Hey, Mark Miller here. I wanted to quickly show you how I use the Helper Bird uh browser extension. I’m using it in Chrome. You can see over here I’ve got all the features up. This is a big big long list of all the different things it does. I always tell people, nobody uses all the features of Helper Bird, but everybody finds the features that work for them. So, what I like to do is um favorite my features. So, I’ve got this um other section right here with the things that I use the most. And I’m basically going to show you what I use mostly um because of my dyslexia, right?
So, I’ve got this nice blog post article here by Helper Bird on their blog, Creating Accessible at Home Learning Environments Tips and Tools. If I This is a a great blog. Somebody spent a lot of time on it. There’s a lot of information in here, but if I just start reading this, um, I may not stay focused on it. I may have to reread. Um, it can sometimes be a challenge for me. So, I will use the summarize feature. S
o, if I open up the summarize feature and ask it to summarize, it’s going to give me a quick five page five page five paragraph, summary of this article. I can listen to it. And you’ll find this is a common theme with Helper Bird. Anytime it shows up with a bunch of text or you’ve got a bunch of text, it’s going to allow you to listen to it. Creating an accessible at home learning environment involves optimizing lighting.
Now, the other thing that um I may do and that I really like if I’m going to dig deep into this article is I’m going to go into the immersive reading mode. And what this does is it strips away all other distractions. Um, it allows me to change font size and and um a whole bunch of different things like that. But the feature I use the most here is I will start to listen.
Creating accessible at home learning environments, tips and tools. And the nice thing is while you’re listening to it, it highlights the word that’s being spoken. So you really get this hyper-focused experience. The other really cool thing in the immersive reader is if you run across a word you don’t know, let’s pretend we all don’t know what the word home means. Um, and you click on it, it’s going to give you images of that word. It’s a really really great way particularly for kids to learn vocabulary because you it tends to stick really well for a lot of people that are visual when they see um what that word means versus getting a definition of it. Um, I use this a lot because I, um, study Spanish and, uh, it allows me to look at that Spanish vocabulary and can sometimes be a much better way for me to learn it than just, um, than just using, traditional, kind of definitions and and whatnot.
The other thing I really like is that, I can highlight a paragraph and just press play. It’s not just homeschoolers on the rise in remote learning technology. It’ll start reading um that highlighted paragraph. I use this a lot when I’m writing stuff and I want to just read back some or listen back to something that I’ve written. Um I won’t catch mistakes if I visually read it, but if I listen to it, I’ll catch my mistakes. Um and then this has got some nice features here. You can automatically search something on the web. The dictionary feature is great.
So, if you wanted to know what let’s just say we were we were wondering what aspirations meant um we can just quickly click this. I don’t know what this necessarily has to do with dyslexia, but it’s just a great quick way to to get a a definition. Sticky notes is another one I’ll show you and then I’ll wrap it up here in a minute. This is just they the people at Helper just added all sorts of cool stuff. Like I said, you don’t have to have dyslexia. They don’t have to. It’s it is an assist of technology, But I really think anybody is going to find the different ways that they want to use it.
The sticky note feature is really cool because you can click it, it’ll pop a sticky note open, and the cool thing is is it stays right on this page. So, I can write whatever I want. This is my note. And if I come back to this page tomorrow, if I – you know, close this, open it back up again, this note’s going to be sitting there for me. There is a ton of uses for this. There’s a ton of reasons you probably haven’t even stopped. Think about why you might want um to leave yourself a reminder on a web page. It could be um sometimes I’ll put little tips on where I found something. If there’s a couple different things that I found on the web page, sometimes it’s just a note if I’ve had a thought about the page.
There’s more note-taking features in Helper Bird as well. There’s ways that you can start to capture stuff and filter it off into a note section. I won’t show you that. That’s not fun. The other thing that I’ll show you real quick is voice typing. This is kind of a – I’m not going to show it to you. I’m just going to point it out to you. This is kind of a cool feature.
If there is something long-winded that you’re trying to fill out, you can actually do voice to text with Helper Bird. Remember this is just my features that I pull forward. This is really the whole uh list right here. And you can see this is categorical, right?
So these are the tools that it has focus ruler and every every thing like that for people with dyslexia. It’s got math reader. It’s got grammar tools. It’ll check the grammar. Um simplify things for you. It does all sorts of stuff.
So, I really encourage you to download this. The free version is fantastic. You will have uh a a good time playing around with that, finding the features that you like. It is so featurerich in the free version. That you’ll probably be fine with that for a while. The paid version is incredibly inexpensive. I probably played with for about a week with the free version and then I think it’s you can get it for 15 bucks right now. And it was well worth it for me.
So, I hope you enjoy it. Have fun with it and, check out the blog post I wrote on it. Feel free to leave a comment. Let me know how you use HelperBird and the features that you found, the most fun, the most useful for you.
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