Make your Chromebook speak!

Having your Chromebook read aloud text is now possible in a number of ways. Chrome has recently got full support for native text-to-speech voices.

The native TTS voices do not involve downloading the speech were as networked TTS does. At the moment the native voices are of low quality speech but still provide the browser away to speak.

Native TTS application Chrome Speak and TTS engines can be be found on the Chrome Web Store.

The networked voices are of similar and grater quality and can speak in multiple languages. Because the networked voices involve downloading the speech it can be slower and may temporarily stop working when you exceed a limit and therefore not suitable for listening to longer texts.

Networked TTS application can be found on the Chrome Web Store: Speakit! and iSpeech's Select & Speak.

If you need to listen to more extensive texts using high quality voices you kan use some free online TTS applications such as Acapela Box and IVONA Recordings. IVONA Recordings appear to only function properly in an Incognito window.

Spokentext.net and Textaid.nu  are paid subscription service that offer some more functionality and more languages.

Google+ Khan Academy

Hangouts are a way for users of the new social network Google+ to communicate using video group calling.
I must admit I could not see how Hangouts and Video group calls would integrate and benefit education. But since I realized that of course Hangouts let you watch YouTube videos together and there are a many YouTube videos targeted for educational use.

This would mean that students could watch videos together and help one another along the way. The very nature of Hangouts allow students to drop in when they would like to work together.

Khan Academy is one great producer of video on YouTube they produce videos on topics ranging from history to biology and of coarse mathematics. Khan Academy videos with Hangouts could become a very effective tool for collaborating and studying together.

Hangouts have a limit of ten users at a given time and maybe this creates the most effective collaboration. Khan Academy videos are often not longer than ten minutes and this makes it easier to take in a new topic. This together creates an environment were you are just 10 students in a 10 minute lecture and can discuss and learn at the same time.

I can imagine that are probably many other ways that Google+ Hangouts could be used in education. Please comment below if you have any ideas!

A new social network more appropriate for education.

Google recently announced Google+ which is a new social network. This social network might be more ideal for educational purposes than sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Google+ Social networking technology is something that educators have often found difficult to integrate into there educational setting because of the lack privacy and control over sharing. It is necessary to embrace a Social medium in the education and provide a social learning environment for those who learn socialy.
Google plus addresses the privacy issues of Social media for education. Google plus has a system of helping you sort groups of contacts and relationships in to circles. Within these so-called circles you can share content with the appropriate group of people.

You can soon see more details on our new Collaboration and Communication page

See also: https://plus.google.com/

Chrome notebooks for schools

Yesterday at Google's developer conference in San Francisco. Google announced that they will be opening a new offer that will allow business and education to subscribe to receive laptop computers for a monthly fee of $20.

Schools and businesses have to deal with high costs for managing their IT systems and computers. Now with this new computing model with all your programs based in the cloud you don't need expensive hardware.

Finally this enables schools to provide computers for every student with all be applications they need easily managed centrally.

To learn more about Chromebooks and the subscription service please visit: http://www.google.com/chromebook/business-education.html

Your texts writes for you with Google Scribe

Google Instant is a great way to speed up searching with results as you type. You can find the text auto-complete technology in a Google labs product called Google Scribe. You can write texts with the assistance of your text auto-completing your words as you type. The service may not seem useful at first but it can really make you write much faster as well as sometimes helping you to formulate and phrase your text differently adding to your vocabulary and improving the quality. 


It seems that speech recognition isn't the only way for easy creation to write on mobile devices which half sometimes got a difficult on-screen keyboard and that text autocomplete can also be a another great tool for easy input on such devices. There are third-party android keyboards that have integrated Google auto-completing technology like A.I.type and scrybe but it isn't yet used on the official default android keyboard wich still uses androids inbuilt predictive text engine. 


Google Docs is most powerful tool is collaboration which lets you work together on documents. The integration of Google scribe with Google Docs would probably change the writing process altogether with the computer knowing what your going to write. 


Unfortunately for now you can´t use Google scribe with Docs but until then try it out at scribe.googlelabs.com/ and the Chrome extension that lets you write in text fields across the web.

Speech recognition on YouTube

Some time ago I posted a description of our website and I mentioned some interesting ways that Google uses its speech recognition.

Last year Google announced automatic captioning or machine transcriptions to transcribe spoken words into text. The captions on the video display as the person is talking but there doesn't seem to be a way to copy the captions from the video if you want to share them somewhere else.

As I was browsing the Google operating system's blog I came across an interesting URL that would let you download captions from an entire video allowing you to see the whole video written down.
This means you could easily get a whole lecture written down from your own video or someone else's.

Step 1 Shoot a video and upload it to YouTube or find a video already captioned on YouTube if you want to do that skip step two.
Step 2 If you've uploaded your own video click on captions on subtitles then click on a acquire machine transcriptions. When that is complete click on the download you could then use the text but it would have time codes in it so I recommend you upload it again by clicking on add new captions or transcripts. Now go straight to step four.
Step 3 If you want to find a video already subtitled on YouTube you should select closed captions under search options when you have searched for videos.
Step 4 Then use this URL: http://video.google.com/timedtext?lang=en&v=VIDEO_ID and replace the words the VIDEO_ID with the ID of the video you want to download the captions from.
You should then see the entire video written down in front of you. copied the text and go to http://www.nicertutor.com/xml.cgi paste it in and click go now you've got your text!

Welcome to Google for Learning and education!

We are a website that likes finding interesting solutions with Google technologies that could be used in classrooms with education. Google is developing and innovating with new technologies such as cloud computing that students and students with learning disabilities could benefit from.

Some of Google's cloud computing technologies can help with collaboration between students and teachers such as Google docs which is a full online office suite with document editing, presentation creation and more.

Other cloud computing in technologies such as speech recognition can now be used in exciting new ways for example for someone who has difficulty writing speech recognition can turn talk into text. Speech recognition is used in YouTube videos for automatically captioning spoken words and could potentially be used for filming a class lesson. The student could then go back and copy the captions from the YouTube video and see the whole lesson written down on a document.

So why not join us in looking at Google's products and technologies in finding new exciting solutions for educational environments.

This is our newly created website: http://google4learning.comule.com
Enjoy!