When I grow up I want to be a doctor.
I want to work with computers because I like to work.
I want to be a cake baker.
Transoranje School for the Deaf was initially an Afrikaans school for Deaf children
with a goal to have an empowered Deaf child.
We want the children to feel comfortable at our school. It must be a home for them, it must be gentle.
It must be a place where they can express themselves, being someone that is noticed and seen.
There are no link-ups between the hearing world and the Deaf world,
although Deaf people need to function within our hearing world.
They do not have the language that hearing people have, so they need a tool to make themselves understood.
I felt that we needed to make something for Deaf children in South Africa in their own language.
We started the iDeaf project because we saw that there was a big problem with Deaf children's reading skills.
We wanted to make something that would make it easier for them to learn.
Deaf children learn everything visually (using their eyes)
and we had to find an easy way to put all the information that they needed into one place
and that was one of the reasons we chose the iPad - it was an intuitive tool.
We didn't have to teach the children another language to use this tool; they could use their fingers and find their way on the iPad.
Deaf children know natural signs and they tend to go towards the sign instead of reading
and we wanted to help them to read first because we need to improve their reading skills.
You just touch the word and will see the sign for it,
so we would make stories easy, so it's easy to understand.
We'd highlight words we knew children would struggle with
and made an image or a video to explain that word
and this helped the children to understand the word more and helped them to really understand the story.
They have really bettered themselves. I think the iPads have changed the children.
My Grade 3 class can now read a whole story by themselves without any help
and this really makes me happy. It's amazing.
Initially we just thought about improving reading skills
and we now find that the children are using the iPads in ways that we never thought of:
we can now record them doing sign language interpretations of their own stories,
and the little children can now start learning sign language
and working with maths and shapes and general language
in applications (software) that we didn't even think of.
Using the iPad, these children have a much brighter future.
The goal is to give them tools and prepare them for the hearing world.
We are working with children who naturally use their hands to talk to others
and this was just an extension of their own language.
To help us reach these goals there is nothing that worked better than an iPad.