Text to Speech on Macbook Airs

You may not know this quick trick for text to speech that your MacBook can do. Simply highlight text you'd like read to you, and right click (or control + click.) Choose "Read the selected text."

How might this be helpful?

• In a whole group setting, students get to hear a different voice reading text to them on your teacher screen and it will catch their attention.
• Students using Macs can use this feature to have unknown words read to them when selected one at a time, or sentences that aren't making sense to them.
• Students struggling to read a text at grade level can use this to remove the difficulty of decoding, vocabulary, etc. and focus on comprehension.

You can also change the settings to allow for this with the press of one or two keys, as long as you are still on the Mavericks operating system, anyway.

Do you have other ways this might be useful in the classroom?