Tag: teaching

If You Want To Sing Out…

On February 26, 2026

I invited my husband, Barry, to be a guest blogger for this piece, because I can’t begin to explain how he achieved this miracle. Please note: Barry is a Principal Software Engineer by day. I will attempt to translate anything I think may trip up us lay people.

Jessie did some “phrase banking” when she was first diagnosed with ALS in 2017 in anticipation of losing her voice. She recorded a library of phrases that are stored for verbatim use on a text to speech device. When she types “Hello!” the device plays her banked recording of “Hello!” in her own voice.

Jessie intended to do “voice banking” as well, in which she records a huge quantity of sentences, and then a company generates a synthesized voice that sounds like Jessie’s original voice. Unfortunately, between teaching and looking for a new house, Jessie only got halfway through recording the sentences before her speech was affected.

Like most folks in this situation, she listened to the various canned voices on her Tobii Dynavox device and chose a female voice that sounded “close enough”. These voices are good. The technology has come a long way from the computerized voices we heard growing up (…think “War Games” or Stephen Hawking’s early use of text to speech technology) but it was never her voice.

Well, we recently heard an interview with Eric Schmidt, former CEO at Google. He was talking about how they had a prototype a while back that could create a realistic voice clone from no more than a few minutes of audio. It was not released at the time for various reasons but it got me thinking that the time was right for us to return to this issue and do something!

As you know, Jess was a public school teacher for 24 years and she had a number of classroom videos she filmed. I extracted a bunch of clear voice audio from these and fed them into the ElevenLabs voice cloning app (https://elevenlabs.io/).

ElevenLabs markets themselves primarily for agentic (autonomic AI) content creation: voice overs, audiobooks, podcasts, chat bots, etc. However, their cloning capabilities were reviewed as highly accurate and expressive.

Indeed, the voice modelling was spot on from the ~60 minutes of input we provided. We now had a nearly perfect sounding Jess-bot!

I thought at this point that we might use the voice clone to generate content that could be fed into the traditional voice banking apps, having the voice clone do the “recordings” that you would normally do yourself in this process. Unfortunately, there is a maze of intentional licensing barriers to such an approach.

However, ElevenLabs does have a partnership with BridgingVoice which is a non-profit organization focused on ALS and assistive communication technology. “We help people living with ALS (pALS) maintain their ability to meaningfully communicate with family, caregivers, and medical professionals, no matter the stage of their disease.” BridgingVoice picked up the licensing fees for our use of the ElevenLabs voice clone API (Application Programming Interface). (https://bridgingvoice.org)

Then I wrote a little application to act as a broker between the various components. It takes in the input text from her typing app, communicates with the ElevenLabs API to vocalize that text, and processes and plays the audio returned. (From Jessie: if this paragraph confuses you, just go on to the next one. It won’t affect your understanding.)

And voila, Jess has her voice back! She types (with her eyes) anything she wants to say and it is vocalized in near real time with her cloned voice.

Note that BridgingVoice has a Tobii Dynavox integration app similar to the one I wrote that they provide free of charge to the pALS they support. If you need this, you should totally use it – it works just fine. I decided to write my own software because…

I wanted to learn more about the technology and I was already halfway down the road of thinking through various issues in my head, so I couldn’t stop myself. 🙂
The BridgingVoice app had some volume integration issues I really wanted to address to make the user experience smoother.
I’m sure the ElevenLabs Text to Speech API is going to evolve quickly and I wanted to be in a position to incorporate new features without annoying the BridgingVoice folks with lots of questions and feature requests.
I also added a bunch of additional INFO and DEBUG diagnostic logging so I can help Jess when things aren’t working so well. (From Jessie: I ignore the technical terms I don’t understand, if it doesn’t get in the way of my overall understanding.)
2026-02-22 13:41:04.202 [INF] VoiceApp Main()…
2026-02-22 13:41:04.234 [INF] Text: 86 characters
2026-02-22 13:41:04.867 [INF] GetAudio(): 0.627 seconds
2026-02-22 13:41:10.624 [INF] PlayAudio(): 5.754 seconds
2026-02-22 13:41:10.628 [INF] VoiceApp Main(): 6.516 seconds

The “Speak” button to the right on her eye gaze keyboard vocalizes with the same canned voice as before. The new “Voice” button on the left vocalizes with the clone. But the clone is dependent on a network connection to access the ElevenLabs API so we left the Speak button in place as a backup when we’re out of the house, or having a Wi-Fi outage, or whatever.

(Also, the clone tends to add confusing emotional tones to texts with just a word or two in length. So the old voice or banked phrases are still much better at saying “Yeah” or other simple texts that don’t provide enough language context for the clone to model very well.)

This is a small clip of Jessie from 2011 leading a class of high schoolers through a reading of Homer’s Odyssey:

And this is Jessie 2.0 today:

(Ok. You got me. I typed that, not Jess. But you get the idea.)

I’m sure this process is going to get even easier from here on out. It’s not hard to imagine a time when you turn on your text to speech device for the first time and it prompts you to record or input a few simple voice prompts. And that’s it, you have a highly accurate personalized digital voice. I’m just glad we were able to manually connect the tech dots for Jess’s benefit today.

So let Jessie know if you’d like to come by for a visit some time soon. She’d be happy to catch up and talk with you in her own unique and beautiful voice.

…Sing Out.

– barry

Teaching Writing

By Jessie

On September 29, 2025

In living with ALS, loss, teaching

My friend Julia has been reading one of my teaching journals aloud to me, because I wanted to refresh my memory about that particular year. I wrote a reflective journal most days for every year I was in the classroom. I used lesson plan books, which have boxes with lines for six periods, which is how most secondary schools have their schedules, six periods per day. My writing had to be tiny to fit into the boxes. Julia has to use the magnifying glass and the flashlight on her phone.

I would never be able to read it on my own. I even have trouble reading things on my device, because since my ALS has become advanced, I have trouble reading words on the left side of the screen. That’s why I prefer audio books and podcasts.

But I digress. The second half of the journal, meaning the second half of the year, focused on writing. For more years than I would like to admit, I thought the way to teach writing to a whole class–as opposed to one student at a time– was to give everyone a graphic organizer, like the one below for argumentative writing:

I may have modeled filling out the graphic organizer. As you can imagine, it didn’t work very well for most students. The ones who grasped the concept just wanted to write, and those who didn’t, gained no help from the graphic organizer. I always ended up making many comments on the finished drafts, and the students would never transfer my comments to subsequent writing assignments.

Two things happened to change my method of teaching writing. One was when I transferred to the Highline School District. There I had a literacy coach, Mary Edwards, who vastly improved my practice in many ways, including introducing me to the “green book,”. That’s what we called a book published by Teacher’s College, Columbia University, that was filled with detailed scripted lesson plans with accompanying resources. With Mary’s help, I implemented an editorial writing unit, and started with having the kids read a bunch of editorials, and I modeled identifying various techniques that the writers used. I conferred with each student about what they were trying to do. This process was much more productive than graphic organizers.

The second thing that pushed me to change my teaching of writing was the book Study Driven: A Framework for Planning Units of Study in the Writing Workshop by Katie Wood Ray. The premise of Study Driven is that students need immersion in the type of the writing that they are going to do. The examples need to be published pieces.

I realized I already knew this from my own writing. When I wrote an article for Educational Leadership about my experience teaching for the first time in a high needs school, I first read several published articles about teaching.

So, from then on, I structured writing units with immersion as the first step. When my ninth graders wrote their own Odysseys, we went back and studied how Homer began the Odyssey. When my eighth graders wrote biographies of someone in their family, first we read short biographies (picture books) of famous people. It made a vast difference in the quality of their writing.

A few years later, another book revolutionized my writing instruction. It was An Ethic of Excellence, by Ron Berger. Berger describes a process that begins with students familiarizing themselves with the qualities of excellence in whatever they are going to make. Then the students do a first draft of the project, participate in feedback groups (after extensive modeling and whole class practice), and then repeat those steps until the student is satisfied that they have achieved excellence. (If you would like to see an inspiring example of this process, watch Austin’s Butterfly.)

Joshua, my teaching partner at Highline Big Picture School, and I implemented that process with nearly everything the kids worked on. With writing, it was a perfect fit with what I was already doing with immersion. I had extensive experience with teaching how to frame feedback from my years as a facilitator of professional learning groups with other teachers. The immersion/identifying qualities of excellence and the multiple rounds of drafting and feedback, together with conferring with more experienced writers – either me or one of the volunteers I often had for big writing projects – was magical in improving student writing. Beyond that, it fostered a culture of multiple drafts. After all, that’s what professional writers do.

I’m fortunate that I enjoy writing, because it’s the only creative endeavor I can do since I lost the use of my hands. When I decided to create a blog, I first read blogs from other people living with ALS. I learned that their blogs typically include a post about their diagnosis process, so I wrote one early on. I always write multiple drafts, and Barry gives me feedback until I’m satisfied that the post is ready to publish. The one thing I can no longer do regarding writing is teach. I miss it very much.

Summer

By Jessie

On August 9, 2025

In living with ALS

I love, love, love summer. I was on an academic calendar from the ages of five to 49, and I still feel the rhythms of that cycle. Summer means freedom and decadence. The freedom and decadence to sleep as late as I want on weekdays. The freedom and decadence to do hot yoga three times a week or more. The freedom and decadence to go to the farmers market and buy berries and peaches every week. The freedom and decadence to gorge on those berries and peaches. The freedom and decadence to go to the up u-pick blueberry farm during the week with my kids. The freedom and decadence of not having to respond to the endless barrage of student work.

Nowadays summer freedom and decadence means I can shed my blankets. I can’t regulate my temperature, since I have no muscles and very little fat, and I don’t move around. I use an electric blanket on top of a regular blanket for three-quarters of the year. No one ever sees my outfits. When it’s in the high 70s, I get to put away the electric blanket. When it’s in the 80s the regular blanket goes on my legs only, and that is only because it stays cool in my house (mature trees, nature’s air conditioner). Outside, I don’t need a blanket at all.

Along with feeling the rhythm of the academic cycle comes the dread of August 1st. As long as it’s July, teachers have a buffer of August before we have to turn our attention to the next school year. And the last week of August is always reserved for mandatory school district training, meetings, and kick off events.

I still feel that dread of August, although I have been retired for seven years. The good news is that when I was teaching, the freedom and decadence would become too much by the time I had to go back to work. The brutal thing was getting up early again. Now that I’m retired, I get to sleep as late as I want. ALS silver lining number five! ¹

1 If you’re curious, here are the other silver linings:

Falling in love with Barry.
Learning that strangers will help me if I fall.
Learning that friends will help me with all kinds of things.
Being able to be home with my kids.
Sleeping as late as I want.
Not having to renew my National Board Teacher Certification for the second time.
Not having to teach during the pandemic