Hearing Loss in the Classroom - Video

Wanted to share this video someone shared on CICircle. It was the first thing I looked at this morning and it really caught my attention.

The message behind this video is loud and clear. Our hard of hearing/deaf  children work VERY hard at listening - especially in the classroom where there is always background noise (chairs moving, papers, tapping of pencils/feet/fingers, hallway noise, outside noise, computers humming, talking, whispering, etc - believe me, a classroom is rarely completely quiet) and not always the.best acoustically appropriate environment - and they can easily miss information, not only from the teacher, but even more importantly, from the students around them. I have read over and over again that 90% of knowledge acquired by a young child is through incidental learning and I experienced this firsthand in my own classrooms.  As Aiden's mom, I must ensure that our school district and all his teachers etc. not only understand the importance of the appropriate use of any assistive listening device, but also (and just as important), identify clues that Aiden is hearing (or not hearing) ALL spoken information, especially that of the other students.

With Aiden in mainstream preschool now, I am forwarding this over to our district's Director of Special Education, Aiden's teacher, and all his therapists.  Although we are not using an FM at the time (there is a soundfield amplification system in his classroom as our audiologist recommends that a child with CIs not use a personal FM until they have the language to report back problems with how the FM sounds - static, not working right etc), we will be in the near future, as I want to make sure Aiden has every tool available to him in order to make listening in the classroom as easy as possible. PLUS, our district is so new to hearing loss and this will be beneficial in many ways and for  the other students with hearing loss.

Here are some other sites/articles I am going to share on hearing loss in the classroom as well.

If you have any links to videos/articles you presented to your school district while advocating for your child, please share in the comments section.

• http://www.listen-up.org/edu/teach.htm#inc - 
• http://www.hearingreview.com/issues/articles/2011-02_02.asp
• http://hope.cochlearamericas.com/online-courses