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sereneI've thought of a way to help our students with disabilities directly, AND make a positive impact on my department's budget, and if anyone wants to help, I think this would be a wonderful way to make an actual difference without spending a ton of money.
There's this great pen called the Pulse SmartPen, and it's *amazing*. If you want, go to their site and view a demo, but basically, while you take your notes in class, it records audio of the lecture, and then when you get home, it uploads to your computer, and you can point at any place in your notes (say, where you don't understand what you wrote, or where something's going to be on the test), and it will replay the audio of the lecture to you. [EDIT: Several of our staff and students use the pen, and they all say it works really well and is a lifesaver to folks with ADHD and learning disabilities, among others.]
This will help students in many ways:
1) Instead of depending on other students' notes in order to accommodate their disability, this will be notes in their own style, that make sense for them
2) After they graduate from school, the pen will help the student in office and grad school settings, where human notetakers are not always practical or even allowed
3) ALL students in the class, not just students with disabilities, can share notes if the note-taking student uploads them to the LiveScribe site.
4) The student who takes the notes has instant access to the notes, instead of having to wait for a notetaker to copy and/or scan and/or email them.
It will help our department, too:
1) Finding and hiring and tracking and paying human notetakers is a painstaking process. It doesn't pay students much, and students who take notes might drop the class or flake on giving notes, so our students don't always get what they need as quickly as we/they/I'd like.
2) The pens cost $130-$150 (depending on sales) as a one-time purchase, and downloading the special paper to print is free, whereas human notetakers get around that much per semester per class.
3)The pens are cheap enough that small-change donors (like me!) can make at least a dent in buying one or more.
Anyone wanna chip in on a pen (or more than one)? I'm committing to donating at least one pen to the department, to give to a student*. More would be excellent. There'll be a PayPal button at the bottom of all my posts through the end of next week. Of course, please do not donate if your own situation doesn't allow it, or if you just don'wanna.
* I am planning to just hand it over to my co-workers, whose job it is to counsel our students, and let them decide who gets it. They're good folks and I trust them to help students for whom the pen is an appropriate accommodation.
There's this great pen called the Pulse SmartPen, and it's *amazing*. If you want, go to their site and view a demo, but basically, while you take your notes in class, it records audio of the lecture, and then when you get home, it uploads to your computer, and you can point at any place in your notes (say, where you don't understand what you wrote, or where something's going to be on the test), and it will replay the audio of the lecture to you. [EDIT: Several of our staff and students use the pen, and they all say it works really well and is a lifesaver to folks with ADHD and learning disabilities, among others.]
This will help students in many ways:
1) Instead of depending on other students' notes in order to accommodate their disability, this will be notes in their own style, that make sense for them
2) After they graduate from school, the pen will help the student in office and grad school settings, where human notetakers are not always practical or even allowed
3) ALL students in the class, not just students with disabilities, can share notes if the note-taking student uploads them to the LiveScribe site.
4) The student who takes the notes has instant access to the notes, instead of having to wait for a notetaker to copy and/or scan and/or email them.
It will help our department, too:
1) Finding and hiring and tracking and paying human notetakers is a painstaking process. It doesn't pay students much, and students who take notes might drop the class or flake on giving notes, so our students don't always get what they need as quickly as we/they/I'd like.
2) The pens cost $130-$150 (depending on sales) as a one-time purchase, and downloading the special paper to print is free, whereas human notetakers get around that much per semester per class.
3)The pens are cheap enough that small-change donors (like me!) can make at least a dent in buying one or more.
Anyone wanna chip in on a pen (or more than one)? I'm committing to donating at least one pen to the department, to give to a student*. More would be excellent. There'll be a PayPal button at the bottom of all my posts through the end of next week. Of course, please do not donate if your own situation doesn't allow it, or if you just don'wanna.
* I am planning to just hand it over to my co-workers, whose job it is to counsel our students, and let them decide who gets it. They're good folks and I trust them to help students for whom the pen is an appropriate accommodation.
a question
Date: 2011-03-04 07:26 pm (UTC)secondly, what about personal responsibility? why not involve the students in the fund raising process? if these students made it to berkeley, they must be pretty smart. surely they could figure out how to raise the money. why are people with disabilities so often the recipients of good will? they can work for things.
i don't mean to pick on you, but i've been looking at several disability blogs. theres so much of 'do this to help us' but so little of 'what can i do to help myself or others.'
when those students graduate, there will be no office to help them get what they need (at least no one to help without a lot of advocacy) - why not help them learn what they can do on their own?
Re: a question
Date: 2011-03-04 08:49 pm (UTC)1) How is this so unique? can't any mp3 recorder do this?
Nope. The cool thing, which you can see at the link I gave here, is that there's a video camera in the pen, and special dots on the paper, so that if, let's say, you took a note while your prof was talking about the Renaissance, and you either can't read it, or can't remember why you wrote "cobalt plus!" in big letters, you can take the pen, click on the words "cobalt plus!" and hear your actual professor's voice saying exactly what she was saying when you wrote those words. It's a wonderful tool.
2) what about personal responsibility? why not involve the students in the fund raising process?
You're assuming a lot here. First, that I'm not a student with a disability myself (I am). Second, that the students aren't helping to buy these pens. But chiefly, that people should have to expend a bunch of effort and money to be awarded (I chose that word carefully) an equal opportunity. An equal educational opportunity is one's birthright, I daresay, but even if it weren't, it's US law. Whether or not you agree with it, we can't charge students for receiving reasonable academic accommodations, nor do we want to. If you were born with the ability to see and I wasn't, I should NOT be charged extra to get my class materials in electronic format or Braille, and by US law, I cannot be.
3) why are people with disabilities so often the recipients of good will? they can work for things.
Sometimes they/we can, and sometimes not. Regardless, there are great tools out there that are out of the reach of some students. Some of our students buy their own pens, with their own or their parents' money. For some students, that's simply not an option. Factor in that people with disabilities are far (far, far, far, far) less likely to be employed and far (far, far, far) more likely to live in poverty than average, and you may see that this is not an act of charity, but of fairness.
4) when those students graduate, there will be no office to help them get what they need (at least no one to help without a lot of advocacy) - why not help them learn what they can do on their own?
Yes, of COURSE there will be offices to help them get what they need. http://www.ada.gov ; Well-trained HR offices. Community organizations. And we DO help them learn what they can do on their own. But we do it without forgetting that there are some things that some people cannot do by themselves. It's neither dependence nor independence that is the proper balance here, but *interdependence*. People in the disability community rely on each other. It has always been so, and often it's so because at the end of the day, you rely on the ones you know will understand where you're coming from.