Today's class was very 'elluminating'!!! (I know it really is illuminating) You'll get the point!!!

Today we continued with the Elluminated sessions on Kurzweil 1 and 2 and they were very informative.  I do not have this program in my school but I do believe it would be great to have and I have a few children in mind that would have benefited from the program last year.  There were several features that I liked with this program(too many to mention) so I will just touch on a few.  I really was impressed with the bubble note option not only to highlight certain aspects of the text but with the assessment component.  I could see this is helpful for reluctant writers especially for giving them some independence in writing, it will also allow the teacher to choose the amount of writing depending on what the student is capable of writing in specific test formats.   It is a very ingenious feature!  I will also mention the Brainstorm feature for writers who have organizational concerns and have struggles writing.  It would be great to take the text and help the student brainstorm a visual organizer to help with the writing process.  One thing that I would like to see changed with the writing feature is the word prediction feature.  I have used co-writer a little in the past year and if a student is a poor speller then this program is very helpful predicting any type of word.  I am sure in the next version of Kurzweil the developers will improve on this little imperfection.  This is not to say that the Kurzweil option for word prediction is a failure, just that for younger students and other students who need a more defined prediction program Kurzweil may have to take second place(only in this area)  This is why is it so crucial to make sure you have the correct match of students needs to programs.  The last feature that I would like to mention is the translate feature.  I would have like to had this knowledge last spring when we had 6 students from China, Thailand, Holland enter our school with no english at all and things were very difficult for them.  They relied on technology that came from home for translation of simple of words, to get through the day, and just sat and listened to the teacher read and speak in a different language all day (very frustrating I am sure for the students).  Some of the other children had been introduced to boardmaker symbols to communicate and had no written output because of the language barrier.  If this program would have been available I am sure it would have worked for them in one way or another to better service them in the educational setting.
Overall it was a good introduction to Kurzweil and I am looking forward to using it in the future.  I did have the opportunity to import an article from my other course into it(when I had it on my other computer before that died) and had it read the article to me and highlight a few points.  It was actually a good program and I was going to do more with it, so hopefully I can get another trial this week or find somone that has it to experiment some more.