braillerunner

Education currently refers to the process deemed appropriate by society and governmental agencies in which students progress grade by grade or year by year through elementary, secondary and post-secondary academic pursuits. Interestingly enough, there seems to be little consensus on what the definition of education actually is between state and federal government agencies. As standardized testing has become key to the acquisition of government funding for public schools it appears that individual states and school districts are restructuring curriculums in secondary school content areas such as mathematics in order to target the acquisition of specific math skills without regard for the need for a natural progression of math content areas that will ensure content mastery within an overall program. I refer to a decision by one of my school districts to focus on algebra skills by teaching only algebra 1 and 2 and removing pre-algebra from the curriculum. It seems to me that pre-algebra is logically very useful and a helpful precursor to the more advanced courses. This is the shape of one facet of the educational process.

It seems that a wiser approach to achieving high levels of overall educational success is to consider the needs and abilities of the learner. What skills does the learner bring to the table and what needs? Once these are assessed, curriculum can be presented and modified according to the strengths and weaknesses of the individual students. The greatest challenge with this strategy is that it places a great deal of responsibility upon both the teacher and the students to work together in the learning process. The teacher must be able to actively gauge the intake of information by their students in terms of quantity and levels of difficulty and to make allowances for reflection and review when difficult topics are encountered and for increasing the pace of instruction when students have achieved sufficient mastery of the content under consideration. Regular feedback is essential on an individual basis by the teacher to foster the maximization of engagement by each student in a content area. This helps to ensure a balance of high levels of self-esteem and confidence as the student has concrete evidence that he or she has fulfilled the requirements for mastery of content material.

By these descriptions it seems that education and learning appear to be somewhat different. Education is the process as deemed appropriate by the educational system set in place “from above” so to speak while learning is the actual activity of a student becoming proficient in skills and knowledgeable about a content area on an individual basis. From the point of view of a skilled instructor, it seems irresponsible to rely wholly upon the dictates of components of standardized testing to achieve both the goals of the educational system and the needs of the learner. Some form of compromise is needed in order to allow for the maximization of learning.     

These are interesting questions because as an instructor, the concerns that are often uppermost in my mind are what are the syllabi, what delivery of the specified content in the syllabus will be most interesting to my students and what is it that I am going to have to do to convince parents and administrators that I am in fact delivering curricula in a manner that appears to be  competent and proficient. Looked at in this way it is sometimes difficult to separate what education is from the trappings that go along with it.

The purpose of education is to provide an environment in which meaningful learning takes place. Meaningful learning may include a variety of subjective interpretations from concrete demonstration of learned skills through authentic assessment to simply being present to observe or listen to a presentation by a “teacher” or fellow student with no assessment being involved. One of the classical conceptualizations of what education is and perhaps the one that is most commonplace is the image of a teacher standing at the front of a classroom full of students imparting knowledge using the “sage on stage” technique. The learners in this situation are involved to the degree that they are taking notes or listening to and processing the information, but such an environent provides little opportunity for students to participate in the learning process and to make the knowledge imparted their own.

An example of educational activity that I have recently engaged in as an itinerant vision specialist departs from this model to a considerable degree. A high school student on my caseload who is blind has started making the transition from an oral/aural learner to a tactual learner (braille reader) meaning that instead of listening to material being presented via lecture or audio tape and giving auditory responses for a scribe to write down he has begun to use his braille notetaker to do homework, take notes and tests and to turn these in with minimal assistance using the internet as the medium for exchange of this information between he and his sighted teachers. Over the past three months this student has begun to develop sufficient levels of proficiency to pass each of his 5 courses respectably. What is so different about my role in this situation is that I have become more of the facilitator of this process by teaching teachers how to use internet email efficiently, develop back-up plans in the event that the internet for any reason fails, and to teach my student how to use the various features of the notetaker and to help him become comfortable with communicating with technical support staff independently when problems arise. Basically, I am working myself out of a job by helping this student develop increased levels of independence. However, the end result, is that the outcome of this process is resulting in an independent, highly motivated student who is experiencing real academic success. Although I am not teaching him everyday and much of my work takes place behind the scenes, I feel that my efforts are producing results that are equal to or better than those that I might be able to achieve were I daily acting as the “sage on stage” on this student’s behalf. This somewhat unorthodox and indirect process provides all of the requirements of the educational process with regard to this student, in my opinion.

As Nate indicated in his post this morning our current task is to address classroom artifacts including grades, syllabi, rubrics, etc and discuss why or how we might avoid using them with the purpose of guiding but not shaping the educational process. My feeling is that syllabi are valid and useful “artifacts” in that they provide a means for the learner to gain a complete appreciation for the material that will be the foci of study within a course structure. Also, the expectations of the student are clearly laid out in a syllabus making this sort of the equivalent to a contract between the teacher and student in the event there are concerns at any time with regard to perceptions of the acceptability of an assignment or test. Details such as requirements for participation and attendance can also be addressed as well as the level of skill proficiency expected to be achieved by the learner at the completion of the course. These core components of a syllabus serve to assist the learner in deciding upon the desirability or appropriateness of a course while “shopping” a course calendar to make choices for course selections. Once involved in a course I find a syllabus extremely helpful in keeping myself organised with regard  to timelines for presentations, writing papers, and keeping up with required readings. For these reasons I would recommend that course syllabi be retained as an extremely valuable artifact in the educational setting. I would argue however, that the syllabus is only a very useful tool and is not in and of itself an actual component of the educative process as Nate pointed out.

I am in favor of tests and grading because they provide the learner with feedback with regard to levels of performance within a course. From a theoretical standpoint, any teacher generated test is likely to contain a considerable amount of bias and may not be perceived to be pure, authentic assessment. However, there are tremendous benefits to be derived from testing in that the learner is forced to review material from texts, homework and lectures which leads to the use of higher reasoning processes in actually transacting meaningful information from a course that may have concrete application in actual situations. Grading is an effective tool used by wise teachers to keep students focused upon key ideas under discussion. An example is that I am writing this document in response to Nates directions in order to have this assignment reviewed and graded. I anticipate that I shall receive an A for this effort. If I do I will realise that I have fulfilled the expectations for this particular task. If I do not receive an A then I will know that I have not fulfilled the expectations for this task, and will hopefully carefully review what I have done so as to prevent me from making similar mistakes in the future.

Rubrics are useful in that they require the instructor to lay out what expectations exist for students to achieve certain grade levels in a course. The unfortunate thing about rubrics is that they also seem to set the limits on expectation levels thereby limiting the student and the instructor in the range of subject material to be discussed in a course or in particular course components. This artifact has perhaps the greatest potential to “shape” the learning process before it has had the time to develope fully. I would recommend that it is necessary to carefully word rubrics so as to leave room for individual expression of the students and for flexibility in the means of presentation by an instructor. 

I just realised a great benefit of using blogs. As I finished the last post, it occurred to me that when I press the “publish” button I am actually doing just that. I am aware that before I press that button I am careful to proofread and edit the post as necessary before allowing others to read it. As a teacher, these are primary tasks that we want to convey to our students and get them to practice. Publishing online in this fashion reinforces all of these skills (if properly supervised) in an authentic context. It also gives the teacher an opportunity to remotely monitor the progress of development of writing skills of their students, not to mention increase their repertoire of computer access skills.

This realisation comes at a point where I have just successfully taught one of my student’s teachers how to use the visual display mode on the BrailleNote. By making a connection to the classroom computer using a serial cable connected to the BrailleNote and activating specialised software for this application, this teacher who is not trained in braille, can view in real-time the written work of my student in print on the computer screen as my student composes the work using the braille entry keys on the BrailleNote. This is an extremely powerful tool in facilitating the development of proficiency in specialised vocabulary in individual content areas in mainstreamed educational settings for my students who are blind.   

In the past few weeks I have had the unexpected experience of getting to participate in my own series of connectivity issues with my personal laptop. This machine has operated in a variety of wireless environments over the past 18 months and has been so reliable that when all of a sudden it stopped doing so, I was in somewhat of a quandry. I have become familiar with issues that my student’s BrailleNote’s had encountered such as incorrect internet provider, subnet mask, and default gateway numbers but was suddenly faced with the same issues with my laptop. Even though this computer has been “repaired” twice in the past two weeks I spent days experimenting with trying to acquire my home wireless signal, to no avail and eventually bought a 25 foot ethernet cable to attach to a recently purchased wired modem, which is attached to my wireless modem. This experience has been valuable because of the additional perspective I now have on my student’s situations. Perhaps the most important discovery has been relearning the restrictions placed upon me by this ethernet cord. If the phone rings or if I want to work in my easy chair I have to finish internet tasks because the internet connection cannot travel with me. In both of my student’s schools no wireless connections exist. Hence they must rely upon modems and ethernet cables wherever we can “conveniently” place them for internet access. Since they have not yet complained about this aspect of getting connected, I expect that they have not yet begun to appreciate the benefits of wireless connectivity which I plan to start concentrating on as soon as we can install wireless access points for them. 

One thing I forgot to add in the last post is that two other BrailleNote internet connectivity issues encountered recently by my students included an exchange email server based problem at school and dial-up connectivity at home. Both connections were operational after the initial installation but both shut down suddenly and there seemed to be little explanation for either of these problems. The best theory for the school based issue is that the BrailleNote may have been automatically flagged as an unauthorized device on the school’s exchange server. Normal maintenance by the school’s IT staff may have resulted in this connection being shut-down as a matter of routine and the staff would hardly have been able to recall the specific shut-down procedure in the large volume of a week’s activities. This issue was rectified by having the IT staff assign a unique IP (Internet Provider) address for the BrailleNote on the exchange server. The home dial-up situation is not yet rectified but the manufacturer and the internet provider are working together to find a solution. An interesting anecdote is that a representative from the internet provider company made it a point to visit with my student and me to learn as much as possible about the connectivity characteristics of the BrailleNote. The representative spent almost an hour with us as we performed diagnostics on the internal settings. This seemed to be a very educational experience for the IP representative as she had little familiarity with a device capable of connecting to the internet designed for users who are blind with auditory and tactual feedback. She expressed a fascination with and a desire to learn the braille code, so I gave her some literature on it. The school’s internet provider had a similar response as he kept asking me to use the ”screen” icons to guide me through the process. When I told him that I had no screen and could refer only to auditory and refreshable braille display feedback he and I both realized we had need of help from the manufacturer’s technical support staff and solved the problem via a conference telephone call.     

Hi everyone. Apart from suffering from additional limited or non-existent internet connectivity, my BrailleNote using students seem to be making progress. One student who is bilingual and had almost always been primarily reliant upon books on tape or having tests administered orally is for the most part functioning independently using the BrailleNote mPower and Tiger embosser with the expectation of being a tactual reader (braille) and turning in completed assignments on time with sighted peers in the classroom. At this point in time, this student who is blind is carrying a full schedule of courses in a mainstreamed high school setting and is passing all 5 subject areas. This is very encouraging. I know that my stastically-minded colleagues will again remind me that what we have here is simply a very strong correlation and cannot be considered a cause and effect relationship, and may therefore not  be based upon “scientifically based” research but as a practitioner in the field, I am convinced that this technology is a key factor in making my student successful. This is the first time that classroom teachers have been able to directly exchange written documents without relying upon an aide or vision specialist to translate from braille to print and vice versa.

Another student using the same technology appears to be making strides towards increasing independence in a middle school classroom. This student’s classroom aide made the comment this week that she is doing “less and less” for the student as there is no longer any need for brailled assignments to be transcribed into print or for tests or assignments to be transcribed from print to braille for the student’s usage. An unexpected benefit this week came when we combined the Tiger embosser with the classroom scanner and Kurzweil 3000 translation software. Unfortunately, a brailled English textbook became lost in the mail system. Although another copy has been ordered, we have been successful in scanning appropriate pages from the classroom print text, transferring these to braille electronic files and then embossing the pages as necessary for the students’ usage. Although we anticipate only 90-95% accuracy in the translation using this method, the product has been quite satisfactory for the student’s usage and the process is very straightforward. The only other drawback is that we will run through quite a lot of braille paper if it is necessary to braille the entire text but we are prepared for this eventuality. The BrailleNote may alleviate some of the need for extra paper usage in that my student can easily use the notetaker’s 32 cell refreshable braille displayand/or the auditory feedback option to read or listen to the electronic files if his teacher feels this is appropriate. 

The “bleeding edge” bit in the past few weeks has had to do with continued internet connectivity issues at home and at school. The problem as I see it is that teachers are prone to blame the technology first when something is not working such as the internet access for both of my students. In both cases this issue was not caused by the BrailleNote device. In one instance the problem was caused by a faulty internet flashcard connector. The problem was not easy to diagnose as from outward appearances the device looked to be intact. However, my student discovered that something was loose where the wire attached to the flash card and we assumed this to be the culprit. The next problem was getting a new card because the supplier was out of stock on this unit and the warranty on it had just elapsed. It was necessary to contact the manufacturer of the BrailleNote to confirm that a slightly different flashcard would suffice because it was immediately available. This process took about 10 days and in the interim my student had to learn how to save files on a USB portable drive and hand this to his teachers so that they could then download completed assignments into Microsoft Word and print them out. My student also became accustomed to asking his teachers to save their files sent to him on this disk. Becoming proficient in these sequences makes it possible for my student to have a back-up system in case the internet fails for any reason.

Hi everyone,

I just posted my first lesson on the BNTE course wikki but am unable to view it. Is there a particular option that can be selected to view what the students actually see in the wikki? I only seem to be able to post information, at this point.

I now have two students who are actively using their BrailleNote notetaker devices. I felt very proud last weekend when I received my first email message from my 6th grader while at a conference on the east coast. I received several messages from my ninth grade student which was very pleasing as well. As the maximisation of independence for my students is the focus of my efforts to familiarise them with this technology I am happy to report that my week-long absence (due to the conference) does not appear to have caused any serious interruption in my 9th grade student’s access to the curriculum.

Challenges that we faced this week however, were sudden losses of internet connectivity at home and at school for my 9th grader. It appears that a power supply problem at a network level may be the partial cause of this but after further diagnostic activities we isolated the problem to a deteriorating ethernet connector card. Interestingly enough, this $80.00 item is the key to internet connectivity, has just elapsed its 30 day warranty, and the supplier will not have access to another one until the first or second week in November. This has serious implications for my student if the device fails altogether. The moral of this story; always have available a back-up ethernet connector card for the BrailleNote.

For my 6th grader who has just started to use his notetaker there have been challenges in his being able to send email attachments although he can receive them from his teachers. The first and natural inclination of the teaching staff is to blame the technology and revert to the Perkins for manual braille production of assignments. What is interesting is that the problem actually lies with the school’s rather unsophisticated internet email provider. Some investigation with several teachers provided evidence that email access had been intermittent at best this past week and the source of the problem was discovered by Humanware technical support staff via the telephone, thank goodness. Obviously this has serious implications for a student who is relying upon internet email as the primary communications channel between teachers and students. The moral of this story appears to be; before implementing assistive technology devices that depend upon internet email connectivity, always do a thorough assessment of the reliablility of the email provider. This school is so small that it relies upon IT support via an on-call service for most problems encountered. The computer/business teacher is learning as much as possible as quickly as possible to act as the on-site problem-solver for issues involving computer software/hardware. Unfortunately, neither he or I have had much experience with connectivity issues such as those that we encountered this week.