Dragon doesn't work for my DD11 either. I think that there is something about the pitch of her voice that it just can't learn. We have similar problems with phones, part of her voice just drops out. My husband literally misses half of the conversation with her on his work phone. We have an IPAD2 so it doesn't have it's own dictation system. I wonder if this will get better as she gets older. My DD13 uses Dragon with no problem (no dysgraphia issues, she just finds it faster than typing).
FWIW, she does like typing on the IPAD. We use Pages. It can save as a word doc and she can email it to her teacher. I think that she also has used email to transfer it to our iMac and edit it with Word for longer projects.