August 1, 2010
HOME > Technos > E-zine > Whats New
Special for Month of May: Youth Crises II: Play It Safe—Plan for Crises
Be prepared for a crisis before it occurs! Youth Crises II: Play It Safe—Plan for Crises, a comprehensive emergency preparedness plan, is available now at a 50% discount. A production by partners AIT, the Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township in Indianapolis, and the Indiana School Safety Specialist Academy, the Youth Crises Video Kit consists of a 40-minute videotape and a manual for workshop leaders. Segments included in the video are: “Bomb Threat,” “School Shooting,” “School Fight”—all dramatizations—and “Education and Prevention.” The video underscores the importance of education and prevention programs in the lower grades as a means of helping to prevent violence in the upper grades. Also included in the Kit is a detailed Facilitator’s Guide, which contains models for some of the kinds of information, guidelines, and checklists that are essential to a school’s crisis response plan, and supports a video-led workshop for school administrators and other concerned professionals. The complete Video Kit is on sale through the month of May for only $74.98.
AIT Staff Coordinates Research Project on Closed Captions and Audio Descriptions
AIT’s Broadcast/Training Professional, Joann Flick, is coordinating a research project for AIT partners CaptionMax, South Carolina ETV, and Wisconsin Educational Communications Board (ECB) that seeks to determine the pedagogical value of enhancements that were originally intended to make media resources more accessible to learning and visually impaired learners.
According to Donna Horn, VP for Business Development for CaptionMax, “enhanced features mean that a voice menu—an actual voice, not a computerized one—reads the menu on the DVD. So, if a blind person, for instance, uses an instructional DVD from AIT, that student will be able to hear the menu items…whereas a deaf student can still see them. So, both students can navigate the menu and utilize the DVD to its fullest extent. Students can choose to watch the videos with or without captioning, audio descriptions, or enhanced features.” To learn more, read our Technos e-Zine Featured Interview with Donna Horn.
Does displaying closed captions in a class help students to improve their reading? Are the audio descriptions that are added to video to help visually impaired students understand the content and action on screen useful to introduce students to the topic of expository writing? These are questions related to the pedagogical value of enhancements that the research project seeks to answer.
Ms. Flick volunteered to assist CaptionMax in collecting data about how teachers might use closed captions and audio descriptions for the visually impaired with their students for purposes other than the intended support for learners with visual or auditory impairments. CaptionMax staff have heard anecdotes from teachers and media specialists that both captions and audio descriptions had instructional value for all learners. Captions, for instance, give learners practice in reading.
In order to capture some of the utility of captions and audio descriptions and to frame ideas for further research, Flick designed a series of focus groups and surveys. The study design and instruments were vetted by the CaptionMax Advisory Board. ECB and SCETV volunteered to conduct focus groups with teachers in Wisconsin and South Carolina. It is expected that the project will help to determine what teachers think about how these enhancements might be used. By the end of the summer, Joann expects to be able to report on the findings of the study and to make recommendations for further research into this topic.