The International Center for Technology
in Oral Education
The International Center for Technology in Oral Education was established to develop, refine, and disseminate innovative technologies that will increase the learning of deaf children. Over the past five years, the Center has focused on three major software programs: The Vocabulary Tutor, its companion authoring software, and The Listening Tutor. Each has been tested internally, refined, tested externally and evaluated. The dissemination of these technologies has also been successful:
- In 2004, the Animated Speech Corporation of San Francisco commercialized the Vocabulary Tutor. It has been on the market as Team up with Timo: Vocabulary since spring 2005.
- In 2006, the Animated Speech Corporation released the Timo’s Lesson Creator (the authoring environment for Timo: Vocabulary) and opened The Lesson Exchange, a forum in which vocabulary lessons among parents, teachers, and specialists can be shared. For The Lesson Exchange Tucker-Maxon teachers developed over 500 lessons for children with hearing loss.
- In 2006, The Listening Tutor prototype was shared with the cochlear implant company Advanced Bionics, a Boston Scientific company. They have declared full support of the commercialization of the product and want to collaborate on its development.
The Products
Team up with Timo: Vocabulary
Timo: Vocabulary (Image 1) is a computer-based program that teaches children with hearing loss new vocabulary. It provides a robust language-learning experience to students by combining expert teachers of the deaf knowledge of vocabulary teaching, with the most advanced computer technology available, including Timo, an animated conversational character. Through instructions, questions and feedback, Timo leads the children through the language learning activities of the tutorial. The activities in the program advance from receptive practice to production and supply much repetition and baseline measures.
Image 1. Team up with Timo: Vocabulary.
Timo’s Lesson Creator
Tucker-Maxon’s original Vocabulary Tutor included an interface for teachers, specialists and parents to easily create tutorials with any vocabulary items they choose. This supplied children access to intensive lessons with vocabulary they need to know immediately. It also furnished parents and educators with the tools the means to quickly fill in their children and students’ language. The Animated Speech Corporation created a companion product for Timo: Vocabulary that allows people to make lessons. This is called Timo’s Lesson Creator.
(Image 2).
Image 2. Timo’s Lesson Creator.
The Listening Tutor
The Listening Tutor focuses on the auditory discrimination of similar speech sounds. It takes students through the typical speech lesson activities of sound identification, discrimination and production. When a student encounters difficulty with a task the program intervenes with visual speech support (the animated character producing the sounds), or practice with repeating speech sounds instead of single speech sounds. The goal of each session is to bring the student back to the most difficult task in the tutor, that is, to identify the sound in a closed set of single syllables without visual speech support.
The Lesson Exchange
Tucker-Maxon teachers used Timo’s Lesson Creator software to create a body of lessons to support classroom curricula and the IEP goals of their students. At the end of three months, the teachers had created 500 original lessons. Many of these lessons have been posted at the Animated Speech Corporation’s Lesson Exchange pilot Web site for other special education teachers and parents of children with language needs to download and use. (Image 3)
Image 3. The Lesson Exchange Web site.
For more information on the commercial availability of these technologies, please contact Animated Speech Corporation.