Group items tagged

Here is a lovely set of resources for educators, parents, and students to create an awareness of the needs of deaf students and how to meet those needs in the classroom. I had a deaf uncle and learned sign language and it has served me well when it was necessary in my life. Younger students often enjoy signing songs - it adds such a rythmic beauty. Here are some great resources. Consider having students sign songs and speeches in your next assembly.

A set of lesson plans for grades 6-8 from PBS to help students understand and reflect upon those who are deaf. This is integrated with writing as well.

"25 August 2011 Last updated at 02:17 GMT Help People who are deaf or hard of hearing have long complained that going to watch a film can be an unsatisfactory experience, with subtitled films on at unsociable times and often suffering from technical problems. But a solution could soon available in the form of special glasses which allow the wearer to see subtitles directly in front of their eyes, giving them the freedom of choice afforded to hearing people. Graham Satchell reports."

Here are some suggestions for deaf awareness raising activities. This is also the kind of thing that would be excellent integrated into summer church or vacation camps. You can get great ideas from here.

Move over Khan Academy. Educreations is here with a super simple web or iPad app that lets you record lessons to share with your students, wherever they are. If they enable one thing like common core tagging (tag it with the standard) and enough contribute we will have an incredibly powerful tool.

The strength of Khan Academy's tutorials is content and clear presentation of this content. I didn't find either in Educreations' showcased examples: most could just be presented as a good old slideshow. Granted, a few do have an audio comment. But you can do that with slidecasts too (e.g. you can synch an audio file with your slides on Screencast.net or on MyPlick.com) Moreover, there is no way to caption such Educreations presentations including audio for the deaf, which means they can't be used in schools in US, Italy and other countries that have laws imposing accessibility for all for educational materials. And you can't subtitle them for people who don't know the original language, which severely curtails the potential use. Khan Academy, on the other hand has an international captioning/subtitling team - see http://gigaom.com/video/khan-academy-universal-subtitles/ . So OK, Educreations have an iPad app - the point is that Khan Academy's tutorials don't need one. The real difference is that Educreations' content is crowdsourced and the content of Khan Academy's tutorials isn't: not enough to outweigh the accessibility and internationalization issues above. Teachers can already produce their own online tutorials as slideshows, slidecasts or videos that can be captioned/subtitled in other languages with other platforms.

ASL Dictionary with video

Automatic subtitles in YouTube? I use Dragon regularly and wonder if this could be done... it looks like it still needs some work but the idea of it working with little or no training is amazing.

Youtube with subtitles... ESL, learning strategies, differentiation, oh my!