Monday, August 27, 2012

Dyslexia: Merilee Grage Hearing the Voices of Dragon

This week we are looking at the story of Merilee Grage who struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia for years.

She is using Nuance's Dragon Naturally Speaking to help finish her Master’s degree in Special Education.

She is a believer in the use of assistive tech in the classroom, and has introduced Dragon to the students in her repsonibility, who face reading challenges.

She reports that the results have been “amazing.”

Grage dropped out of college in 1979 due to her undiagnosed dyslexia, but with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the tables have turned: "I bought Dragon to help with my typing and I ended up using it for everything: emails, papers, my online courses, and anything else that requires a keyboard."

"It’s about creativity and having a flow of work that’s not interrupted by worrying about spelling and grammar. Dragon is a major part of that."

More recently, Merilee has seen the transformation Dragon has had on students of all ages, including a 3rd grader with dyslexia who, for the first time, was excited about reading and was thirsty for more.

“When we were done,” Grage recalls he said, "There has to be a third book." His motivation was amazing.

This was a student who didn’t want to go to the resource room because he read at a first grade level and couldn’t write complete sentences.

"Dragon and echo reading during profile creation forced him to work on word pronunciation, and his comprehension and fluency greatly increased."

To read more of Merilee’s story, go to Nuance's website here.

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