Leveraging the potential of technology to increase efficiency, opportunities,and impact is critical to how we shift education and the learning culture for both teachers and students.  This has to be at the forefront of all conversation about technology. Today I want to focus on a simple efficiency solution: streamlining the note taking process for both audio and text. This simple solution arose out of my frustration with having to take notes from the hard copy of the book How Children Succeed.

This is a highly recommended book that all educators should read.  Every page is filled full of valuable information – all of which I wanted to highlight and be able to locate easily.  My frustration arose out of the fact that I do most of my reading on my Ipad. In that format, I easily take notes and highlight info for quick reference and organization. I really didn’t want to read, highlight in the book, then slowly type or write a summary of what I read into Evernote (another amazing tool that is my Go To application).

With all the technology out there, I knew there had to be a great solution.  So the first thing I turned to was the Dragon app.  It’s a very robust speech to text recognition app but it does not sync with Evernote (on the Iphone – there is an extension for Android hardware). Yes – I did contact their customer support and suggest this update.  So I quickly turned to the internet and my Twitter PLN to solve the problem.  In a relatively short amount of time, that included some research and connection with a member of my PLN, I accomplished the task.  The system isn’t perfect but that’s mostly because the speech to text recognition (in most applications is not 100% accurate). So here it is:

Go to Settings on your Iphone/Ipad

Click on the General tab and choose Accessability

Scroll down to Speak Auto-Text and choose ON

Open up Evernote and create a new note

Touch the screen to bring up the virtual keyboard

You will now notice a microphone next to the space bar

Click the microphone and start speaking (you may need to speak a little slower and very clear)

Punctuation is added by prompting with the actual terms such as period, comma etc.

Click done to convert your speech to text.

Fix any minor errors. The text is now saved in a notebook which you can sync across devices in Evernote.

Once I got going, I found this to be a easy way to integrate speech to text, automatically save it in Evernote, and sync across all my devices.  Although I was frustrated at the outset of this situation, my persistence and unwillingness to give up was worthwhile. Weirdly so, I felt a sense of accomplishment and excitement that I came up with a workable solution.

This experience made me think about the Ss in our classes and our continual desire to make school meaningful, impactful, and engaging.  Maybe we should start to shift responsibility – even for something like this – to our students.  If school is preparation for life, isn’t this a perfect example of a task (even though small) that needa to be addressed in every day life. This little task included identification of a problem, critical thinking, the use and choice of relevant resources, leveraging technology, collaboration, creation, and now communication.  Hmm… aren’t those many of the 21st Century Skills we keep talking about. Just a thought -would love to hear your feedback on the solution or the more important side note about creating authentic learning opportunities for our students.

Hopefully this works for you.  Feel free to share any other ways that you’ve solved this problem.