Learning Center

Amy's Start Toward a Successful Future: Why is It Important to Talk About the Future?

When I was in 2nd through 4th grade, I started attending meetings to plan for my future. My mom wanted me to be involved and listen to people in my meeting. In the meeting, I felt so confused and overwhelmed when I listened to their discussions about my future. In 5th grade, I was still attending the IEP (in Texas they are called ARD) meetings to discuss my future and how to improve my education. By this time, I was very upset and still did not understand why I had to be involved in the meeting every year! My mom tried to explain why I had to attend the meeting and why it was important, but I still did not want to attend the meeting. Then, later when I was in the 6th through 7th grade, I finally started to participate and discuss issues on how to improve my education and plan my future a little bit at a time. Just in case, I had my advocate there to take over and tell them about my classes if I needed help.

Expectations in Transition Meeting-Encouraging Student Participation

Transition planning for high school students has been going on in some formal way for over two decades within the school system. Some states set the transition age at 14, and others started the planning at age 16. In most cases, it was addressed as a separate process with its own set of paperwork from that of the Individual Education Plan developed in an IEP meeting where academic progress, classroom accommodations and other student needs were addressed. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) places emphasis on the importance of the transition planning process, with clear guidelines as to how planning should take place.

Children's Literature Featuring Characters Who are Blind or Have Low Vision: Annotated Bibliography

Approximately 50 book titles compiled by Mary Ann Siller. A reading motivation for students who are blind or visually impaired is to introduce them to books with visually impaired characters. The forty-eight titles in this bibliography compiled by Mary Ann Siller include stories about Ronald who has an array of humorous mishaps until he gets this glasses (Watch Out Ronald Morgan!), an emperor's daughter who is blind (The Seeing Stick), Brian who is blind and learns to take care of his new parakeet (Brian's Bird), and many more.

Louis Braille: Humanitarian, Teacher, Inventor, and Friend

Happy Birthday Louis Braille! The inventor of the Braille code is known throughout the world as a great humanitarian who believed in literacy for everyone. What a wonderful tribute "Braille Literacy Month" is to his legacy through the centuries.

Federal Laws and Accessible Media

Requirements for accessibility of television programming and video

In Praise of Siblings

The understatement of my life could be that "all kids are different." Give my daughter a set of watercolors and brushes, and she's happy all afternoon. Her brother's idea of fun with paint involves camouflage, a CO-2 cartridge with a case of 500 high velocity pellets and a semi-automatic paintball gun. I should have seen this coming when my eldest first wielded his pork chop bone like a Walther PPK during Sunday dinner at the tender age of two. Only three men I know use a pork chop bone like that, and I gave birth to two of them (and married the third). Either brother would lay his life down for his sister, assuming she hadn't gotten on his nerves that day.

Child Abuse and Neglect: CA/N

Stories of child abuse and neglect (CA/N) represent a horrific reality that is difficult to comprehend, much less accept. Unfortunately, such difficulty does not stop people like the Wisconsin "Predator Priest" from abusing over 200 boys at the St. John's School for the Deaf. In reality, the best available research indicates that CA/N is experienced by children with disabilities at a rate that is three times that experienced by their nondisabled peers (Sullivan & Knutson, 2000). CA/N destroys lives, devastates families, and damages organizations.

The Logic of the Motion Picture in the Classroom: Films in Schools for the Deaf (1915–1965)

Motion pictures have been a powerful medium for entertainment since their inception. In 1915 The Birth of a Nation grossed an amazing $10,000,000. Deaf persons loved silent films, as the visual quality was often extremely high (especially for those produced in the 1920s), and actors stressed the use of body language and facial expression.

Reading Out of the "Idiot Box": Same Language Subtitling on Television in India

Blindness and Black History: One Leader's Perspective

When Carter G. Woodson created the observance of "Negro History Week," which later became "Black History Month," he inspired African Americans to protect and uphold their history, which not only includes written history, but also oral history and the preservation of special and unique artifacts. Our history is our genesis, our present, and our path to the future. It explains how we came to be, who we are, where we are today, and where we are going tomorrow.

On the Need for Usable Videos for Deaf-blind Students and How It Can Be Met With Captioning and Description

The Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP) is a national non-profit that is federally funded to serve as a free-loan media library of accessible educational videos for K–12 students who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind, visually impaired, or deaf-blind. DCMP recently conducted interviews in order to determine how accessible videos are used in the classroom with students who are deaf-blind and what other options need to be included in order for these videos to meet the widest need possible.

Public Law 85-905

Original text of Public Law 85-905, the public law that originally established Captioned Films for the Deaf. Also known as the Captioned Films Act of 1958.

The Equal Access Journey: One Parent's Testimony of How Captioning Benefitted Her Children's Education and Kick-started Her New Career

I am the mother of three children: a college freshman (Kyle) who is profoundly deaf, a teen-aged daughter (Megan) with sloping mild to profound hearing loss, and a hearing son (Keegan) who is finishing the second grade. My parental journey through an inaccessible world—and all the steps therein—began 14 years ago when my nearly five-year-old son was identified as having a hearing loss, was emboldened when Megan was diagnosed with a hearing loss, and continues today, step by step, learning experience by learning experience.

Described Movies at Local Theaters

If you're the movie-watching type, you know that you get to enjoy great films the way they were meant to be enjoyed: on the big screen. Watching a movie in a theater allows you to enjoy technically illustrative audio and be mesmerized by bigger-than-life visuals. It allows you to fully empathize with the characters, lose yourself in the dialogue, and fully engage with and follow the plot. But what if you couldn't see? You couldn't be mesmerized by these visuals. You wouldn't be able to empathize with the characters as well if you couldn't decipher what they looked like, especially if a character has a particularly important feature used to identify and differentiate him/her from others. Could you differentiate between voices? Would you be able to follow the plot as well as if you had sight?

Excerpts from the "Educational Captioned Films Depository Manager's Handbook"

Paper written and prepared by the Special Office for Materials Distribution, Indiana University, in 1977. Provides a brief history of Captioned Films for the Deaf (CFD) and a description of roles of various agencies administering components of the CFD program. Includes a flow chart of the hierarchical relationships of agencies within the Bureau of Education for the Handicapped (BEH), Division of Media Services.