Deafness+and+Podcasting

Deafness is the inability to hear whether it is partial or complete loss. Over one million people in the United States and over 28 million people worldwide have some form of hearing loss. Deafness is a barrier in any education situation where the majority of the content is accessed through verbal and audio pathways. A teacher lecture is no help to students with hearing loss. While sign language and printed material can deliver word-for-word what is said, not all students learn best from just simply listening or reading what the teacher says whether they have hearing loss or not. Podcasts are audio, video, and sometimes audio/video files that are digitally stored and delivered through digital playing devices. Computers, IPod, IPads, and mp3 players are all devices a student can use to access a podcast. Absent students or those who need to review a previous lesson can simply access the podcast through the teacher’s blog or by subscription. Video Podcasts, called Vodcasts, are podcast that include video. Having images, videos, diagrams, charts, and other visible forms of accessing content can benefit all learners whether they have hearing loss or not. A deaf student could even watch the podcast before the relevant class lesson in order to be able to increase participation during the class lesson. One barrier to the Vodcast is that the audio/commentary that goes along with the video is not accessible for students with hearing loss. While visual aids can communicate in ways that audio cannot, it still is not a complete form of delivering content to learners. A deaf student may not understand a portion of the video. This will leave the student confused and frustrated. Fortunately, captioning Vodcasts is possible and becoming more user friendly as technology develops. There are numerous ways of going about this which all have positives and negatives. The least effort by the teacher but most professional way is to have a company do it, but that costs the most money. The least expensive way would be for a teacher to add the captions themselves through video editing software, but that is time consuming. Then, there is the middle ground where Web 2.0 software can caption videos for you, but it won’t be as accurate. Regardless of the method a teacher decides on, vodcasts with captioning will benefit students with hearing loss as well as everyone else.
 * Deafness and Podcasting **
 * By Michael Maki **

For more information on Vodcasts and captioning. [] [|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deafness#Assistive_techniques_and_devices_for_hearing_impairment] [|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#Video_podcasts] []c [] [] []

Deaf Podcasting by Gloria Braxton Spring 2012 Term 2 Odiogo-Texts to Voice Podcast Most people understand a deaf person with a speech impediment when they have spent some time with them and are familiar with their speech. It might be a different story if they could not see the person speaking or hear a recording prior to listening to them speak. I work with an interpreter who is hearing impaired; she speaks with a speech impediment. It took about a week of working directly with her to understand her from anywhere in the room. She has been a great asset to my non-hearing impaired students and wanted to do more. She wanted to be able to offer podcasts to the rest of our students who were not of the deaf community. She wanted these to accompany her blog post to help make everything more accessible, but did not feel confident enough in her speaking pronunciation to do a podcast of her own. So she started Googling for text-to-voice podcasting services, and came across Odiogo which provides this service at no charge. I looked up Odiogo and this was the invitation to all: Check out our automated podcast “to go”: your site’s RSS feeds, text articles and blog posts can be converted automatically to iPod-ready audio files ready to download and play anywhere, anytime, on any device. I was thrilled, now my special education para-educator could communicate freely without the stigma that may be accompanied with a speech impediment. I suggested that she create a classroom blog that the kids could access with supervision that focused on the Read Right program using MP3 players to enhance fluency and comprehension skills. This podcasting would enable the students that had difficulty working with her due to the challenges they already had in understanding/comprehension of classroom content due to communication issues to be more successful. [] [|www.odiogo.com/] [] []