September and October

Amanda was much more disciplined than I during the past several weeks. In fact, you can check out what's been going on on her side of the grant by visiting http://amandaleavitt.blogspot.com. Amanda is a natural blogger; with smoothness and great wit, she supplies a candid and insightful look into her experience of implementing universal design in her science classroom.

So, whatever happened when Amanda turned on the audio description on a NOVA video she showed in class? Students' responses varied, with most finding the description feature to be distracting, even annoying. Several, however, stated that the descriptions were helpful and aided their ability to understand what was happening. Amanda asks that students take notes while watching videos, and some students said that the description assisted their note-taking by providing details that they otherwise would have missed.

What does this tell us? Not much, I realize. We'll examine this again when Amanda shows the next video. In the meantime, my orientation is that closed captioning and video description (when available) should always be turned on in educational settings. If students are trained to accept that "this is the way that we watch videos in school," then they will adjust and adapt to the features and perhaps even benefit from them in ways they don't even consciously realize. On the contrary, if we wait until it is necessary because a student in the class has low vision, is hard-of-hearing, deaf, or blind, then reactions will likely mirror those of Amanda's students.

Having said that...we did learn that some video description is better than others. It's not always seamlessly integrated. I think that is a symptom of videos that are "retrofitted" with description. If it's planned for, then the video can be produced/edited with video description in mind. Otherwise, it's going to come across as contrived when the narrator speaks very quickly to fit in the description or talks over the dialog.

I had a chance to observe Amanda's class last month, which was very helpful and I look forward to returning. From the outside looking in, the casual (or even experienced) observer would likely have seen a traditional lecture on the parts of animal and plant cells....little would one suspect that everything that was being recorded on the whiteboard was getting captured electronically and being made available to all students. Talk about seamless!

Amanda and I also had the opportunity to co-present at the ACTEM conference. For it being scheduled in the last time slot on a Friday afternoon, we had a satisfactory turnout. It was great fun to share our project with others - from the early stages of curriculum development to choosing the technologies to reflections on how things are going. One of our next conversations will be to strategize additional venues for publicizing this work.