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1. Description of Our Community
Taipei is a business-intensive metropolitan and focus on technology and culture. But, there is a group of people who have conquered their hearing problem and face their life and work persistently to seek their stage. They don’t need mercy, but more time to communicate with them to understand their real need. Behind them, there are a group of people denote silently to give them help and concern. This kind of story always happened besides us and touches our heart.
2. Summary of Our Project
In our regular understanding, the deaf is the one can not hear and talk, and can just communicate with others by hand language. The education for deaf has been noticed gradually. For a correct understanding in our society, the government promotes ordinary education to clarify the misunderstanding of deaf, and enhance the training of oral and listening ability, and let them talk like regular people. For a deaf, they need more opportunity and assistance in their learning process. Their original hindrance causing by unable to hear and pronounce makes them hard to communicate with others and results in mis-understanding. These all make them back slide, without self-confidence, and scare to contact with people. But, in our interview, we found their hiding enthusiasm and confidence under their bashfulness. If you can listen to them and with good response, you can be affected by their simple and nice heart. We believe: To give them education, they will walk out of the silence world and to give them stage, they will perform a shining life.
3. Our Computer and Internet Access
A. Percentage of students using the Internet at home:more than 50%
B. Number of workstations with Internet access in the classroom:more than 6
C. Connection speed used in the classroom:dedicated connection
D. Number of years our classroom has been connected to the Internet:more than 6
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
A) Hearing impaired persons failed to understand what we have been talking about Most of them used lip reading. When they failed to understand our meaning, we used body language or sketches and notes to solve the problem.
B) Non-standard pronunciation and misunderstanding We needed to type out the conversation into interview transcripts. Because they could not hear formal pronunciation, they learned speaking through mouth’s shape and its movement. Later we had to guess and listen the audio records repeatedly to understand their speech.
C) Design layout The other difficulty we faced this time was 'poor drawing skill'. We were not good at drawing so we didn’t know what to draw. When we visited other people’s web site, they used simple patterns to demonstrate their style. We thought perhaps we could use their idea, and then we shared this finding with each other.
D) Lack of time We did not have many experiences and managed our time inappropriately. Also, we often spent time on discussion and revising the work.
E) Communicate with hearing-impaired persons The hearing-impaired people did not understand some abstract sentences, such as,” the development in the field of family and career”. We finally used writing and translation from the third person to explain what we mean.
F) Interview question design Long ago when we thought of individual with hearing disability, we only thought that he can neither see nor speak, therefore he must not be diligent to learn, but after interview Brother Bo, we realized individual with hearing disability are indeed diligent to learn. Later, we interviewed one of the worker’s uncle, and we learned individuals with hearing disability has their own culture. It just proves that we don’t really know them.
G) Unfamiliar with computer software
5. Our Project Sound Bite
“I thought this time was harder than before, but I still learned some interesting experiences, like chatting on msn and going to Shawnhwe Association to discuss some activities.” – Shang-Ya Gao
“It was my first time attending this Cyberfair competition. Through the process, I realized the importance of teamwork.” – Bei-Hua Lin
“Students in junior high school had more schoolwork to do and had less free time. Through this interview, I learned something interesting in our life.” – Bo-Ya Wang
'I strong realized that 'No pain, no gain.' If we made this website in a rash manner, we might not have high achievement as those who work hard.' – Jia-Jia Lin
“I could not get the sense of the topic at the beginning because our life and those who were hearing-impaired were different. Eventually, I found some ways to improve because we did not have many people in charge of this work.” – Hui-Min Lin
6. How did your activities and research for this CyberFair Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
A) It broaden our learning dimension by understanding the deaf community, which including the hearing-impaired people, their family members, friends, related organization. We learned and expanded our research topic by means of organizing multiple informatics, learning cooperatively, and supporting jointly.
B) By interviewing and personal experiences, we could better understand the hearing-impaired group. We learned to respect them and realized that there was a lot of patience, courage and caring supporting the hearing-impaired people.
C) We utilized internet, books, newspapers and other form of informatics to develop our research project. Simultaneously, we learned more about efficient informational tools and computer applications. Particularly, with Internet, it surpassed the geographic barriers and limitation, and allowed us immediately obtain more information. Owing to the process of researching, we also educated other schoolmates the accuracy of Internet usage, and guided them to accurately use the information on Internet and similar circumstances.
D) Through personal experience and personal involvement, I believe the students will personally experience a great deal of empathy, patient and caring.
E) Throughout the research, I found currently the education system in middle school, students’ leisure time after school is much shorter than those who are in elementary school, and it’s harder for them to concentrate on research. Also, students generally have poor writing skill. Thus, we found out that it’s difficult to process the research in heavy schoolwork pressure circumstance. At the same time, we realized that to improve students’ fundamental knowledge and writing skill is important.
F) It was also a self-challenge. Under the research topic, there were many perspectives surpassing what we learn from school, such as, writing ability, research ability. Various disciplines integrated applications, interaction with people, computer applications, website production, and audio-visual multimedia processing.
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