Accommodations and Accessibility
For students who struggle with accessing or presenting material, we have different technology assistants that could make things easier for you.
For questions on how Wheaton Academy can assist with your student’s needed, please contact Gina Churchill in Student Services.
Text-to-Voice
- Digital books – Google a title and usually several options will come up, many for free. Select the one that fits your needs best. It is good to have one that has divisions that allow you to go back to certain points for reviews, questions, etc..Most often libraries will also have options.
- Natural readers (a professional text to speech program that converts any written text into spoken words. The program is free, but to access very high-quality voices there is a paid subscription option.)
- iSpeech (creates audio from text content)
- SpeakIt! (an app that converts text into speech for Chrome)
Voice-to-Text
Often students profit from the ability to speak their thoughts directly to the computer (which types it for the student) rather than having to type it themselves. A strong program or a clean input are critical to success.
Dragon Speak A strong program that trains to your voice. Powerful although it must be purchased.
Speech Notes (For best use, use Chrome. Has a feature to automatically turn whatever you say/write into an email, Word document, Tweet, etc..)
Dictation.io Easy to use and good. Has options, such as using other languages.
Read and Write for Google Full program has many useful options, including Text-to-Voice also. Very useful for accessing web research and compiling information results for writing.
Productivity and Device Management
Keeping focused and on task is a huge challenge today. So much time is spent in front of screens, where the opportunity to digress abounds. However, the wise use of resources, especially time, can provide greater accomplishment, success and goal achievement. Here is a handful of apps selected to help limit wasted time on the internet or with screens, and to help manage the use of time better. Some are for computers, or phones, or tablets, some are free, and some need to be bought, although most can be used or tried for free. There are many more possibilities and more show up every day. It may be useful to try these and/or search more for the one(s) that work best for you. Please feel free to share your findings with others.