While there are many options for early aged school children to learn fundamental skills like reading, one method has been steadily gaining popularity the past few years because it has proven to be an effective way to help kids grow. This is by utilizing text to voice services in classrooms so that kids, especially those with vision and reading comprehension trouble, can better understand the words on a page. Not only can text to voice help students learn better, but it can also help teachers too.
How It Favors Students
In some cases, students will have trouble processing information by reading in a cohesive way. This can be due to various factors like having a sight impairment, having conditions like dyslexia, or even just being more familiar with a different language rather than the one being read. This is why text to voice services are really helpful because students can focus on the meaning behind each word rather than diverting all their attention to just processing the text themselves.
These services offer the ability to vocalize text, let students listen to the tone of a sentence instead of just reading it, and visualize the meaning of their text a lot better. Features such as customized voices and highlighting can also make a huge difference in helping students absorb their material in a far more comfortable way.
How It Helps Teachers Too
For teachers, text to speech software and services can be huge time savers. They’re easy to use, and students more often than not are comfortable with the results. Teachers can utilize these programs to help each student get individual and personalized attention to have been impossible beforehand. They can monitor how students are processing information more effectively. Still, teachers can apply these services to almost any text, be it a textbook, learning guide, or storybooks for young students.
Teachers get to utilize these services on print-based texts that don’t have audio functionality included. As long as the text is there, it can be transcribed and delivered as sound. The sounds themselves are both high quality and easily understood by students who listen to them. With the help of synthesized voices, students aren’t restricted to having only robotic sounds instructing them, but they can instead listen to the voices that they resonate with the most.
The students that benefit the most from this technology are the ones that have the most trouble reading themselves. It’s estimated that around 20% of all students have some form of learning disability that inhibits their ability to process all the material being read properly. Still, only about 4% of students get the proper special education needed to overcome them. By utilizing these texts to voice services, teachers can help students get back on track and let them absorb their reading materials just like their peers who might not have the same trouble. With text to voice in the classroom, the gap between them might not be as large anymore.
