[education-wg] List of Education FOSS projects

[Kevin Cole]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 14:09, Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman at gmail.com> wrote:

> Random observation:  This topic -- software for communication with
> special needs students -- comes up with some regularity on lists
> regarding FOSS in schools.  On more than one occasion I've followed up
> with a response that says "OK, well, first can you tell us exactly
> what this software needs to do?"  And I can't recall ever getting a
> useful response.
>
> Just a reminder of how collaboration between teachers and developers
> is hard, if you don't start with someone who already understands the
> problem and the means of getting to a solution.

Since I'm not in the classroom, I cannot speak with a lot of authority
here.  But, as far as the needs of deaf children, closed-captioning of
all video materials is a good place to start.  However, the more
vexing problem is that of literacy skills of deaf students. On
average, they lag far behind their hearing peers.  With that as a
given, I'd say (repeating what many have said before me):

* pictures are worth a thousand words: try to make educational software
  language independent.  (This benefits a lot of groups other than
deaf students.)
* grammatic consistency and simplicity when graphics aren't enough.
* develop software that not only grades students performance, but attempts
  to collect anonymous data that focuses on specific linguistic difficulties, to
  create some sort of feedback loop in the development cycle.  Pair that with
  demographic information, possibly yielding results like "Deaf Latino
males in the 5-
  to 10-year-old range misconstrue... yet have a much firmer grasp
of... Therefore, the
  next version of the software should..."

An amusing example: One of the functions of our office is to create
deaf norms for the  Stanford Achievement Test (the other SAT). Since
deaf kids don't track the same as hearing kids, the SAT levels,
designed to match grade levels, don't work.  We have created a set of
"pre-tests" using throw-away items from the published SAT to determine
which level of the test  will yield a meaningful result for a deaf
child of a given age.  In developing these pre-tests we determine
which of the throw-away questions we'll use and which ones we'll pitch
as well.

One year, we encountered a sample reading question which involved a
letter left by "Mom and Dad" to "Sally and Billy" instructing them on
how to take care of the household while they were out. In the letter,
they instruct the children to remember to go out and play catch with
Buster.  One of the multiple choice questions that went with this was:

Buster is:
A. a cat
B. a dog
C. a hamster
D. a horse

(or something similar to that.)  Our research showed an inordinate
number of research participants choosing C. presumably because
"bu-ster" looks a little like "ham-ster".  However, we all had a
laugh, picturing this terrified little hamster being thrown between
the two children as they "played catch with Buster".

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