Click & Sign
Kimberly Fleming, Special Education Teacher
This capstone was designed to build an interactive resource for a sign language for deaf community in education. Focus of this project was to build vocabulary for a five year old deaf student so he can express their needs and wants. It introduces users to click on the online resource and objects to indicate their thoughts and recognize objects. With reference to a few articles, the author explained the importance of teaching sign language for communication at a young age.
Author Kimberly Fleming is a special education teacher in elementary school. While designing this capstone, she considered it for a five year old student who could not hear and there was no designed plan for communication. This student had a cochlear implant but was not very successful with using it. His parents have started to teach him sign language and the student knows only twenty signs. Kimberly thought that if student’s peers, classmates, teachers and family including school staff all understand how to use this program that would benefit the student for better communication.
The school district had no plan for technology access when they went virtual during covid time. So, the district used paper format for teaching which was not very successful. Later the district implemented a wonderful 1-on-1 technology plan and provided a piece of technology and confirmed that every family has internet access. Kimberly thought of taking advantage of technology for building an interactive site for this child which supported ISTE 2a. She used Thinglink, where the user can click on any picture which will then open up a video link showing the use of sign language for that particular picture and increase users vocabulary. In general at age 5, kids know about 10,000 words while in this case this child knew only 20 signs. The following ISTE 5b , use of thinglink will help this student to interact with more words.
Based on ISTE standard 7a, this capstone would allow a student to test and quiz himself with slides of the deck feature. It would give students two choices and allow him to pick one, and tell him if he picked the correct one or not. This gives immediate feedback on his vocabulary comprehension of specific signs. This was to help him with his receptive communication. To improve his expressive communication the plan was to let students create a flipagram video of his expressive communication skills over time.
For this capstone, Kimberly thought about the Triple E framework as well. As this student is very young, to engage him with this plan she thought of adding cartoon images to motivate him to stay on task. These cartoons were fun and cute and interesting for young users. He could pick and choose which signs he would like to choose to play. The plan was to add more vocabulary as students signed vocabulary grows. For the enhancement, the video showed only one sign at a time to keep it simple. By providing access to the device with internet access the option to learn was extended. There is room for growth.
This project was planned for the students’ individualized needs. The text, pictures and videos were simple, interesting for a 5 year old and user friendly.