Re: [IAEP] hearing impaired education and Sugar
On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 23:47, David Han ds...@bu.edu wrote: Hi all, I'm David Han, a Boston University student. I'm working with Caroline and Anurag in Boston. There is a prominent school for the hearing impaired in Allston, MA (Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing). This is very close to BU. I'm hoping to organize Sugar on a Stick workshops for the local community at the Honan-Allston Branch of the library. I would like to approach this school to participate in our workshops. Are there activities on Sugar that support the hearing impaired? -David Han ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep Hi David (and everyone else), To the best of my knowledge, none of the Sugar activities explicitly target the needs of deaf students. As Andrea mentioned the main problems involve access to language. Any language. If a young deaf child is not exposed to sign language (or some other accessible form of language) within approximately the first two years of life, they are often at a linguistic disadvantage for the remainder of their lives. The problem for kids in many countries is that their parents may not recognize the problem early enough, misdiagnosing deafness as something else, and the school systems are ill-prepared to handle students who communicate visually rather than aurally. If they are isolated enough, they do not get the opportunity to communicate with other deaf individuals, further widening the gap. I'm a research applications programmer for the Gallaudet Research Institute at Gallaudet University (http://research.gallaudet.edu/). The campus houses not only a university for deaf students, but also both an elementary school and a high school for deaf students: Kendall Demonstration Elementary School (KDES) and Model Secondary School for the Deaf (MSSD). The OLPC Learning Club DC is one of the Lending Libraries, and we now have a few XO's on loan to the instructional technology specialist for KDES and MSSD. Since I'm not in the classroom, and have had little exposure to the junior league kids, I haven't spent a lot of time looking into which software offers the best possibilities for linguistic development, but I'm sure others on this list have. In fact, two researchers involved with our Science of Learning Center on Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2), presented a poster session Designing Game Environments for Sign Language Development which I was unable to attend. However, I saw the poster at a later date, and it mentioned some of the ideas behind Sugar, the XO, etc. I do know that MIT's Scratch programming language for kids is being used to teach English as a Second Language, by encouraging students to create little plays or stories using Scratch. You may want to see what the Illinois School for the Deaf is doing with their XO's... - http://www.myjournalcourier.com/news/jacksonville-17737-students-computer.html - http://www.myjournalcourier.com/news/jacksonville-17737-students-computer.html http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=4439.msg29773;topicseen#msg29773 I've BCC'd an ever-growing boatload of people, listed below sans e-mail addresses, who have all expressed interest in working with software for deaf students, both within the US and elsewhere. If no one objects horribly, I can send the list WITH e-mail addresses to those interested. BCC (in no particular order): Diane Bellomy, Sue Hotto, Andrea Mangiatordi, Martin Langhoff, Emiliano Pastorino, David Han, Guadalupe Artigas, Esteban Arias, Tomeu Vizoso, Katelyn Foley, Yamandu Ploskonka, Mel Chua, Cristina Berdichevsky, Rosemary Stifter, Barbara White, Caroline Meeks, Anurag Goel, Carol Padden, Deniz Ilkbasaran, Nancy Bradbury, Pamela Broido, Nancie Severs, Carolina Segura, Pia Waugh -- Ubuntu Linux DC LoCo and Sugar Labs DC Washington, DC http://dc.ubuntu-us.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] hearing impaired education and Sugar
On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 02:47, David Han ds...@bu.edu wrote: Hi all, I'm David Han, a Boston University student. I'm working with Caroline and Anurag in Boston. There is a prominent school for the hearing impaired in Allston, MA (Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing). This is very close to BU. I'm hoping to organize Sugar on a Stick workshops for the local community at the Honan-Allston Branch of the library. I would like to approach this school to participate in our workshops. Are there activities on Sugar that support the hearing impaired? Esteban has been working on accessibility, maybe he knows about this? Regards, Tomeu -- «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar. What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David Farning ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] hearing impaired education and Sugar
Hi David, I think the Ceibal / LATU team has also been looking at various accesibility tools for Sugar. I've been talking with them recently about a 'Zoom' tool for kids with limited vision (hoping to post about this soonish) , and I think they've done some work with a screen reader. CC'ing Guadalupe Artigas and Emiliano, as I suspect they may have been involved. cheers, m On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 5:47 AM, David Han ds...@bu.edu wrote: Hi all, I'm David Han, a Boston University student. I'm working with Caroline and Anurag in Boston. There is a prominent school for the hearing impaired in Allston, MA (Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing). This is very close to BU. I'm hoping to organize Sugar on a Stick workshops for the local community at the Honan-Allston Branch of the library. I would like to approach this school to participate in our workshops. Are there activities on Sugar that support the hearing impaired? -David Han ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] hearing impaired education and Sugar
On 16/12/2009 15:04, Martin Langhoff wrote: Hi David, I think the Ceibal / LATU team has also been looking at various accesibility tools for Sugar. I've been talking with them recently about a 'Zoom' tool for kids with limited vision (hoping to post about this soonish) , and I think they've done some work with a screen reader. CC'ing Guadalupe Artigas and Emiliano, as I suspect they may have been involved. I was there during the first tests on this and helped the LATU team with the magnifier. As far as I know, hearing impaired don't have actual problems using a computer: they usually have problems with very complex sentences, with word meaning and other similar matters, like synonymy, antonymy and hyponomy. I met the children of a school for deaf in Maldonado and they use their XO like the others, working a lot with the record activity and with games like memorize, which help them binding concepts with their written form. The right question to be asked is does Sugar include any activity aimed at reinforcing basic linguistic skills? Hope this helps Andrea -- Andrea Mangiatordi http://www.farfalla-project.org/ http://bglug.linux.it/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] hearing impaired education and Sugar
As a follow-up to the previous message... Getting a wee bit ahead of current reality, here's two projects to keep an eye on with regards to software specifically targeted at deaf audiences: Dicta-Sign: http://www.dictasign.eu/ Zebedee: http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/filhol/research/topics.html http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/filhol/zebedee/ Though I didn't interact with him as much as I intended while he was here I learned that the common denominator above, Michael Filhol, is a friend of open source, and therefore I expect that some component of the above may be able to work it's way into Sugar in the future (or maybe it will simply live in the cloud and be accessible from an XO). ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
