Google Voice Transcription for Universal Design

While I wonder whether Google is collecting too much information about me and others, I still marvel at the capacity for supporting the kinds of work we do. Eric and Alex recommended Google Voice so I requested an invitation. It arrived and I am setting it up and testing to see how it works and how I might incorporate it into our work.

Google Voice seems to have potential for supporting universal design for learning. Here is my first test of that function. The snippet below is the transcript. The word "voice" displays in a grey font color so I suspect that the transcriber is less confident in that part of the transcript. But high accuracy including punctuation is a pretty impressive result even if it is not 100% confident.



12/22/09 5:24 PM 10 minutes ago
Hi. This is testing out whether the google voice system can accurately transcribe my voice and take a message and send it to the proper place. Thanks very much. See you later. Bye.

Snow Day Technology Leadership

Last March, a heavy snow caused school closures across Maine. But we discovered that the work of ITeams could continue despite the snow using network communication and collaboration. Sylvia Martinez, President of GenYES, commented on that post suggesting that we expand the practice.

When the phone rang at 6:00 this morning with Superintendent Wilhelm's announcement of school closure, I knew we had a new opportunity to follow Sylvia's suggestion. With the full expansion of the MLTI program to the high school and access to new tools, we have even greater opportunities to lead with technology. Let's see what we can accomplish and document with this opportunity.

This year we also have new tools to support this collaboration; I am writing this message in a Google wave shared with several ITeam members. And now I am extending the text in the Blogger editor. When I tried to transfer that message here to the blog, Blogspot stripped the links and formatting in both a copy and paste and a drag and drop. So, we need some more work on making tools operate more seamlessly.

Embedding a Wave 2nd try

Since it did not work as I intended in the earlier post, I am using the sample that Google developers posted on the Google Code site:

http://code.google.com/apis/wave/articles/embeddy.html

That way, I can narrow down where the problem lies. I hope to see something in the space between the horizontal lines:
--------------
Paste this snippet wherever you want the wave to show up:

And this one right before your tag:

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Embedding a Wave

I have been learning to use Google Wave and want to know how I can share that with others. Here, I am testing Embeddy, the embedding robot. So, I wrote a wave, added the robot and have copied the embed code directly from the bot tools. When I preview the post, I see blank area in page but not any text. Will be interested to see what happens when I publish.

I had hoped to see the embedded wave in the space below this text but it is not there in any form that is useful for readers or even for debugging the failure to render as I intended. If it didn't display, I was hoping that I'd see some kind of diagnostic (login screen, gadget icon, or other indication of what is going on behind the scenes).

And this one right before your </body> tag: