School for Blind Leads the Way in Distance Learning From: THE Journal By; Dian Schaffhauser Microsoft Lync proves invaluable when teachers and students can't be together. A unique school in Washington state is using a communications and collaboration platform normally deployed in corporate settings to bring a teacher working from a home office together with her students sitting in a physical classroom. The typical student set-up includes a computer (netbooks last year), a headset, a standard QWERTY keyboard, and a Braille display, which converts text into Braille and vice versa. On Robin Lowell's end, she uses a laptop computer, which is hooked to a secondary monitor, on which she displays all of the student desktops so she can watch what they're doing. She also uses a document camera with a small whiteboard. For students with low vision, she can write examples on that board that they can see in blown up fashion on their monitors. Those same students likewise have document cameras too, in order for Lowell to view their work as they're writing it out by hand. Read the entire article at: http://thejournal.com/articles/2012/08/15/school-for-blind-leads-the-way-in-distance-learning.aspx Links: Washington State School for the Blind http://www.wssb.wa.gov/index.asp Microsoft Lync http://lync.microsoft.com/en-us/Pages/unified-communications.aspx