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Education
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Whiteboards aid instruction for visually, hearing impaired students
Dec 8, 2005
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by Alicia Zappier
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In St. Augustine, FL, the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind provides a learning environment for roughly 800 students with varying degrees of sensory loss, and it's using electronic whiteboards to improve instruction.
FDSB is a state-supported Pre-K-12 school for eligible hearing-impaired and visually-impaired students. The campus is divided into nine different departments -- an elementary, middle, and high school for the deaf, an elementary, middle, and high school for the blind, and a special needs school for elementary, middle school, and high school students.
Class sizes are smaller than that of a regular school, averaging five students in elementary classrooms, 10 in middle school, and 15 in high school classrooms. The special needs school educates students who have hearing and visual impairments along with other handicaps, such as cerebral palsy.
The school first invested in two SMART Technologies' SMART Board interactive whiteboards back in 1997. Including recent purchases this spring and summer, FSDB has 87 units at its facility. "The total number of classrooms to be equipped is around 100, so we're getting close to complete in the classrooms," said Susan Cooper, a middle school reading/language teacher at FSDB. There are plans to install another SMART Board in the blind library's instructional area for teachers to use with students who have low-vision, she added.
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| At the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind, more than 80 SMART Boards are installed in classrooms to help students with math, reading, and other subjects. |
"Within the deaf and blind departments themselves, things are usually grouped on academic levels, not by sensory loss," Cooper explained. "We can have a completely blind student with a low-vision student, as well as a deaf student with a hard of hearing student. We can make the accommodation for the low vision student that they need and other accommodation for the other blind student."
The SMART Boards have become a pertinent classroom accessory. "Our totally blind students don't use them," Cooper offered, "but we have blind students who play on the basketball team. They can see, but when it comes to text, they need modification. The boards offer really large text with special bright colors. They can view an Internet page and they don't have to try to find that tiny mouse arrow. They can just click on a link with their hand. The blind students turn the volume up and access the sound off their computers."
Teachers use the board for almost every subject, but it's especially helpful for reading and language. "Most of the time we use it, we use it like a regular classroom would. But the big impact it's had for the deaf department is that it has made things visual and kept the students focused on one thing," Cooper said. "In our classroom, we use sign language to communicate, so the kids have to be watching the speaker. A deaf student can't watch the speaker and read a textbook on their desk at the same time.
"So, we put the text up on the SMART Board. The teacher is standing right next to it, and she signs it and reads it to them at the same time so the kids don't have to constantly look up and down."
Sue Clark has been teaching math in the school's deaf department for nine years. Most recently, she was named math specialist for the entire campus. The SMART Board has made things much more efficient in her classrooms.
"Everything I'd written on the chalkboard now is on the computer, and I can save it and print it out for students. After I prepare a lesson, I can bring it up if it's something I've taught before and they've forgotten it. Students can share their work, and the board is great for problem solving," she said.
By touching the interactive whiteboard, the students can access and control any computer application or multimedia device, such as CDs and DVDs. With the software, they can write over applications in digital ink and then edit, save, print, or post their notes to a Web site to use in the future.
Along with clip art, templates, and maps, the SMART Board offers a variety of geometric shapes for math lessons. "When I'm working with formulas, it's easy to manipulate the geometric shape," Clark said.
Both teachers agreed the students learned how to use the technology fairly quickly. "They're eager to learn it because they're motivated by the visual," Clark said. Sometimes, when a teacher receives a SMART Board for the first time, a student in a previous classroom will instruct the teacher on how to use it.
FSDB uses its SMART Boards along with mostly InFocus projectors, as well as scanners and digital cameras. Eventually, the school plans to have a SMART Board in every classroom.
MORE INFO
FSDB www.fsdb.k12.fl.us
InFocus www.infocus.com
SMART Technologies www.smarttech.com/a>
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