Blog Assignment #12

The video Assistive Technologies for Vision and Hearing Impaired Students really shed light on how much extra time is needed with special needs children. As a group we never experienced having classes with vision or hearing impaired students and never fully understood the extreme importance of one on one time with each student, but after watching this video we are more educated. These videos and articles informed us about new technologies that are available for vision and hearing impaired students and how teachers can use them in their classrooms. Here is what we learned.

Hearing

HAT Devices

Remote microphone hearing assistance technology (HAT) delivers the speech signal from the microphone to other audio devices so students can have easier access to what the teacher is saying. HAT devices can bring the speech and sound signals from the microphone to your child in a number of ways:

1. Directly to your child’s hearing aid, cochlear implant or other hearing device via a hearing loop;
2. Directly to your child’s hearing aid, cochlear implant or other hearing device via a wireless receiver that your child wears;
3. To a strategically positioned loudspeaker that benefits your child and others in the room;
4. To a single, personal loudspeaker close to your child.

This technology does not only help the hearing impaired, but also others students that may have a hard time hearing from the back of the classroom.

Vision

In the video IPad Usage for the Blind, Wesley Majerus demonstrates how the vision impaired navigate the features on the IPad.

Here are the features Wesley uses:

• Voice controlled
• Uses gestures to navigate through all the features of the IPad
• Swipes finger across screen to determine what app to choose and then double taps to select the app
• Swipes three fingers across IPad to flip pages
• IPad reads the books to you and it is the only ereader that does voice control for books

Coming from Ipad owners, we did not know that these features were accessible for the vision impaired, but we believe that IPads are a wonderful tool for teaching through technology.

Teaching math to the blind discusses how reading braille is linear and this tool allows the vision impaired to vertically compute math problems, because number placement is necessary for students to be able to understand more complex math problems. With this technology, the vision impaired students are able to drag their fingers across the board and read the math problem just as any other student would be able to. It would also help non-impaired students be able to clearly visualize math problems.