness of your eLearning course. In this article, I’ll share 6 helpful tips for using Google voice commands in Google Drive.

Google Voice (http://voice.google.com) allows you to sign up for a Google phone number and connect multiple phones to that phone number. You can have it set up to call your classroom phone, cell phone, and home phone all at the same time. Thus ensuring you never miss a call. What I love is that I can use Google Voice for text messaging and voice mail transcription. If someone texts me to my Google Voice it goes to my phone, my email and my voice.google.com inbox. Voicemails are transcribed so I never have to listen to voicemail. The transcriptions are not perfect, but they are good enough. I see the transcription as a text message to my phone, my email and the Google Voice inbox.

Google Voice es un servicio de telecomunicaciones que se ha ido refinando con el tiempo y que permite: disponer de un buzón de voz, realizar llamadas en conferencia, enviar y recibir mensajes de texto, acceder al historial de llamadas, bloquear y filtrar llamadas, así como transcribir, de voz a texto, tanto los mensajes del correo de voz, como las llamadas. Este artículo de Lisa Montez Sullivan describe algunos de los usos educativos o escolares que posibilita esta herramienta.

A bunch of new features were added to Google Apps this week. The latest one that I have tried is voice typing in Google Docs. In the past there were some Chrome extensions that could enable you to do that, but now voice typing is a native feature of Google Docs. To use voice typing in Google Docs simply open the "tools" drop-down menu and select "voice typing." When you make that selection a microphone icon will appear in the margin of your document. Once the icon appears, click it, allow Google to access your microphone, and start talking. Your spoken words will almost instantly appear on in the document.

Since its inception, Google Drive has been a source of excitement for innovation-minded educators. However, as with any new teaching technology, you may find yourself thinking “it sounds intriguing, but will it really make a difference?” In regards to Drive features like audio feedback, the answer to that question is an unequivocal yes. Aside from offering convenience and helping spare teachers from endless amounts of typing, the addition of voice commenting brings with it profound benefits to the learning experience as a whole. Below, you’ll find five compelling reasons to give it a try, as well as a simple guide on how to get started.