Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 20, 1990 TAG: 9003202879
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: MARK LAYMAN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It's not unusual for Hanson, one of HandsOn's designers, to get calls from people who want to purchase the program. "Most of the time I say `No, this is a research project, we can't let everybody have it,' " she recalled.
But Biggs - who's long had an interest in education for the hearing-impaired - was persuasive.
Now Virginia Heights Elementary School in Roanoke is one of three schools in the country that are testing HandsOn. The other two are state residential schools for hearing-impaired children in California and New York. There are plans to test the program in Toronto, Canada and possibly in Italy, too.
Hanson was in Roanoke this week to show teachers and students at the elementary school how to use the program.
Studies show that the average hearing-impaired child who graduates from high school reads on the third- or fourth-grade level, she said. The goal of HandsOn is to improve the reading and writing skills of those children, particularly third- through sixth-graders.
Hanson designed the program with Carol Padden of the University of California at San Diego. The two met a decade ago at the sign language lab at the Salk Institute in San Diego.
Padden is deaf and is the child of deaf parents. She's featured in the program, giving lessons - in sign language - in subjects such as science and social studies.
What's most important in HandsOn isn't the subject matter, though. It's the reading and writing the students do as they translate the sign language.
Heather McClure, an 11-year-old from Vinton, was the first of the 10 hearing-impaired students at Virginia Heights to get a crack at HandsOn today.
She watched intently as Padden gave a lesson about dinosaurs. After each sentence that Padden signed, Heather - who learned how to operate the program in no time at all - would type a translation onto the screen. Then she and Ellen Austin, a teacher at Virginia Heights who coordinates the city schools' hearing-impaired program, compared her translation with the translation included in the program.
The sign language Padden uses in the program wasn't completely familiar to Heather. Hearing-impaired students in the city schools learn Manually Coded English, which closely follows the rules of English grammar. HandsOn uses American Sign Language, which is less formal and more conversational.
That tripped Heather up a couple of times. But most of her translations were right on the mark and she learned quickly from her mistakes.
"I do really like it," she signed after a few minutes. "It's a real expensive computer."
"This will be just wonderful," Austin said.
The school has a one-year contract with IBM to test the HandsOn program. The accompanying computer hardware was purchased with money from the school system and the Roanoke Valley Fund for Deaf Children.
The 10 hearing-impaired students at Virginia Heights come from Roanoke, Salem, and Roanoke, Botetourt, Franklin and Henry counties. If they stay in the city's hearing-impaired program, they'll go on to Woodrow Wilson Middle School and Patrick Henry High School.
by CNB