Select-to-speak and Dictation

Published by Mike Neumire on 11/15/2023

There are many useful features hiding on student Chromebooks. For those students who would benefit from text-to-speech and/or speech-to-text software, Chromebook provides several options. You simply need to explore your settings. Let’s look at speech-to-text first. Chromebook has a feature called dictation hiding in its accessibility settings. Here’s how you access it: 

Accessing Dictation

Accessing Select-to-Speak

In order to enable Select-to-Speak, you will start by repeating steps one and two, but instead of clicking on "keyboard and text input", you will select "text-to-speech". From there,  you will toggle on "Select-to-speak". 

These Chromebook features are useful in a variety of contexts. They do not have to be tools that are exclusive to students with IEPs.  If a student is struggling on a given day, even though they do not need an IEP, they may benefit from the extra scaffolding one of these tools provides, as long as they're not working toward a standard or objective that is specifically about reading or writing. If their task is to reflect on their understanding of swamps as a habitat, they may choose to speak their reflections and let their Chromebook capture that in text.  This is aligned to the principles of the Universal Design for Learning framework, that is meant to help teachers develop empowered students who are able to take ownership of their learning through meaningful choices.