Special ed [heart] Jott
July 15, 2008
You may already know about Jott, a fantastic cell phone service that will convert your voice to text. You may have wondered, “how is this useful for me besides giving me another way to make a shopping or to-do list?”
I wanted to highlight a couple of uses that are especially suited for Special Education. When you see them, you may get some other ideas about how to use this tool. Please leave a comment below to share them.
Jott for documentation
If you are a administrator, resource specialist, or some other provider of services that demand you document your interactions and interventions with students, Jott can save you a lot of time. Here is an example: at my school, we have been implementing RTI (Response to Intervention) the new federal special education (IDEA) model. This involves a lot of documentation of interventions. I introduced my administrators to Jott. Now, after an intervention with a student, they step out to the hall, call Jott, leave a message, and voila - their message is converted to text, and sent to their email, leaving a paper record. I’ve heard of social workers, and others using it in a similar manner. It’s really great for field notes.
Jott for differentiation
One trick I recently learned is that the speech to text goes both ways on Jott. You can have RSS feeds from news sources, or your class blog to Jott, and it will turn it into an audio feed that students can phone in to Jott and hear. This is great for students who have an audio delivery accommodation on their IEP. Instructions for how to do this can be found by scrolling down to Step 6 Mobilecast. -ALICE MERCER
Slideshare on using Jott for RTI documentation


From what I can tell, Mind Mapping is all the rage right now, and I should probably learn how to do it. In fact, you should, too. Lucky for us both, that information is made available at
If a hard drive crash scares you more than a house fire, you need to back up your data. Pictures, documents, music, all of it could be history. Fortunately, you can back it up safely and cheaply with
I’m a virtuoso at Microsoft Word. Whether it’s mail merges, macros, and the Ctrl-arrow key trick to skip ahead a word at a time, I can do it all. But I use Excel like a Yankee trying to talk Southern. I can do the basic stuff like sums and averages and such, but I don’t know the time-saving tricks that separate the advanced user from the dude who tries to shoehorn a text document into a spreadsheet because the tables in Word are so crappy.