Learned Helplessness: When Less Support Is More
Tuesday, May 21st, 2013School supports and resource-teaching allocations are in the news, raising the question of how much support a child actually needs in a classroom, or in a school. Has anyone paused to query if certain children need help, and if so – when exactly, just how much help, and at what stage of their schooling?
The IDK team [...]
Florida Legislates For The Auditory-Verbal Option
Tuesday, May 7th, 2013Parents of newly-identified children who’re profoundly deaf, have a lot going on. Not least, they must make communication choices on behalf of the children, and decide how the family is going to communicate in general.
Recently, the US state of Florida passed legislation for parents to be told of all the possible communication options for deaf children. [...]
Introduction To Auditory Verbal Therapy (Belfast)
Wednesday, April 10th, 2013Auditory-Verbal Therapy (AVT) is a parent-centred approach to enabling children with deafness to learn to talk by listening with hearing-devices.
The UK has just 14 certified AVT therapists, and on April 27th a free 2-hour information session on AVT is being held in Belfast for parents of deaf children aged under 5. Registration is needed (details [...]
Lip-Reading Challenges In The Hearing World
Friday, April 5th, 2013Having to verbally ”translate” for signing deaf friends who do not lip-read, confirmed this skill to Rachel Kolb, a masters student at Stanford University in California. She writes eloquently here, about the challenges of lip-reading.
Read>> Seeing At The Speed Of Sound
Lip-reading is a very under-rated skill. When hearing-devices are off, it can be the ideal back-up [...]
Parents’ Essential Role In Language Development
Saturday, March 30th, 2013Parents have a stronger role than researchers thought, in developing verbal language in children with hearing issues. A new study from the University of Miami shows “maternal sensitivity [has] strong and consistent effects on oral language learning”, a fact that hospital cochlear implant teams need to note.
Mom’s sensitivity helps language learning in deaf children
Dr Dana [...]
“He Is Not Me”: A Book On Mainstream Education
Monday, March 25th, 2013A new book, “He Is Not Me”, by Stuart McNaughton, tells the story of being deaf from birth – and opting for a cochlear implant in his twenties. Notably, Stuart’s parents mainstream-educated him, to equip him with real-world skills from the very start – with the support of teachers and professionals.
Read >> He Is Not [...]
Crowd-Computing: New Solutions For Captions
Tuesday, March 19th, 2013Speech-to-text automation has a huge role in creating classroom captions for students with hearing and other issues, who don’t always note-take in class. To address the multi-speaker shortcomings of automated caption solutions, a program, Scribe, was devised at the University of Rochester.
Scribe Tweaks Speech-To-Text Automation – With Humans
Scribe works by crowd-sourcing humans to caption speech [...]
Bilateral Cochlear Implants: Hearing With Two Ears
Thursday, March 14th, 2013With bilateral cochlear implants (both ears) in Ireland’s news recently, here’s some information that may answer readers’ and families’ questions.
Read: Who is a cochlear implant candidate?
Some unilateral (single-ear) implant-wearers keep a hearing-aid in the other ear, and can recognise speech by listening through two ears. Others choose to ‘go bilateral’ with 2 cochlear implants, to [...]
Study Supports For Doctors With Hearing Issues
Tuesday, March 12th, 2013An article, “Deafness Among Physicians and Trainees: A National Survey“, in the February 2013 issue of Academic Medicine, gives insights to how doctors with hearing issues access their training and get to work in the mainstream.
Read: Are deaf/hoh physicians getting needed supports?
Amplified stethoscopes (89%) were the most frequent accommodation, with hearing-devices/FM (32%), realtime captions (21%), sign [...]
California Student Seeks Captions Instead Of FM
Friday, March 8th, 2013In 2009, a California-based high school student with a cochlear implant asked her school district to provide realtime captions in class, instead of a FM system, which she said gave her headaches and relayed static noise. At end-2012, the case was reopened with a similar, second case in the state.
Read: Student asks Tustin schools to [...]