Speak Agent version 1.10.0 adds several improvements that you and your students will appreciate!
Saved Lesson Searches
When you filter and sort Lessons or Wordlists, your account will now remember your previous search choices! This avoids having to filter by grade, subject, or language every time you return. If you can't find the lesson you're looking for, be sure to click CLEAR ALL at the top-right of the search area to undo all your filters.
Reading Text Size
The Read Along and Vocab Lab activities now include a way for students to control the size of reading text.
Narration Speed
The Scrambled Sentences, Read Along and Vocab Lab activities also add student control of the narration speed. There are five speeds ranging from extra-slow to extra-fast.
Tall Tales for Lower Grades
The Tall Tales activity now enables fewer answer choices for lower grades. Instead of the current 8 choices, we can now offer 4, 6, or 8. So, for example, we plan to give students in grades K-1 just 4 answer choices. We will implement this for all new lessons. We will also retrofit older lessons over the summer. Pictured below is an example with 6 answer choices:
Word Spin Upgrade
The Word Spin activity now remembers a student's progress if she/he exits the activity partway through and presses Save. In addition, we've increased the size of the word bank visuals. And, students who make a typo can now quickly fix mistakes in their story before sharing it with an editor.
Coming Soon
We've been beta testing a new science activity called Diagram It! More on this next update...
As always, if you have ideas about how we can improve Speak Agent, we are listening! Just contact us.
Written by Katie Cunningham
Katie is CTO and Co-Founder of Speak Agent, Inc. A leading expert in the Python programming language, Katie designed the Speak Agent architecture and wrote the very first line of code for the current platform. She is an accomplished technical author and keynote speaker worldwide, as well as a leader of the Washington DC chapter of PyLadies, an organization dedicated to training women in Python.
