Teacher Spotlight: Chromebook Accessibility Features Can Open Doors for Littles

This month our Teacher Spotlight shines on Cindy Reichardt and Anita Ortiz, Specials Teachers at Eagle Valley Elementary.  They came to the EdTech Team with a question, “What tools can we use with primary grade level students to do self-guided free-inquiry on Chromebooks?” The IB program requires that students are offered time for personal inquiry to discover and learn about a topic that interests them. This was a tall order. How can we support students just learning to read and write to do free inquiry. Digging deeper into the Chromebook provided the answers needed. Chromebooks include accessibility features that can unlock learning experiences for students that would struggle without the assistive use of technology. The built-in features can help customize the learning experience to include and engage every student, even primary students who are just learning to read and write.  For this project, we focused on three of the features.

Select-to-Speak

Select-to-Speak is a built-in tool that is a screen reader allowing students to select specific text on the screen to be read aloud. It works on web pages, pdfs, documents and chrome apps. This tool worked great for primary students to access the information they found on the web without having to know how to read.

Select-to-Speak and Dictation are found in the Accessibility Menu

Dictation

The Dictation tool allows speech to text on the Chromebook.  For the free inquiry unit, students who were not yet proficient in writing could place the cursor in an area where they wanted to enter text.  They selected the microphone icon in the status bar and began talking. Their words appeared on the screen as they spoke.  When using this feature in a search bar, it allowed students to explore a vast area of knowledge that would otherwise be nearly impossible to attain on their own.

Google Translate

Eagle Valley Elementary is a dual-language school. Google Translate came in handy to present information in the student’s native language. With Google Translate, students were able to change their preferred language in Chrome to translate pages for them. Bonus… when the student combined this tool with the Select-to-Speak tool, it read the content on the page in the student’s preferred language!

Application to Your Classroom 

These are just a few of the many tools built right into your student’s Chromebook. These tools go way beyond supporting primary students to do free inquiry. Do you have a student who understands the content but struggles to get their thoughts and ideas down on paper? Dictation or text-to-speech in Google docs might be just the answer. Have an NEP who just joined your class? Combine the Select-to-Speak tool with Google Translate to open up access to your classroom content. The possibilities are endless.  Have an idea? The EdTech Team would love to share with the rest of the ECSD Community. Want to learn more? Click here.

How to Add the Accessibility Menu to your System Menu