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The way blind people can find information in books has changed dramatically.
Years ago, a blind child would sit in class with the multiple volumes of braille books in front of them, which is great if they actually got them. But if a teacher asks the class to open up to page 243 in the novel, "Of Mice and Men" it takes the blind students many minutes to thumb through the correct volume, then to find the correct page.
Today, that is no longer true. Students download electronic textbooks from the Internet and load them onto their note takers or laptop. When the teacher asks everyone to turn to page 243, or any page in any book, our students can do a Find command and jump to the passage faster than the sighted students jump in their print books. There is a trick to doing this flawlessly. Page numbers can vary in books depending on versions, so this is how you get around that. The blind student asks the teacher for the first 3 words of the paragraph she wants everyone to turn to. Then the blind student types those 3 words in the find command and enters, and immediately jumps to the text and is ready to read from their braille display along with the rest of the class.
Another advantage of this method is the teacher hands out questions to the story that is being read. The student can read the question, do a Find command within the book and jump to the major headings dealing with the question. They can copy and paste that information out of the book, jump back to the document where they will be typing the answers and paste in the content and answer the question quickly.
The FIND command is powerful. In WORD, it is CTRL+F, on many note takers, it is SPACE+F. Always search using more than one word, and you can find your information faster.
Lessons to help you more, click on link below
Technology skills
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1 comment:
This is a fantastic tip, and very timely for our students who are struggling to have access to a newly adopted language arts series in our district! Sometimes those e-text files can be unwieldy; definitely NOT the same access as an embossed braille copy, but certainly better than 10 years ago, when waiting (sometimes for a year) for the textbook was their only option.
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