Resources

Kim Thomas

Technology has the power to make learning a more engaging and interesting experience for most children. But for deaf children, technology can be transformational.

Longwill School for the Deaf in Birmingham is a bilingual primary school, in which British Sign Language (BSL) and English are given equal status within the curriculum. There is a mix of deaf and hearing teachers on the staff, and all teachers use both languages. The school currently has 42 children, ranging in age from 3 to 11. For most deaf children, learning to read is particularly hard; not only is English their second language, but they are unable to work out the words on the page from the sound they make.

“Because the children are deaf, we think about how we can really exploit that visual strand,” says Alison Carter, Longwill’s deputy head. “Every classroom has an interactive whiteboard, and we have visualisers; a lot of the teaching is through that visual channel, because it gives them a window to the world. I think children, specifically deaf children, need to be able to learn experientially; it’s no good talking about a fire station to a deaf child – you need to take them there.”

So the school leapt at the opportunity offered by Birmingham East City Learning Centre (CLC) last September to borrow a number of PlayStation Portables (PSPs) for the Year 5, Year 6 and Foundation stage children to use. Because the PSPs have little cameras attached, enabling users to take photographs and record video footage, Alison’s first thought was that they could be used to record sign language classes for the hearing siblings of the schoolchildren: “Then my ideas kept on developing, and I realised the potential is as wide as your imagination can take it.”

Alison says she felt like ‘Mother Christmas’ when she handed the PSPs to the Year 5 and 6 children. Within 10 minutes, they were taking photographs of each other and signing into the video camera. From very early on, the school decided to let the children take the PSPs home, and they have taken great care of them: not one has yet been lost or damaged. The work the children do on the PSPs is uploaded to a central server each week and saved.

The school has found all sorts of uses for the PSPs. One difficulty the children have always faced, says Alison, is that, if they are asked to write something down, they have to communicate their ideas in their second language: “Say I’m a Year 6 teacher doing World War II and I’m teaching about evacuation, and I say, ‘You’ve been evacuated to Cornwall from Birmingham. Write a letter to your mum and tell her how you’re feeling.’ If we’re asking our children to do that, we’re asking them to do it in their second language. The richness and the depth of thought and the great content that the children are capable of would be lost, you’d be diluting it because they’d be writing in English.”

PSPs have changed that: “Now the teacher will say, ‘Go home, sign into your PSPs the letter that you’re doing, bring it back into school, and we’ll work on the translation into English then.’ So it’s becoming much more manageable for the children and you’re getting a much higher quality of work because they can reflect in their first language. And that has just been magical.”

The PSPs are also being used for home-school links, both with the older children, who can film activities at home, and show them on the interactive whiteboard once a week, and with the Foundation stage children. When the 3 and 4 year-old children go on trips to a nature centre, for example, the parents receive a note about it but children of this age, who have reduced communication skills, find it hard to tell their parents what they’re doing. Now the PSPs bring the children’s experiences home to the parents: “We film the nature centre trip using the PSPs and that goes home with the children that night, so the child and the parents can share that visit, talk it through and have a shared understanding of what’s going on. Sometimes there’ll be a note from the mum saying, ‘He’s signing something and I don’t know what he means,’ because their hand shapes are quite poorly formed at this age. So what the teacher can say on the PSP is, ‘We saw rabbits. This is the sign for rabbits,’ and teach the parent, so the parent can cue in to what the child is saying.”

Like many primary schools, Longwill has a Monday morning session in which the Foundation stage children talk about what they did at the weekend. Some of the very small children find this hard, because their signing skills are still emerging. But now the children can show the class what they’ve done because the parents use the PSPs to film the children: “The parents are filming them going out to the park. A lot of parents filmed Christmas morning, opening presents. Another mum came home with a new baby, and that came into school. Now the news session is enhanced – they sit in front of the interactive whiteboard and look at what their friends are doing.”

The PSPs are being used in many other ways, too – to teach spelling to the older children, for example, by filming BSL signs that can be displayed next to the written word; and to create ‘dialogue journals’ between teachers and individual children on the child’s PSP. Alison’s latest plan is to create a virtual repository of signed stories that can be downloaded from the server onto the PSPs. She has already filmed one of the teachers telling the ‘Hairy Bear’ story in BSL and downloaded it onto the PSPs of the Foundation stage children. The children then take the PSPs home and read the story at bedtime with their hearing siblings.

Not only have the children been enthusiastic about the PSPs, but the parents have too, says Alison; one parent told her that it had brought home and school life together, enabling her to share her child’s experiences in school in a completely new way. Alison is hoping now to acquire PSPs for all the schoolchildren, and is fizzing with ideas about how to use them.

She thinks, too, that other schools can learn from Longwill’s experience. “Good practice in special education is good practice everywhere,” she argues. The greatest benefit of the PSPs has been that they give responsibility to the learner: “We want them to be independent learners. We don’t want children who are spoon-fed; we want them to be thinking and creative. For any school that has that sort of aim for their children, PSPs can play an enormous role.”

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