fwtxmom, our ds has Dragon. I agree that it's not that easy to use for kids, and it's also not practical in a lot of situations during school. We're just starting to try out Dragon on the iPad - and so far it looks really *really* promising. I didn't know that Siri was available on the iPad for anything other than asking questions... but I haven't looked into it. I find Siri's voice on my dh's iPhone very annoying lol!
Our ds learned to type first using BBC-Mat typing online when he was in 2nd/3rd grade - it's free and it's fun. My dds used it also even though they don't have dysgraphia
After he'd gone through the BBC lessons he practiced in Ultra-Key for about a year, then we stopped making him practice and just let him get his practice through his schoolwork. He's not much faster at typing than he is at handwriting, I think due to the nature of his fine motor challenges.
I'm really hopeful for the iPad - the few times we've tried Dragon so far it seems to do a fairly reasonable job of voice recognition without the ton of training you have to do on the regular computer, and it's worked well in the presence of background noise. OTOH, I'm probably just delirious from too many late nights watching my ds plod through his homework at the speed of a turtle and hoping for something to drop out of the sky and make his schoolwork go faster.... so I may change my opinion of the iPad Dragon after we've worked with it a little bit more.
polarbear
