Carnegie Mellon Students Release Ed Software for Hearing Impaired From: 21st Century School - 09/22/2015 By: Dian Schaffhauser Carnegie Mellon University students have released two new, free educational software products intended to help the hearing impaired. SignBook is an open source program that allows teachers to create custom video dictionaries of local sign language. Speak Up! is a set of games that help children learn how to vocalize sounds. Both sets of programs come out of the university's TechBridgeWorld, which is dedicated to helping people around the world with technology. SignBook is a platform for teachers to create a local database of animations depicting a sign. It was specifically launched for teachers at Mathru Center's Free School for Hearing Impaired Children in Bangalore, India. Although ample reference material exists for teaching American Sign Language, developer Erik Pintar noted that there are more than 300 other documented sign languages without such supports. SignBook includes the ability to capture sign videos and relevant pictures for each entry and categorize entries by topic and is usable by any teacher who wants to create a dictionary for any sign language. Speak Up!, created by a student team, is a series of games intended to motivate students to make sounds and to give them visual feedback on the volume and pitch of the sounds. The idea is to prevent teachers working with hearing-impaired students in grades 1-4 from having to make loud sounds themselves as prompts for their students, which can be hard on vocal cords. Read the entire article at: https://thejournal.com/articles/2015/09/22/carnegie-mellon-students-release-ed-software-for-hearing-impaired.aspx Links: Downloads iSTEP 2015 http://www.techbridgeworld.org/istep/downloads.html SignBook https://bitbucket.org/amalnanavati/istep-2015/src/3d333c3f95903ba5809df379d2bbbe36a9cd8ca0/signBook/?at=master Speak Up! https://bitbucket.org/amalnanavati/istep-2015/src/3d333c3f95903ba5809df379d2bbbe36a9cd8ca0/speakUpSoundGames/?at=master Mathru Center's Free School for Hearing Impaired Children in Bangalore, India http://www.mathrublindschool.org TechBridgeWorld http://www.techbridgeworld.org/index.html