Awesome tool for horrible spellers

Every once in a while, I’ll get an email message from my grad school adviser, Margaret Riel. She will send out cool tools she’s found to all of her current and former students. She’s a wonderful source in the Ed Tech world.

She sent us a note about Jott the other day, which is a great new voice transcription tool. Best of all, it works via your phone, so you’re not tied down to a computer. You call the phone number, say what you want to say, it sends you an email with the text in it. If you want, you can even send someone else a text message on their phone by simply speaking what you want to say. For people like me who are ultra slow on the phone keys, it’s an easy way to text without having to figure out where all the stupid letters on on the phone (44 wait, 444,*,44,666,9,*,2,777,33,*88).

But that’s not the first use I thought of. The first person I thought of when I read about it was my best friend. He’s dysgraphic. It’s a form of dyslexia but instead of mixing up letters when he reads them, he mixes them up when he writes. He doesn’t email anyone except his family and closest friends because he’s embarrassed about his poor spelling. After I tried out Jott to see how it worked, I sent it to him. I got a text message from him yesterday that he had sent me by using Jott. When I called him, he was very excited about it.

If you’ve ever used a voice transcription tool, you know that they’re hard to “train.” Jott seems to work almost flawlessly, and from a phone at that. Imagine the possibilities for students who are dysgraphic, or who have trouble writing because of a physical disability.

Check it out for yourself…I was impressed.