It really is all Lisa Hogan's fault - here's why . . . 

Lisa did a session at the ACTEM conference on using iPhones with Dragon
Dictate to do speech to text in a writing class.  The basic premiss was
that you could talk into the iOS device and Dragon Dictate will convert it
to text and then email it.  The student could open the email, copy the
text into a word processor, do final editing and get their work don
without the pain of actually typing in a story.  

Several teachers from my district were in that session - she impressed
them with this technique.  They all came back and wanted more iOS devices
because they all had kids in their classes who would greatly benefit from
this process.  This is in a school where all the teachers and kids have
laptops, by the way.  So, I did a little searching to come up with a free
laptop solution to this problem and stumbled across the following.

As far as I know this only works in the Google Chrome browser (free for
both Windows and Mac)

In Chrome go to http://translate.google.com/ 

Set the "From language" to English and the "to language" to English.

In the bottom left corner of the input box you will see a little
microphone icon - click it - start talking.

When you stop talking the translate box will contain the text of your
speech, simply copy and paste it into a word processor.

Simple, easy, free . . . 

So, as I said, it is all Lisa's fault -  Thanks Lisa!


Crystal