Digital Classnotes: Help Your Children Learn More

Our youngest son, Matt, is starting college this Fall. Along with the books, backpack and parking permit, we have outfitted him with a good digital voice recorder to use when he's in class. Rather than trying to race to record notes from the professors' lectures, he can concentrate on what is being said and leave the note-taking to later when he can better organize his notes.

To help him transcribe his notes, we're also giving him a transcription kit, which, with the footswitch, will help him speedily convert the lectures to outlines and notes he can use. By listening to the lecture again, it also reinforces the lesson.

We do get more calls around this time of year, but we suspect many who use dictation in every day work, don't always realize that many of the same benefits they enjoy using digital recorders can also help their offspring.

Maybe this will be the year.

PS: we often get calls from parents and students wanting to record lectures and use speech recognition to convert them to text. As much as we would like to find a solution like this ourselves, there really isn't one that does the job with any degree of accuracy. Speech recognition works by learning how one person dictates, and having that speaker dictate in a conducive style.