Bits and Bobs

Anagramarma
I have been trawling through a pen drive given to me last year from RSC and JISC, such has been the year that I have only got around to it today!! And stumbled across an application called Anagramarama - which being a free download is right up my street basically it gives you &letters and a clock ticking and you have to make as many words as possible from three letters all the way to the 7 letter anagram. The time ticks by and solves the entire puzzle. From an ICT point of view and pedagogoy, the program is self generating so that evan an ICT novice can use it, one drawback is that you don't appear to have any control over the anagram itself, so it would be limited to reinforce subject specific vocabulary, however from a primary point of view it can be used to discuss vocabulary and discuss the words that the program founfd that the pupils did not. Also you could use it as a starter excercise with adult learners especially those with english as another language.

Another of the applications I have rec ently been playing with is Dspeech. DSpeech is a text-to-speech program with the option of saving the output as a WAV or MP3 file, which is great for creating audio books from text sources. It also supports dynamically changing the features of the voices eg. insert pauses, emphasize specific words, spell them out etc. using tags. You can get a portable freeware version. Now this is where it can become really useful because in todays age of costs you do not have to either buy it or download it to the computer you are using, all you have to do is download it to a flash/pen drive and you can use it from there. Now the drawbacks, the voice is very mechanical and robotic in sound, however you do have the optuin I believe, but you would need to check it out - to record using your own voice. so why not use Audacity, well with this program you have the text written in the program, so providing the project is saved it is possible to go back and amend/ edit the text and build a new WAV file. this would especially be useful for special needs, for those dyslexics, or those who have speech problems, or even just those who have inner speech problems. Work used in a word processor can be copied and pasted into the program and the program can read it back to the pupil. The only thing is the caliber of the voice. However, I am sure there will be developments here.