THE FIRST WINDOWS VISTA SPEECH RECOGNITION CLASS IN BUSINESS EDUCATION

Someone had to be first. But who could have guessed that the first Business Education Vista SR session ever would take place three months before the release of Windows Vista! Nevertheless, this historic milestone came on Friday, October 13, 2006.

Andy McClure and Chris O'Mara of Fife School District in Washington cobbled together a beta installation of Windows Vista and Office 2007 for the Washington State Business Education Association conference in Yakima, Washington.

And their efforts were rewarded by an enthusiastic group of BE instructors. The participants were ecstatic.

One experienced speech recognition teacher summarized the feelings of most when she said Vista speech "IS A DREAM."

What amazed the instructors most was the instant accuracy right out-of-the-box.

The instructors went directly into the new speech application and began talking. One teacher reported that her first sentences were 100% and said, "THE ACCURACY IS AMAZING." This comment is all the more amazing when you know that the session was only an hour and a half in duration so there wasn't time to complete the tutorial or to read an initial training story. (An initial story reading is not required anymore with Microsoft’s new speech recognition.)

Windows Vista speech recognition was a runaway hit. Every instructor I talked to expressed how easy Vista SR was to use and how much easier it is going to be to teach speech recognition to kids in a Vista lab. It seemed to me that the more experience a teacher had with speech recognition instruction the more excited they were about Vista. The experienced SR instructors seemed in complete agreement that Windows Vista SR is going to make teaching speech much easier when compared with previous SR applications.

And remember, Andy and Chris ran this first ever workshop with beta software. And I can say without hesitation, Andy and Chris are the only two business educators I know of in the entire country that could have pulled this off with beta software three months before the new speech product even releases.

They were the very first to acknowledge the extraordinary help they received from the technical support team back in Fife, led by Cindy Agnew, and the technical team a Yakima Valley Community College, led by Michael Batali.

To run the beta software, special removable drives were built at YVCC by students in the IT103--Operating System class, under the direction of their instructor Mike Batali.

According to Batali, "The drives were built with a dual boot option with Windows XP and Windows Vista RC1 (release candidate 1). On the Windows XP partition, Office 2007 beta 2 was installed, followed quickly by the Technical Refresh for Office 2007. This was a very practical experience for students as the drives were actually used outside of class!"

This is a wonderful example of teamwork between the students and instructors at YVCC personnel, Fife School District and Washington's business educators.

In Utah, we were attempting to capture that top spot. In fact, we were meeting on October 15, 2006 to plan a Train the Trainers Vista SR training program for January 2007. And before we can even have our meeting, Chris , Andy, Mike and his students beat us to the punch. A hearty congratulations on reaching forward and bringing us all up to speed with you.