This is part II of a as-yet-to-be-determined blog series about my new love affair with Apple products.  To see part I, click here...

For today's entry into this series, I thought I'd feature one of the options on my MacBook that was recently shown to me during a workshop -- Text to Speech.  Essentially, this lets you (or your students), highlight text on a page and ask your Mac to read it to you!

So. Amazing. (Yes, things like this tend to amuse me).

To add to the novelty side of this feature, you get to choose what type of voice you would like to have your text read with...hint: "Alex" is the most normal sounding one, and probably the best one for use with students who will actually benefit from text to speech.  Looking for a good laugh? Try some of the novelty voices such as "Whisper", "Bad News" and, my personal favourite, "Deranged".

So how can you, as an educator, turn this feature on?  

Step 1:

From the apple (in the top-left corner for Mac newbies), select "System Preferences" which gives you this view:

Step 2:

Select the "Speech" icon, which is hidden right in the middle of the row near the bottom.

Step 3:

Click on "Set Key" and identify which keys you would like to set to activate the text to speech feature.

Voila!

Step 4:

Highlight some text on your computer, press your predetermined keys and you Mac will read these words aloud to you!

And since I haven't included a YouTube video created by moi for awhile, here is a quick snippet for my audio-visual learner friends:

There you go! 

In case I haven't said it for awhile, I am a Mac.

Vanessa