Our First Writing Assignment with Word Q + Speak Q

Hello! Last week I posted an entry on winning a giveaway from the We *heart* Homeschooling Giveaway Extravaganza. over at Hip Homeschool Moms.  I was excited to win the Word Q and Speak Q software package especially to help support my son's writing skills.  With the learning challenges of both dyslexia and dysgraphia, my son is most frustrated with any kind of writing.  He is already becoming a pretty fast and accurate typist and he now prefers typing to handwriting. It allows him to express himself, but it is very limited to the spelling rules that he has learned at about the halfway point of the Barton Reading and Spelling System. 

Here is the description, once again.

WordQ+SpeakQ software bundle is the first and only integrated word prediction and speech recognition tool available, designed for students (from 2^nd grade to college) and others  who struggle with writing. It was developed by a research team led by Dr. Fraser Shein of Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto.

Built to enhance, and be more forgiving than, other applications, WordQ provides additional functionality to popular writing applications (e.g. Internet, Adobe, Microsoft Word and anywhere you can highlight and click), including word prediction, suggesting words that change depending on the context, and spoken feedback that allows users to hear their mistakes (e.g. run-on sentences, spelling and punctuation errors, etc).  SpeakQ is a plug-in that builds on and enhances WordQ’s functions, adding speech recognition (speech-to-text functionality), working in spite of mild speech imperfections and accents.
A 30-day free trial of the software can be accessed at http://www.goqsoftware.com/try

Our first Word Q experience
So, we got the software in the mail yesterday - and I loaded it onto the laptop last night!  I have only used Word Q, so far.  After you have set up Word Q with the appropriate language and some basic user information, you open it, and then open another word processing type of program like Microsoft Word. When you open Word Q, it gives you a menu box in the upper right hand of your computer screen and a small box near your cursor. The menu box allows you to switch back and forth between functions and helps you to find what you need.  While I was typing, I used the word prediction box and it gives the top 5 most likely words that you would type next, depending on the words you have already typed in that sentence.  It changes constantly, which is a distraction to me, but my son loved it!  For him, he could type the first couple of letters of many words and it would "predict" them for him.  If he saw the word he was looking for in the small box, then he would press the appropriate number key (1-5) and it would complete the word for him.


He was able to compose two or three sentences quickly and with more words than he probably would have typed without Word Q.  Then, we switched to the "read" function on the menu and highlighted the text.  A computer voice read the text back to us!  It was accurate.  He did some editing then, and had the text "read" again.  He did this several times before getting it to sound the way that he wanted.  He said, "This is way better than just typing!" 

This is what he wrote (the first sentence was given as a writing prompt, but he typed it on his own):

"One morning, when James came downstairs, he found the kitchen full of smoke. He fell down unconscious.  Apparently his mom was really old and she had a lot of candles when she blew her birthday candles out."

I know it's kind of "silly", but he would not have been able to spell "apparently" or "unconscious" on his own.  So it did already expand his writing abilities in this short piece.  (At least my husband is always turning a year older than me when we really blow out those birthday candles!)

My Thoughts: 
I don't want to give him a "crutch" that will keep him from learning to spell or read, so we will not use this when we are doing the dictation in the Barton Reading and Spelling System lessons where he is learning to spell on his own.  However, I do want to give him support so that he can eventually write independently.  I plan on allowing him to use this for any kind of composition he is going to be doing.  Until now, his language arts writing has consisted of a maximum of 2-3 short sentences when he has to type it on his own.  When I type things for him, he is able to really express his ideas and his huge vocabulary, because he is not bound by his learning challenges.  Now, maybe we can begin to cross the bridge between those two ways of writing.  Maybe he can start to type his own ideas, in a more expressive way.  We will have to try the Speak Q function on the menu bar later in the week.

Thanks again to the Hip Homeschool Moms for this WONDERFUL giveaway!  I believe that Word Q will revolutionize my son's writing!