Online-videoconferencing technology allows college students in Georgia to tutor hearing-impaired high-school students in Delaware. The distance-education setup is one of a small but growing number of uses of high-speed Internet connections to aid in instruction for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Online videoconferencing, used for a variety of educational purposes such as translation and monitoring student teachers, provides new opportunities for education students to hone their skills while giving deaf high-school students practical help.
Such projects also underscore the potential payoff of investment by colleges in advanced networking, such as Internet2′s high-speed network and the National LambdaRail fiber-optic network. But at the same time, technical and bureaucratic problems pose challenges to using the networks effectively for deaf education. (The Chronicle, subscription required)
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