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| Page | Article | Comment |
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| Focus articles | ||
| 4 | Managing noise | Reverberation and noise combine to make it difficult for children to understand speech. Deaf children, or children with language difficulties or other special needs such as auditory neuropathy or autism, may find speech discrimination particularly challenging. There are many children whose needs can be met with a little adaptation by mainstream staff. However, there are others whose needs are highly complex and their learning settings may require advice from a Teacher of the Deaf or an educational audiologist. In this article Stuart Whyte considers the nature of reverberation and noise in learning settings and provides some practical suggestions for improving conditions for children and staff affected by noise. |
| 8 | Listening lessons | As Teachers of the Deaf we know assistive devices can enhance the listening experience for deaf students in the educational setting � the hardest part is convincing them that this is the case! In Somerset, the Hearing Support Team has reconsidered the approach it takes to introducing students to any equipment that may be used to improve access to sound. Team Leader and Senior Educational Audiologist Jacqui Gardiner explains the range of options the team now has available |
| 10 | Donaldson�s assistive devices | Donaldson�s School is Scotland�s national school for children who are deaf or have speech and language difficulties. Due to the diversity and complexity of need within it school population, staff strive to make available many different assistive listening devices in order to address more effectively the hearing and listening needs of the children. The children exhibit a wide range of hearing needs, from children with normal hearing, to children with differing degrees of hearing loss, through to children with little or no access to acoustic stimulation. Joe O�Donnell, an educational audiologist at Donaldson�s, provides some detail on the types of assistive technology that are in use at the school. |
| 13 | Scottish accounts | As a visiting teacher of the hearing impaired (VTHI) for the primary and nursery stages in North Lanarkshire, Margaret Freel doesn�t see that FM is necessary at the nursery stage as the children are rushing around for much of the time. Currently the service has pupils using Inspiros and Oticon Amigo T10 and T20s in the primary years. In this article, Elaine Harris highlights some of the varied experiences with FM and Soundfield in North Lanarkshire. |
| 14 | Early listening opportunities | In 2007 Catherine Statham and Hannah Cooper began a project at the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust in conjunction with the Berkshire Sensory Consortium Service to evaluate the management issues and practical considerations when fitting FM systems to very young children. They have since fitted 25 children who have bilateral hearing losses ranging from mild to profound with ear level FM receivers and have integrated this service into our routine practice. Here they describe the project and set out their conclusions. |
| 16 | In the front row | PC Werth has been at the forefront of supplying voice amplification systems or Soundfield systems for over ten years. Over that time, as with most technologies, there have been many advances but some things have remained the same. First, the number of speakers that are recommended: PC Werth still strongly believes that to have a true Soundfield within a classroom, there needs to be a number of speakers placed strategically around the room. Ease of use also remains one of its main concerns when designing products. Ricky Dummer takes a look at some of PC Werth�s Soundfield solutions. |
| 18 | Soundfield for all � well almost! | There are 422 schools in Norfolk. Before 2008 there were ten Soundfield systems in use, and one school had a new building which had the systems fitted as standard. In 2008, following a grant from the Schools Access Initiative committee, further systems were fitted in 30 schools in an ongoing programme to supply over 250 systems to improve the listening experiences of pupils. Julie Carter, retired Team Leader for Children and Families with Children�s Services Sensory Support in Norfolk, Elizabeth Reed-Beadle, educational audiologist, explore the pros and cons of the three different systems from Connevans, PC Werth and Lightspeed that have been installed. |
| 20 | Do Soundfields work? | The concept of Soundfield systems is now well known throughout the ToD community but less so in mainstream education. The idea is that the teacher wears a wireless microphone that transmits the voice to an amplifier, which then drives one or more loudspeakers distributed appropriately around the room. The system does not operate at high volume like a public address system, but aims to produce an even level of sound throughout the whole room, equivalent to or just above the teacher�s natural voice. This means that all students, wherever they are seated, should hear equally well and the teacher should not need to raise his or her voice significantly in order to be heard. As part of his A-level studies, Oliver Pont used the Room Acoustics Measurement Kit from Connevans to find out how a single speaker Soundfield system affected the signal-to-noise ratio and speech intelligibility in three typical classrooms of his secondary school. |
| 22 | My Amigo | Lois Couch first heard about Amigo a number of years ago when a colleague returned from a presentation at a BATOD conference saying that he had some new ideas for their service. After the initial disappointment of realising that Amigo was an FM system and not a time-share opportunity in Spain, the team contacted our Oticon rep and requested a hands-on demonstration of the Amigo system. It was decided to purchase four sets of transmitters, together with ear level receivers, to trial with pupils who were reliable FM users in the secondary hearing support facility. Lois explains how they got on. |
| 23 | An effective piece of kit | When Headteacher Matthew Heasman first arrived at Broadfield Primary School in Hertfordshire Soundfield systems had already been installed in one classroom in each year group to help a small group of deaf children access the curriculum. Liking the system enormously and quickly recognising its benefits to all children, not just those who were deaf, Matthew set about installing additional systems in other learning areas around the school. The impact has been immense, as he now reports. |
| 24 | Using the IR Swift | Soundfield systems have been shown to improve the listening environment for all pupils in the classroom. Initially Soundfield systems were not particularly sophisticated. They usually consisted of four speakers, an amplifier plus a separate radio microphone transmitter and receiver. As they developed, the radio receiver and amplifier were integrated into a wall-mounted unit which made it easier to install. The early systems were radio-based which worked well but, due to the limited number of radio channels available, restricted the number of systems that could be used in a particular area. This restriction led manufacturers to change to infra-red transmission, which stays within the confines of the room in which the system is fitted. Unlimited numbers of systems could now be installed in a school and a wider range of systems became available.In this article, John Popplestone describes the history of Soundfield and the development of the Connevans IR Swift system. |
| 26 | A complete solution | Looking for ways to enhance the listening experiences of all pupils, not just those who are deaf, St Stephen�s School in South Godstone tried both portable and fixed systems. The school currently has four Soundfield systems, including two portable systems � one in Year 5 and one in Year 6. The two fixed systems are in the school�s ICT suite and the assembly/lunch hall. Jo Smith explains how they have made the systems work for all their pupils. |
| 28 | Easy listening | The Dynamic SoundField system from Phonak heralds a new era in classroom amplification. A Soundfield system consists of a wireless microphone and one or more loudspeakers which amplify the teacher�s voice around the class. As a result, students hear and understand the teacher�s directions more easily, which in turn leads to improved student performance and a happier, stronger voiced teacher. Phonak�s Dynamic Soundfield is the first Soundfield system to offer industry-leading sound quality, intelligent automated settings and a transmission mode to suit every student listener. Developed over several years it amplifies the teacher�s voice throughout the class without increasing the overall noise level, allowing students to hear clearly and understand commands without the system creating distracting feedback or echo. Phonak�s Gareth Jones has the details. |
| 30 | Phonak trials | In May 2010 Farnham Primary School was approached by Bradford Local Authority Special Needs Team to trial a new digital Soundfield system. The school was selected because, with a dedicated unit for deaf children, it had the largest number of deaf children in any primary school in Bradford. Furthermore, because all the children are learning English as a second language, it was thought that the new technology could improve the listening skills of all pupils. Headteacher Richard Edwards reports on the trial. |
| 32 | Raising Soundfield awareness | A Soundfield, or classroom audio distribution system (CADS), is one of the easiest and most effective ways a teacher can communicate well with the whole classroom. It is used to transmit the teacher�s voice from a microphone to a speaker system, and also to re-broadcast directly into a deaf child�s personal FM system. There is no excuse now for any deaf child to be left behind in the classroom. Today's technology ensures that, assuming an early enough intervention, all children should be able to hear. A Soundfield, or CADS, is one tool of many that should be available to all children in the modern classroom. Graham Breakenridge, Director of Classroom Communications, is keen to point out the advances made by Lightspeed Audio Products in this area. |
| General features | ||
| 34 | On teaching practice in Kenya | Established in 1985, the Kenya Institute of Special Education (KISE) is a government-owned institution that offers courses in various types of special needs programmes. Teaching practice occupies a key position in the programme of teacher education. It is the culminating experience in teacher preparation and provides an opportunity for beginning teachers to become socialised into the profession. In this article, Malawian teacher Joseph Kuphazi reveals his experiences of teaching practice undertaken as part of his training to become a teacher of deafblind children. |
| 36 | All about working memory | Working memory is the ability to keep information in mind and use it to guide behaviour in the absence of external cues. In reading, for example, we need to remember what we read earlier on as we continue to read a paragraph in order to understand its meaning. In arithmetic, we often have to implement several steps as we remember intermediary results in a calculation. According to various studies, deaf students� performance in WM tasks is significantly related to their performance in reading comprehension, and this is also true of deaf children who have a cochlear implant. WM is also related to deaf students� geometry learning, so WM plays an important role in deaf children�s school learning. Terezinha Nunes from Oxford Univeristy explains how working memory is assessed and explores deaf children�s performance in working memory tasks. |
| 38 | If you can�t beat them, join them! | Social networking sites often get a bad press from those who have never used or felt the desire to use them, due to reports of bullying and heightened peer pressure. But these issues existed for young people long before the internet was even thought of and cannot be blamed on this technology. Rather than ignore these websites, we should be embracing the wealth of possibilities they can offer for young deaf people. If we want to help deaf young people to use these sites responsibly, we have to understand them ourselves. So get online and have a go, urges ToD Eleanor Hutchinson. |
| 40 | Through the looking glass | There are five institutions that provide Teacher of the Deaf training in England (Birmingham, Hertfordshire, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford Brookes) and they are currently working together on a research project, funded by the British Academy, that seeks to promote the development of teachers' critical thinking and reflective practice to enhance their work in both theory and practice. This project has come about because we ToDs are often lone specialists in multidisciplinary settings. They need to be able to analyse and develop educational practices that draw on the unique learning resources of deaf children to enhance their educational achievement. Ruth Swanwick and Ruth Kitchen from Leeds University give an overview of the project. |
| 42 | Plans for phonics | It�s �phonics phonics phonics� everywhere these days and it�s causing quite a bit of noise. There�s a plan to introduce a synthetic phonics check of children's abilities to read single words at the end of Year 1. The DfE published information on its consultation on the check for six year olds and then it was piloted in 300 schools to approximately 10,000 pupils in June 2011. Headteacher of Longwill Primary School for Deaf Children Babs Day was invited to the Department of Education to share her views on the proposals, and in this article she is keen to share her experiences. |
| 44 | Exploring the Scottish Sensory Centre | The Scottish Sensory Centre (SSC) is a national organisation promoting innovation and good practice in the education of deaf, visually impaired, and deafblind pupils. It has an excellent track record in delivering high quality continuing professional development (CPD) to teachers of children with visual impairments and children who are deaf. Following its recent crisis, the SSC is now jointly funded by the Scottish Government (75%) and the University of Edinburgh. Centre Co-ordinator Janis Sugden explains a bit more about its work. |
| 45 | Getting ahead | Life can be hard for deaf young people during their teenage years � it is easy for self-confidence to weaken in the face of all the new challenges. Without the right support many deaf young people are vulnerable to isolation, abuse, bullying, poor self-esteem and low levels of achievement. Michael Johnston, Youth Training and Development Manager at NDCS, has news of NDCS�s Getting Ahead programme, which aims to give deaf young people the vital skills they need for further education and employment |
| 46 | Standards for CSWs | As part of the process of developing the new Signature qualification for communication support workers (CSWs), National Occupational Standards (NOS) were produced. The NOS, in the form of an application guide, are now available from the Signature website. Maria Bailey, freelance trainer and development consultant, has the details. |
| Regulars | ||
| 52 | This and That | Items from the postbag and e-mail inbox that could be pinned on the noticeboard for you to read!
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| 54 | ICT news | Trying a little �internet stalking�, Sharon Pointeer discovered how easy it was to track herself down online. This made her think about how we need to be protecting ourselves and our pupils in our online presence � her concerns were further heightened by the recent press coverage about GPS (global positioning system) phones and geotagging of pictures. The potential of exploitation of this system by the �bad guys� is huge, so it is important that we make our pupils aware, as part of their e-safety education, that by posting photographs they could be revealing more about themselves than they intend. |
| 58 | Abbreviations in this issue | A lifesaver � the page that every ToD turns to when confronted with a set of meaningful uppercase letters! |
| Reviews | ||
| 54 | Deaf Education; Changed by Cochlear Implantation? | Elizabeth Reed-Beadle takes a look at Sue Archbold�s book based on her PhD studies into the impact of cochlear implantation on deaf education |
| 57 | A sample of eBooks/CD in British Sign Language/English from DeafEducate | Anne Willett, an early years ToD considers some new titles in DeafEducate�s range of eBooks. |
| Association Business | ||
| 3 | Stronger together | A busy June NEC meeting saw a focus on the essential priorities for BATOD to maintain its momentum in shaping itself for a future in the new educational landscape. Gary Anderson highlights the main points addressed in each of the three discussion groups. |
| 47 | Does the website work for you? | With about two-thirds of the estimated total number (approx 2,300) of ToDs in the UK holding BATOD membership, the NEC believes that the reports of the work it carries out reach the majority of the most important people in the field deaf education � you � our members. But to quote an old saying, �You can lead a horse to water but you can�t make it drink�, and that is exactly what we have discovered. Although some information is available openly on the BATOD website, the �meaty stuff� in the members� area is only accessed by a possible 445 registered BATOD members. Ann Underwood continues her series of articles about the BATOD website. |
| 48 | BATOD was there representing you | Between the NEC meetings, members of BATOD attend various meetings that are of particular interest to Teachers of the Deaf. This list is not exhaustive as some reports have not yet been received or meetings reported on, some are meetings booked for the near future. This list also appears on the website in the Calendar folder. |
| 49 | A letter to the Editor | Prompted by an earlier article that appeared in the Magazine, one of our readers poses an interesting question about the effect of drugs on cognitive function. |
| 50 | Save your voice � let them hear! | Ann Underwood highlights a forthcoming BATOD Foundation event on Friday 25 November 2011 at Knightsfield/Monk�s Walk School, looking at the benefits of Soundfield systems and supported by four key providers of this technology. Ann also urges you to get involved with the BATOD Foundation. |
| 51 | What went on at NEC on 25 June 2011 | A productive day of BATOD business saw lively discussion on the Green Paper, membership issues and international links as well as a focus on the progress of the workstreams. Andrea Baker files her report. |
| 53 | Have you moved? Change of address form | Reading a colleague's Magazine? Wondering what has happened to your copy? If you are not receiving your BATOD Magazine and Journal perhaps it is because we have no record of your current address. Put this right by completing the form and returning it to the BATOD Membership Secretary, or simply email from here. |
| 59 | Subscription Rates | Annual Membership subscription rates apply from 1st August. |
| inside back cover | Officers of Regions and Nations | Contact addresses of officers of BATOD Regions and Nations |
| Calendar | ||
| 60 | Meetings to know about | Advertised courses and meetings which are of interest to BATOD members.
Contact the Website Manager to add a one line entry to this valuable page and/or pay for a small advert in the Magazine. |