Making Braille Reading Fun for Children with Benjamin's House
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Presentation given by Jonathan Hassell (Accessibility Editor, BBC jam) and Nick Kind (Spark Learning) at Techshare 2007. Covers: how Braille displays and audio content can transform a blind five-year old's learning; how Spark-Tinopolis created Benjamin's House as an eLearning game to help blind children to learn English and Braille literacy (both reading and writing); how we got Benjamin Zephaniah to contribute poems and be the host of the game; how we created an aurally compelling game world; how materials created
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Making Braille Reading Fun for Children with Benjamin's House
- 1. Benjamin ’ s House Making Braille reading and writing fun for children Nick Kind – Spark Learning Jonathan Hassell – BBC jam
Editor's Notes
- Jonathan ’ s bit starts
- So to give you some examples of what specific SEN commissions we are progressing: You ’ ve seen a trail on the film of what we ’ re doing to help literacy in the Blind community. Literacy for blind children is all about learning Braille. Early Braille tuition and practice is currently only possible in one-to-one sessions with a teacher or Teaching Assistant, often only on one or two days a week. At present, the lack of appropriate materials and time allowed for Braille tuition make it very challenging for teachers to make this fun or engaging . We ’ re looking to use new Braille technologies to allow Braille learners to practise their literacy skills without the aid of a teacher, over a wider, more engaging set of stories, rhymes and poems than they currently have access to. We ’ re doing something similar for bilingual Deaf learners, who have the challenge of learning written English and British Sign Language at the same time. We ’ re looking to use new technologies such as BSL Avatars, which have been developed by the academic community, to support Deaf learners to grow their literacy skills. Finally, we are looking to use Soundscape techniques taken from the evolving Blind games community to open up hands-on, interactive learning to Blind learners, by using sounds to indicate their environment and what is happening, rather than the usual “ tell don ’ t show ” multiple-choice quizzes or book learning. I could say much more, but I hope that this has given you a flavour of the innovative and creative approaches we are using to bring learning to life for many children who have often been under-served by recent advances in learning.
- Jonathan again
- Jonathan again