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The 6th-grade students of the Higher Education School No. 40 in Morón, Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, produce audio stories for blind and visually impaired children under the inspiring title of “Wonderful stories to listen to”.
This project, which has just received one of the six first prizes awarded by the Ministry of Education in its sixteenth edition of the addresses a specific need of the children who attend the neighbouring Special School No. 506.
Educators and students contacted the local Talking Library, which offered the books and facilities, gave them advice and showed them how to write in Braille quickly and how the visually impaired can use a computer.
The authorities and teachers of School 506 guided the group of students from School No. 40 who contacted the radio “F.M. Huayra Quimbal 89.9”, which offered its studio to record the audio stories. Students were divided into groups, selected the children’s stories, read and performed them. Once they recorded them on a flash drive, they began the editing process at the school using the Audacity application. They then added effects and music to the stories before giving them to School No. 506 and sharing them on digital platforms. They used the Blogger tool to develop a collective digital blog [in Spanish]: https://cuentosees40.blogspot.com. You can also listen to the audio stories on Spotify [in Spanish]: https://spotify.link/E70wY3SNMDb
In addition to this material, they provided the school with a pedagogical box with objects mentioned in the story so that the children could listen to it with a tactile path that allowed them to follow the story using materials with different textures.
The project tackles the problem that people with impaired vision have to access information and communication; in this context, the students learnt about the Braille system and its rules, along with the legislation that establishes and protects the rights of people with disabilities.
The experience uses the curriculum content of the school subject “Institutional and Community Communication,” which includes theoretical and practical knowledge about the meaning of community and the workshop on language production.
Alongside the production of the stories, in the subject “Communication and Sociocultural Transformations in the 21st century,” they investigated the uses of technology concerning this disability, and the DANE Project (based on the creation of applications for tablets, mobile phones and smart TV, designed to help people with disabilities to learn). They explored different digital platforms for storing and distributing audio and browsed examples of audiobooks.
Part of the CLAYSS team was able to share the award ceremony and the day of reflection held by the Ministry with the protagonists of this project. We welcome this initiative and hope that it will continue its growth.
