Thursday, April 17, 2014

Blog 12

The Mountbatten

The Mountbatten is a device that is used for blind students. It writes in brail, which is the language used by the blind, and then a voice recorder says what the blind student is typing out loud. This is used so that the students can learn the brail language much faster than normal. This technology is very advanced and can also save and receive files. This technology allows the student to be involved in the classroom and receive feedback from the teacher. This technology sounds like a great idea to me. If I ever have a blind student, I would gladly incorporate this into my classroom. It would allow me to communicate with my student so they can learn everything I have to teach just like the rest of the students.

mountbatten

Teaching Math to The Blind-Professor Art Karshmer University of San Francisco

Professor Art Karshmer of the University of San Francisco,began this video expressing the difficulty of mathematics for blind students. He states that learning mathematical brail is much more difficult than learning words in brail. This is due to the fact that brail is read from left to right just as words are seen by people who can see. In the mathematical world it is much harder to read math problems from left to right. It is much easier to read them up and down instead. Professor Karshmer built a device using small blocks that have brail numbers and visual numbers on them. The student will be able to choose blocks and scan them using a barcode scanner. The scanner will them say the number out loud so the blind student knows what number they have in their hand. They will then place the number on a board, when this is done, a voice recorder will call out the row number letter and column number so that the student will know where it is. They will continue to put numbers down in there appropriate positions so that they can line their math problems up and down instead of left to right. This allows the blind students to learn math a lot faster. Professor Karshmer believes that this board can be used to teach addition and subtraction and everything in between all the way up to basic algebra. I really like this math board. Not only will it help blind students learn math, but also visual students. I would definitely use this technology in my classroom to help all of my students. I would allow my students to get into groups, and work together to learn basic math problems.

Assistive Technologies for Vision and Hearing Impaired Children

The video begins with examples of how partially blind and deaf students go through life every day. I couldn’t imagine how difficult it would be to go through this. I found this video to mostly be a motivational video directed at teachers who could potentially have blind and/or deaf students in their classroom. The video show many examples of how deaf and blind students go through their day. Throughout the video, questions pop up such as, “Are you prepare?” and “ Are you doing enough to support these students?”. These questions speak directly to me as a teacher because I realize how important assistive technologies are to the hearing and vision impaired. It is our duties as teachers to ensure that all students, regardless of disability, have the opportunity to succeed and make the most of their lives.

1 comment:

  1. Good post Katherine! I also found the Mountbatten pretty interesting. It is really great to be able to get all of your students involved in your classroom, especially physically impaired students. I find it really cool that it speaks out loud what they are typing so they can hear what they are typing.

    ReplyDelete