Subtitled Videos for Education of the Hearing Impaired Child
We begin this fifth article in the series about Visual Learning by stating the obvious, that educational videos that have been developed specifically to teach the K12 curriculum, and that purposely provide dedicated subtitles, provide an improved, effective and enjoyable way of delivering learning and education for the hearing impaired student or the child with hearing difficulties, and will encourage self-motivation towards a continuation of that learning experience. Or in simple terms, the hearing impaired student will enjoy this new and more meaningful way of learning, and as a result they are going to want to continue using it.
Children generally benefit greatly from Visual Learning. The use of educational video introduces that important element of fun to the learning process, it delivers the curriculum content in a graphical format that makes learning interesting, it enables and encourages them to learn at their own speed thereby enabling them to achieve their greatest potential, it provides a more compelling alternative to the textbook that often does little to inspire or motivate the student, and it provides them with what can be best described as their own virtual teacher complete with STOP and START buttons.
As the awareness of the effectiveness of Visual Learning has grown, and the significant benefits of online educational video have become more widely accepted and understood, the availability and the amount of online educational video has started to increase. However with the exception of one company, the needs of the hearing impaired child or student appear to have been largely ignored and forgotten.
While this may not have been deliberate, the fact remains that this has largely come about because the majority of so-called educational video available online, is film footage that was original recorded for other uses including general TV distribution, and was not developed specifically for the teaching of the K12 curriculum. In other words, simply because those videos may be of a general educational nature, does not mean that they adequately meet the requirements of the curriculum standards.
Zane Education however has taken a totally different approach, and as a result has a developed an online educational video library of over 1,500 online videos covering 11 school subjects and 240 topics specifically for the teaching of the curriculum. And wonderfully they have had the foresight to provide children with as many learning style options as possible, by adding subtitles to all of their videos.
In other words children with hearing impairments can now also enjoy the significant benefits of online educational video.
As was pointed out in an earlier article on Visual Learning that specifically addressed the issue of Dyslexia, there are those that would speculate that learning by using video rather than the use of textbooks, means that children’s reading skills will suffer. Obviously with the addition of subtitles that is not necessarily the case. In fact a future article to be released in the next week will demonstrate and explain precisely, how video subtitles can be used to rapidly increase a child’s reading skills. And Research carried out by the Availll Institute over the last 5 years has demonstrated the link between the use of subtitles on video, and the improvement in children’s reading skills. (more…)
