IT'S NOT JUST KEYBOARDING ANYMORE

By Karl Barksdale

Speaking Solutions © 2002

IBM succinctly defined what speech recognition does in an early ad campaign: "You talk, it types." Many students are now calling this new magic "voice-writing."

Talking into a noise-cancellation headset with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, IBM ViaVoice, or Microsoft's Office XP speech recognition software allows students and teachers to voice-write between 110-170 words per minute (wpm) with amazing accuracy. In Dragon training sessions, a Business Education instructor from Kansas hit 197 wpm and a teacher from Wisconsin broke 200 wpm while achieving over 96 percent accuracy - after only a few hours of training.

Speech recognition or SR improves student writing, never misspells, and frees time that can be applied to more essential writing tasks like proofreading, and editing. I learned this the hard way. I had a typing/writing assignment that was designed to fill 45 minutes of instruction. In a fit of curiosity, I let my students complete the activity with their speech software instead of their keyboards. Eight minutes into the assignment the printer began to hum and whirl. At the 15 minute mark, the students were finished - leaving 30 minutes of additional instructional time. (Only then did I realize that I was underprepared for the rest of the class period, so I began to babble something about carefully editing and proofreading -- which actually started to make sense by the end of the hour. Teach and learn!)

Reducing typing in order to increase time for vital writing processes is just one of over a half-dozen reasons why students around the world should set their keyboards aside, pick up a headset, and learn the magic of voice-writing. They should also learn its companion technology, Microsoft's handwriting recognition.

Leading the charge of change are members of the National Business Education Association or NBEA, an organization that represents over 100,000 keyboarding and Business Education instructor's in all 50 state and the provinces of Canada. Members to this year's national convention even hailed from Bermuda.

NBEA's National IT Standards admonish students to, "Use a variety of input technologies" and:

Develop proper input techniques (e.g., keyboarding, scanning, speech recognition, handwriting recognition, and the use of a touch screen or mouse), including safety methods to avoid repetitive strain injury. Page 85, National Standards for Business Education, www.nbea.org, ISBN 0-933964-56-0

To meet these new standards, the state of Washington has created a new course to replace their traditional entry-level high school keyboarding course. It is called Digital Communication Tools or DigiTools for short. According to Cindy Agnew, the creator of the concept:

To ensure a computer literate society, each child must be able to communicate using a variety of digital tools. As the "tools" change, communication skills will be the driver. We need to teach the appropriate use of communication tools as our nation continues to evolve into the Information Age. The traditional Keyboarding class is the perfect home to introduce the new digital input technologies.