“ociaWith tears for teachers with parents these are important in how we construct our knowledge now again we’re going to explore some ways that we can do this a little later on but it’s important to recognize that constructivism has multiple slightly different schools of thought so first off constructivism emerged out of cognitivism so we talked about cognitivism that people are constructing their own knowledge that’s where they started constructivism Builds on that idea it is it’s kind of a branch that builds out Beyond so first we have the cognitive constructionists these are folks who believe that knowledge is constructed through our mental processes like attention perception and memory Learners are viewed as active problem solvers so they use those different mental processes within themselves to construct their knowledge and views of the worlds the teachers role in this”

You’re looking at the results of my latest psychology notes. whilst typing up the notes off the projector, I accidentally hit control shift s and, to my amazement, my computer began transcribing exactly what our psychology Prof was telling us and putting it into my Word document. this was magical, and I watched it in awe a few minutes before realizing I was much more invested on the text appearing on screen then it’s actual meaning, so I returned to taking normal notes. I’m now using  speech to text to reflect on this occurrence of speech to text, which makes it speech to text section… yeah, I figured it wouldn’t transcribe that correctly. in any case, however, this method taken spoken words and using technology to transcribe them as pretty amazing, especially for students who could use the extra support and who aren’t necessarily capable of typing  notes at a comparable rate. I also started using it for texting in some cases where my hands are busy, mostly when I’m baking. of course there are many errors that appear, because the technology isn’t super advanced, I don’t often speak with the best diction, and certain softwares are absolutely incapable of understanding accents, which is a sad reality that fails to accommodate for the many International or immigrant students in our classrooms. it’s always getting better however, so hopefully these issues will be addressed in the coming years. 

This speech to text function also reminds me of the auto-generated captions that appear on YouTube. in many circumstances, they become an absolute joke as the words and phrases appearing have absolutely no similarity to the actual information being presented. well it’s funny for many students, this is detrimental to those who require these captions to be able to understand the same content as their peers. it’s possible to go back and edit the transcript, from what I understand, but this takes time and manual input. These are things teachers do not have much of. In terms of supporting inclusivity, this just means that we as teachers must be careful while selecting our resources and verify that the captions are accurate, there’s an option for described video, and that videos have the appropriate trigger warnings for violence, flashing lights, loud noises, and other factors that might be detrimental to the learning of certain students.

 as an English teacher, the lack of capitalization that speech to text is doing right now is tearing apart my soul and Awakening and anger I did not know I had. it’s like my sister is texting me;  for those of you who have not encountered it yet, texting without capitals appears to be a trend amongst younger Generations now. do you see what I mean why would you capitalize Generations and not the first letter of the sentence?? at least it understands the word.. okay it understands the word. but will always put a period when I say period except in that case apparently.

 wait experimentation time: esket Google could come home La Francaise plan downtown. I have just discovered that Google docs’s Speech to Text does not understand French.  this limits it’s use in a French classroom for sure.

Attendez: je viens de changer la langue et ça marche. ça marche très bien en fait, parce que d’habitude j’ai des difficultés avec l’orthographe des mots en français. s’est aussi une stratégie pour pratiquer la prononciation des mots, parce que si Google ne ne peux pas me comprendre,  il faut que j’évalue ma prononciation. 

 okay As much as the software has been helpful it is now defeating me, so that’s all for this week.  until next time!

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash