[blindkid] BrailleNote use

Richard Holloway rholloway at gopbc.org
Thu Sep 6 04:56:02 UTC 2012


I bumped "send" too early by accident. 

Please excuse a couple of double-word typos, but mainly I wanted to clarify that we provide/provided things like our own Braille paper for the perkins, and ink and paper for the loaned printer when we had one, but now our daughter tends to print (or occasionally emboss) her work at school as needed.

Classroom teachers tend to grade mostly ink printed copies of her work, and that has caused one stumbling block in that they rarely provide written feedback to her which she can read on her own. I foresee a point where they may need to provie electronic feedback on the apex with a digital file, or to email her comments.

I do wonder what others have come up with for that concern, but apart from that, a notetaker can sometimes eliminate a great deal of needed Braille translation going from a student to a teacher, and indeed a fair amount going from the teacher back to the student when there are things like txt files already prepared for lessons, books, etc.

Should they be new to this process (unlikely as a school for the blind) it is good to watch for technical glitches in translation which do come up, but it is not too frequent here. 

One other little tip: At some point, the TVI switched all of Kendra's output at school when just in ink to be on colored paper. Since then, fewer things seem to have gone missing. I suspect typical classroom teachers have trouble at first remembering that one student has typewritten papers all the time while the rest are in grade school pencil scribble on mashed-up notebook paper. Probably less of a concern at a school for the blind when they ought to have a lot of kids producing either printer-generated output, or Braille pages.

There are many tools in the tool bag for today's Braille students but none is more important for our daughter than her BrailleNote. Fighting to get this for your son full-time will be a great benefit for him down the road!



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