Friday, September 09, 2005

As another school year begins, I hope that many more students will have the opportunity to discover new tools and strategies that will remove the barriers to academic success. There are a number of tools and resources that provide access to the curriculum. A number of these are FREE!! Please review the links list on the right. If you have any other favorites, please let me know.

Here's a really affordable program that our struggling readers love! If you haven't already downloaded TextAloudMP3, you have to check it out at
Nextup.
. This is an excellent program (Windows only) that costs less that $30 and allows you text-to-speech access on the Internet as well as in your word processed document. For an additional $35.00, you can obtain high quality NeoSpeech voices. (It's important to offer our students a variety of voice options so that they can choose the voice that enhances their reading performance.) It offers the easiest method for converting text files to MP3 for easy download to an iPod. And the student customizes the voice and speed that is best for them as they read along in the assigned book.

Let me know what you think. It is available for a thirty day demo download at the above link.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I think Text Speaker is one of the best text to speech software. You can use it for reading all your documents, emails, ebooks, and more. It also has a good selection of the most natural sounding voices in many different languages. It is perfect for helping young children to read.