Australia has introduced its first mainstream “Model Classroom” for deaf students at LaSalle Catholic College in Bankstown. Classrooms are planned to maximise learning in mainstream schools with interactive whiteboards, captioned resources, visual computer content and sound-field systems. The pilot project was designed by Media Access Australia in collaboration with the Catholic Education Office and LaSalle…
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Many people are unaware that seven different forms of intelligence are known of. Few people excel in all areas so it helps to identify where you fit. Recent studies show that deaf people can have a head-start in the area of language, when consistent teaching is received from an early age. Someone who does not…
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In Ireland deaf children have the chance to communicate by text, sign or voice. This is not always the case in developing countries, where children can be isolated from society due to the lack of access to communication. The world’s first project in which deaf & hearing classmates use SMS to chat face-to-face for inclusion,…
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Children need to develop literacy skills before their first day of school and research consistently shows children learn literacy skills even before talking. Emergent literacy theorists believe that children start learning about literacy (reading and writing) from birth. Infants can learn about the letters of the alphabet and concepts of print long before they are able…
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Late in 2009, South Africa’s “Got Talent” show announced its winner, a deaf hip-hop dancer named Darren Rajibal. The 19 year-old had danced for just four years when during a power cut he decided to entertain family and friends by dancing. Many of his moves were learned from internet videos. After the show, the lead…
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On April 8, 2010, Anna Daly from Cork radio station LifeFM talked with IDK’s Miriam Walsh, an attendee at the Arts Council’s Future Arts conference in Dublin from March 27-29, 2010. A podcast of this interview will be posted here asap. IDK’s Caroline Carswell also wrote an arts inclusion advisory for administrators after the event. AD: Anna Daly (LifeFM)…
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Young deaf students attending Lawrence Elementary School in the US have seen the literacy and numeracy benefits of a new software programme. In the classroom, audio output from the computer is sent via radio waves, directly to receivers the students wear on their hearing aids and/or cochlear implants. Ambient noise is limited for the children…
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Deafness had a key role in the invention of the phone, the internet and SMS texting. As voting for Ireland’s Net Visionary Awards gets under way, Miriam Walsh explains the link to each technology. Would you consider deafness in any way to have influenced the telephone, Internet and SMS texting as everyday tools for communication? Most…
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Just recently, the Early Learning Initiative at National College of Ireland launched its new Parent Child Home Programme (PCHP). Many of the programme’s “points” are similar to the home-work the parents of severely to profoundly deaf children need to do, to develop their child’s language as early in life as possible. Based on a programme started…
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In recent years websites such as CaptionTube and independent services made videos and audio more accessible to deaf or hard of hearing people. In November 2009, Google announced the automatic captioning of videos on its YouTube site to boost captioning provision and support text indexing. Existing captioning services are not always user friendly or free. With over…
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