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My deaf education professor is always telling us that for children, the problem with deafness is not a lack of hearing, but rather an abundance of isolation. Especially for kids who sign, their time in school may be the only opportunity that they have to talk to other people in their own native language. Most parents of deaf children do not know sign language, and the other children and adults on their block would not be familiar with it either. Even in school, if a child is mainstreamed, the only person that he may be able to directly talk to could be the interpreter in the classroom. This isn't giving the child a lot of time to interact with children that are his own age.
One way that this can be combated is through the use of Skype or ivisit. These features could allow the child to work on their homework or simply chat with another deaf child who may not be close enough to physically see the child in my class each day. Imagine that this child now has someone to interact with, instead of having very little communication during his time outside of school.
It isn't an ideal situation, but using this technology to foster communication would be making progress in the right direction for that child. The only thing that I worry about when using Skype in this type of capacity is that if you have two children talking to eachother at home, where the teacher cannot easily monitor the conversation, you might get into instances of one child bullying another.In this instance, the teacher may never find out about this. Do any of you think that this would be an issue? If so, how do you think that we could combat it?
Within the context of the classroom, it would also be really neat if I was working on a weather unit, and we could Skype in with a deaf classroom in Florida for five minutes a day. I could have one of the children ask them what their weather was like. We could then make a graph of the weather in Florida versus the weather in Michigan over a certain period of time. This would teach the children social skills and show them that learning transcends subjects. This could be both a math and science lesson. In addition, you could add in geography. For example, I could teach the students map skills by showing them where Florida was, and where in Florida these children lived. We could also calculate how far this classroom was from our own through the use of maps.
That is a very neat idea. I like how simple technology can be used in such a differnt way. This is just like Twitter, I never really thought of it as a social networking place, I just thought it was a place for people to tell people what they are doing every second of their lives. but its relaly not.
ReplyDeleteSkype and ivisit have become great tools for me in the classroom. In my deaf ed. class this semester, for example, I am working on a group project with a girl from Maui and one from Guam. They meet with the MSU students in my group over ivisit. The only problem is coordinating the time difference because one of them is 12 hours off from Michigan time and the other is 6 hours off.
ReplyDeleteThank you for such wonderful information about use of Skype. Additionally, you may also try alternatives such as webex, gomeetnow, gotomeeting, R-HUB web conferencing servers etc.
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