Voice Feedback, Voice Recognition, Videos from Microscopes [issue 17]

This week, it’s all about audio and video in your newsletter about technology in education. Read Tekiota to find out how to:

1. Leave voice feedback for your students.
2. Dictate your work in Google Docs.
3. Record your next science experiment.

Record Voice Feedback for your Students

- TIP OF THE WEB -
[icon name="fa-cloud-upload"] STANDARD 3: model digital age work and learning

 “… it is often the case that students get feedback … and so on much too late – it can take weeks to mark their work  particularly if the class size is large. By the time students receive their feedback,  they may well have moved on, and then they take very little notice of the feedback.” Phil Race 

Kaizena Voice Feedback

Feedback is best given within 24 hours so students can remember the learning more clearly. Kaizena is an add-on that makes it possible to leave voice feedback on Google Docs and Google Slides. Kaizena also includes customizable rubrics teachers can add to help students understand the feedback.

Depending on the teacher, leaving voice feedback may or may not be faster, but voice feedback could be very beneficial to students who are learning English as a second language.

Kaizena is very easy to install and use. In Google Docs or Slides,

1. Go to Add-ons and then click on Get add-ons
2. In the search box, type in Kaizena
3. Click Kaizena
4. Install by clicking free, and accept the agreement
5. Click add-ons again, and select Kaizena Mini
6. In the new column to the right, select that you are a teacher, and fill out the information about your school and grade level
7. Finish the set-up process

Kaizena: Voice Feedback on Google Docs

When you are ready to begin giving feedback, highlight the area you want to give feedback on the document or slide. Next select the microphone button in the right column, and record your voice.

Laurie Williamson discovered this workflow and she loves it:

Jennifer Gilbert, Tech Ambassador extraordinaire, just showed me how to use Kaizena to make voice comments on the huge stack of lab reports I have reviewed. It will save me a lot of time and allow me to put some encouraging tone into them where I need to. This is going to be indispensable to me and I know the students will appreciate them more than reading written ones.

A shout out to her for her wonderful coaching AND to KAS for funding the personal development that produces this kind of strategic skill.

Dictate in Google Docs

- TIP OF THE WEEK -
[icon name="fa-cloud-upload"] STANDARD 3: model digital age work and learning

If Kaizena is focused on sharing audio feedback, Google speech recognition engine is now available in Google Docs. This tool allows you to speak in place of typing. Instead of using the keyboard, you can directly dictate your text or comments and they will be transcribed as text onto your document.

To activate the speech engine, open a Google Doc and click on Tools > Voice Typing. An overlay icon of a microphone will pop up, click it and start talking while it is red.

Google Microphone for Speech Recognition

Once you are done, don’t forget to click on the microphone again to turn it off.

Combined with Google Docs suggestion mode, this could be another fast way to leave comments on your students work in two clicks. Watch the animated image below to learn how to dictate text in Google Docs and pay attention to how I switched the suggesting mode on to add suggestions for the students:

Voice Dictation in Google Docs

Language teachers could use the power of Google’s voice recognition to help their students’ pronunciation in foreign languages. Change the language in which the document is written and start talking. If the computer recognizes the words the students spoke, they pronounced it well!

Tips For Speech Recognition

1. Speak slower but conversationally
2. Speak close to your computer’s microphone (on the left side of your MacBook Pro) in a quiet room
3. Here are the following commands to enter punctuation:

Period = .
Comma = ,
Question mark = ?
Exclamation = !
Apostrophe = apostrophe (‘)
New paragraph = starts a new paragraph

Google’s Artificial Intelligence Behind Speech Recognition

Google’s voice recognition engine uses a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning. Andrew Ng defines his development of deep learning at Google as “a learning technology that works by loosely simulating the brain”. You can learn more about deep learning artificial intelligences powering speech and image recognition in Deep-Learning AI Is Taking Over Tech on re/code.

Google Deep Learning Artificial Intelligence

Record a Slice of your Fingertip

- TIP OF THE HAT - 
[icon name="fa-group"] awarded to Jeff Roth-Vinson
[icon name="fa-cloud-upload"] STANDARD 3: model digital age work and learning

The tip of the hat this week belongs to Jeff Roth-Vinson and his newly acquired video camera for his microscope. Jeff managed to connect the video feed to his laptop in order to share videos and photos of the layers of dermis and epidermis at the tip of a human finger as viewed through his microscope. Instead of squinting into the lens one at a time, students can now discuss the video projected over 2 meter in front of the classroom: