Browsing by Subject "visually-impaired children"

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    TEDI 3 Week 1 - Creating an Inclusive Classroom
    (2019-06-01) Verhoef, Suna
    In this video, Suna Verhoef, an educator at a school for visually-impaired children in Worcester, South Africa, discusses how to make classrooms inclusive of learners with visual impairments. She stresses the importance of immediate action to include learners with visual impairments in classroom teaching, and discusses the importance of attitude, awareness and adopting a growth mindset in preparing teachers to allow them to support children in their learning. She discusses the importance of connecting with the children in the classroom, to develop strategies and plans to include them in the curriculum. She also discusses the importance of discussing empathy and kindness with the sighted learners in the classroom to encourage inclusion and collaborative learning. She then discusses how to prepare the classroom for inclusion, from controlling light levels and reducing glare and organising appropriate seating for learners with visual impairments. Lastly, she stresses the importance of flexibility and creativity in reorganising teaching and the teaching space to best incorporate all kinds of learners.
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    TEDI 3 Week 1 - The Visually Impaired Child in Different Educational Challenges
    (2019-06-01) Watermeyer, Brian; Leteane, Benedict
    In this introductory video, Dr Brian Watermeyer introduces the theme of this MOOC, starting by discovering the visually-impaired learner. The video discusses the various environments in which visually-impaired children find themselves in and introduces Benedict Leteane who explores his own experiences growing up in South Africa's special education system. He introduces some of the other themes that the MOOC will cover, such as the medical aspect of visual impairment, and how to design inclusive classrooms that provide an interesting and accessible learning environment for visually-impaired learners.
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    TEDI 3 Week 3 - Conversations with Teachers about Accessible Teaching and Learning
    (2019-06-01) Watermeyer, Brian; Daniels, Samantha; Bongiwe, Daniels
    In this video, Brian Watermeyer interviews Samantha Daniels and about their experiences in dealing with accessible and inaccessible learning materials in the classroom. Samantha, a teacher in a special school, discusses the frustration of working with inadequate materials and the need to work around insufficient resources with very young visually impaired learners, and discusses some of the strategies and workarounds she has developed in her class which includes partially-sighted and totally blind learners. She also discusses the difficulties of working with timeframes that may not take into the account the needs of students with visual impairment and colleagues who may not be fully supportive of the needs of special-needs teachers. Bongiwe Daniels, the principal of a special-needs school in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, reflects on her experience of dealing with the infrastructural deficits that had affected the school when she became principal, and how they negatively affected the ability for learners to participate in classroom activities. She discusses how she reached out to civil society and aid organisations in order to raise funds and supplies to provide the resources necessarily to provide quality education. The panel then discusses how to appropriately use (and the skills required to use) assistive technology, such as smartphone and software.
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    TEDI 3 Week 3 - Providing Learning and Teaching Support Material Creatively
    (2019-06-01) Verhoef, Suna
    In this video, Suna Verhoef discusses providing Learning and Teaching Support Material in a creative way. She discusses her own experiences with a lack of specialised training for educating learners with visual disabilities, and her experiences with engaging with the Expanded Core Curriculum in her class with her learners. She discusses her experience in adjusting a class on the trans-Saharan trade routes to include learning support materials that would cater for children with visual disabilities, including the use of physical props, sound clips of appropriate audio, and physical learning activities such as roleplay. She discusses how the Expanded Core Curriculum provided a framework for reworking a lesson to incorporate life and social skills that made the lesson more effective and improved the quality of learning for her students.