For When You Just Need the Text to Speak to You

Last year, our district started its 1-to-1 initiative by putting Chromebook carts in my classroom and each eighth grade classroom (because we had all taken REMC's Blended Learning in the Classroom course).  I was on one of the teams that had a number of students who had accommodations stating that texts and assessments be read aloud to them.  My problem that year was that I only had support during one quarter of my classes, so if I was going to read every chapter from the book, and every quiz and test aloud, ALL of my students had to hear me; while this benefitted some of my students without IEPs, many of my students complained of being distracted.

In order to make sure that I was meeting the needs of all of my students, I started recording myself reading chapters using Audacity, but found that that was very time consuming; there had to be another way.  I'm not sure how I discovered Chromevox, which is a screen reader extension for Google Chrome, but I do know that many of my students benefited from hearing the text read aloud while they followed along in their books.