Google Scribe: A student’s dream come true?
Google Scribe has potential to be a great tool for students. It can practically write your essay for you … if you don’t care too much what it sounds like.
It’s every student’s dream: an intelligent typing program that can automatically do their homework for them. While no such program is available, Google Scribe is a step in that direction. Google describe Scribe as:
“Google Scribe provides text completion service. Using information from what you have already typed in a document, Google Scribe provides related word or phrase completion suggestions. In addition to saving keystrokes, Google Scribe’s suggestions indicate correct or popular phrases to use.”
It’s basically a predictive text engine – much like the autocomplete feature provided in Google web search, Scribe looks at what you’ve typed and provides suggestions as to what word or phrase you may wish to enter next. Some obvious uses for Scribe:
- On mobile devices: if your mobile device doesn’t ship with a standard keyboard, Scribe could make typing much easier and speedier.
- Inspiration: one of Scribe’s suggestions may help overcome writer’s block.
- Instant research: need to write Vancouver, <Province> but aren’t sure which Province Vancouver is in? No need to stop writing – Scribe will provide you the answer as soon as you’ve typed in “Vanc”.
- Correct spelling mistakes – before you make them: you’ll see that it’s spelled Vancouver and not Vancoover as soon as you’ve typed in “Vanc”.
- Foreign language help: while Scribe is currently English-only, the presence of a drop-down language box would seem to suggest that it will eventually be available in other languages too. And when that happens, Scribe may well be able to help you avoid errors when writing in a language in which you lack expertise.
Note that you can use Scribe anywhere on the web. From the Help:
“From the Google Scribe home page, drag the Google Scribe Bookmarklet (located below the text box) to Bookmarks toolbar (or Favorites toolbar depending on your browser). To use Google Scribe on a web page, click on the Google Scribe Bookmarklet. Google Scribe will then enable itself on the active text field on the webpage. Enabled text fields display the icon at top end corner of the active field.”
Scribe may not be what kids have long been hoping for, but it certainly has potential. Give it a try and let us know what you think.
Absolute rubbish and idiocy that only serves to further dumb down the minds of students. It is a constant interruption to the mind to have popup suggestions as to what might come next in a sentence the majority of suggestion being nonsense.
Is not the idea of education and learning to be able to use one’s own mind, knowledge and creativity? Can you imagine your future elected lawyer having to draft into legislation a complex bill, whose formative years included such trash as Google scribe? How about your doctor or surgeon you might want them also to be sharp of mind and capable. Do you honestly think that writers and authors of note use such tactics, no not one?
Spell check is a useful tool to some, learning to spell makes it of little value, proper education ensures so.
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Here’s a prediction: Google = Terminator
Dumb down indeed, it is a way to get rid of unnecessary thoughts in a person’s mind. Good education isn’t in knowing how to spell, its in knowing how to communicate your ideas. Ideas are what makes the world, and good education isn’t in getting rid of tools that save time, but embracing those tools in order to get rid of the mundane tasks and move forward. Believe it or not, spell check helped me learn more English than the boring memorization of spelling words and vocabulary lessons. Practicality over mind numbing memorization makes good education. Stop being stuck in the past, and learn to lean with the punches.
Guess what else, I cn Rd THS SNTNCE JuSt As Esily as the correctly spelled one.
I disagree with those who say this will not help. When I was not good in French writing, I would use these types of tools to help me, with tenses, and as an instant dictionary. The trick to learn here, is to look at the possibilities that are offered by these programs. If you don’t look, you can’t learn though. We all learn from our mistakes and every correction, teaches us something new. Using technology has truly improved my learning curve.