ROUGH EDITED COPY

RIT-NTID

CREATING ENGLISH-TO-ASL TRANSLATION USING POWERPOINT

PRESENTER: SARA HANSEN

MONDAY, JUNE 23, 2008

1 P.M.

CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY:

ALTERNATIVE COMMUNICATION SERVICES, LLC

P.O. BOX 278

LOMBARD, IL 60148

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This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings

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Creating English-to-ASL Translation Using PowerPoint

Presenter: Sara Hansen.

>> Good afternoon. I hope you all enjoyed your lunch. I'd like to introduce our presenter today, Sara Hansen who is going to present about using PowerPoint slides and hyperlinks to show English text signed in ASL. Sara? After she concludes I have an evaluation form I would really appreciate if you could fill it out or fill them out on line. So really appreciate your cooperation.

>> Sara Hansen: Thank you. Hello and good afternoon everyone. My name is Sara Hansen and I teach at the Metro Deaf School which is located in St. Paul, Minnesota. And what I would like to open my presentation with this afternoon is to tell you -- well, first of all, what I need do is introduce it and after that I'm going to be switching over to speaking English and then the interpreters will be signing for me. So we will progress along that way and then I will switch over and they will be signing for me. Now, I started using this particular program with my first through third grade students. I noticed that sometimes it was very difficult for younger student whose didn't have English as a first language to become independent as they were reading. Sometimes the younger students would sit with a book and they look at -- sort of make up their own words. They would try to sound it out, whatever. The deaf students who didn't have the vocabulary couldn't do it and they weren't independent readers at that time. We had to come up with something else for the deaf students so they would begin to read on their own. Of course they had teacher support. They need to feel they could attempt to start to read a book on their own. We started by scanning books to PowerPoint and uploading that. That process was a little lengthy, took a lot of time, needed a lot of volunteer teaching assistants to make that happen. So the scanning part once we really instituted that really helped things roll along. I would like to show you all the different things that are ready to scan into PowerPoint into text. You can use either words or phrases and what you do is that links to a picture of somebody signing in ASL or a video of somebody signing in ASL. So what do we do this for? What's the point of using the hyperlinks? There's three basic reasons why we do this. The first is to foster that independence that I was talking about before. These young beginning readers need to have that self-actualization so they can begin to attempt to read on their own. Second is they can record themselves signing a story. And then that could link to the text. So what we have as a record already of their reading and what their attempts are. We're not necessarily having to struggle with that any more. The students we have a record of what they are doing. Before they would make the attempts and it would be gone. We would have no way to access it later. With the hyperlink technology we are able to do that. The third track is to support the second language learning by using the first language as the bridge to the second language. So what can we actually hyperlink? We can do individual words and that could link to a photo. Now, it's either the child themselves demonstrating the sign or somebody else. It could be an adult, whatever. But you link this word to somebody signing it in a photo format. Sometimes you have tricky phrases in the English language. Very difficult to translate into ASL. That's another thing we can link to a video and also the full text of a story is something we can link to. Here are the requirements to be able to use this technology. It's not extremely fancy equipment. You need PowerPoint, of course, and usually that's readily available on your computer. Just a quick aside. When I have been doing this I have been using this work on my computer and I have a PowerPoint 1997 or 2003 or whatever and now of course there's a newer version and it's going to look very different on your hand-outs than actually what I'm showing on my PowerPoints here. So just warning you there's going to be a little bit of discrepancy of what you see on the hand-outs and what is here. Anyway, we scan the books and upload them first. You need a digital camera and need to have that able to link with your computer and also you need the video clips at the ready so that you can have these uplinked with the PowerPoint when you actually figure out which words you wand or phrases to link with the it. If there's enough time I would like to show you four different kinds of hyperlinks that we're using. You can hyperlink individual words to a picture, the photo that I mentioned before. Also English phrases they can be very brief. You know, maybe not even a full sentence but just one basic part of a sentence, two to three words, something like that you could link to a video description of that. You could also do full English text to a video. The fourth one is a really fun part of the project I'm totally into this one you have a full text story and then you have the child act it out also in ASL. So you have the story plus this role play that become as component of it. This is more for during in-class projects. Now I'm going to make a switch and go into my first language. Thank you so much for interpreting so far. Okay. The first project I'm going to show you I did this book, it's called -- it's a series of books for struggling readers, it's a great series called "wow, these are brand new readers." They come in boxes of four books. With this one it is called wow. It is with a struggling third grade reader. This is after we had already done the book in glass a little bit. I had taken pictures of her signing some of the vocabulary. Then we made this into a book with some of the words supported with pictures of her signing the words. So she could go back to this book and she would always remember the words that she struggled with. So I'm just going to kind of go through this and show you the hyperlinks. So we're working on verbs with this particular book so she would click on the word and there's a picture of her signing the word. And I also I use another program called SMARTnotebook that maybe some of you have used if you have smart boards. You can cover the picture. Obviously she would probably figure out the sign to laugh because she would look at the picture. Later on I could cover the picture and make it a more independent activity. So I want you to imagine you're -- she is doing this at her own computer, and she is going through the book herself reading the book on her computer. That was an example of hyperlinking individual words to just a still photo of a student signing the individual word. I am going to go through the how-to process of this. First I'm going to show you the examples of the videos that I have done, too. Then at the end I will go through the step by step in the hand-out, also. The second one I'm going to show you is a story called you probably heard of this book, snowy day. I use this with a couple of second graders who -- they were pretty much -- they are about first grade level readers but there are some really tricky phrases in this that are tough to translate into ASL. This was a book they had not seen before. And they -- I have this on their computers and they read this book for the first time without any support from the teacher and some of the phrases are hyperlinked to ASL translations. And this way they were able to be a little bit more independent with it at first. I'm kind of going to go through it quickly because of time. But I will also be happy to send you guys copies of these PowerPoints with the links already embedded. So I can do that. So here was a phrase that I envisioned my students struggling with. So before -- when I made this book I had a native signer sign some of these phrases and I put the links into the PowerPoint. So when they got to a piece of text that had a rectangle around it, they knew they could click on it to get the translation. This is also nice because the students can toggle back and forth between the media player and PowerPoint. They can keep going back and making the connection. So I'm not going to go through the whole story but that's an example of something I had set up before they started reading the book so they could really be independent the first time they read and it not feel like there were so many words they didn't know. Third one, I'm going to show you, is this is after they read -- after they read the story and we have been through for it a few days. They decided this wanted to sign the whole text of the story. This is great because it gave me a record of their reading. Also gave me this full text signed version I can use with future students. So it was many benefits. You can kind of see some of the phrases that were signed by the adult, the students use the -- signed it the same exact way when they made at this time second time. You can tell they really internalize the tricky phrases in their first language. It's also fun to work on this as a class because you can like the word snowsuit, we were thinking what is a snow cute. In Minnesota our kids they wear snow cute as lot. Can't wear a snowsuit he would probably put on gloves and a hat and scarf. They decided that was important to put in the story, too. It's a nice dialogue about translate everything one language to another. We also, it was interesting the discussion we had, too, sometimes the text is broken up into two pages but it's not always a natural stop for ASL. So they decided well it's okay. We will sign it all together in one video and we won't hyperlink the other part. Everyone will know. So it was interesting to see their perspective on that, too. So you sign both of those pages in that video. There was a lot of revision with this. We did it once and they watched it and said I didn't sign that very clearly. Really nice process to do. Was time consuming but again I wouldn't do this with every book we do in class by any means. It's nice once in a while to get the record of the reading and understanding. This is my favorite. This was one of the phrases that they -- that I had an adult sign the first time they read the book on the computer, he wasn't old enough not yet. That was one of the phrases. Really interesting the student signed exactly like the adult signed it when we did her version. This was really fun. I had the adults sign this one on the initial book they read on line, too. And she signed great big tall heaping mountain of snow just great big tall heaping mountain of snow. And the kids were like, no, that can't be right. There's one sign, seven words there. We had a great discussion of that. Sometimes multiple signs that you need for one English word and vice versa. Sometimes there will be seven English words and need one sign. At the second grade level that was really interesting for them. That was really big moment for them. As you can see it doesn't say anything in the text about Peter sitting in the back. That was another discussion we had. Sometimes you have to give background information. If you were signing the story aloud what pictures would you want the kids to know about, background information. Another thing we can do with the final project. They were also like why don't we give it to the kindergarten class so they can watch it. We translated it into ASL for them. It's a nice resource to have to keep for other classes, too. I'll show you a short -- small part of the book we did. If you give a mouse a cookie, which is another really fun story for this age group. Really good with cause and effect. We made this -- made our own version of this signing the text and role playing the story. We saw the play at the children's theater in Minneapolis. Really nice to have all the different connections. So we didn't do this all at once. Looks like this very complicated project but we just did the students signing the story like we did in the previous book and then they had also made a role play of the story. They acted out the story. All I did was take the movie and cut into it clips and put it in the pages I went with. It was more work on my part than their part but the finished product is really fun to have. With this one I didn't hyperlink with rectangles. I used an icon instead. It's the same concept just putting in a different kind of graphic. I'm going to stop there just because of time but you kind of get the idea. So now I'm going to walk through the process of how to do this. It's really actually very simple. I am also -- already have all the photos and video clips in folders ready to go. So that makes it a little faster, too. And I'm going to use first I'm going to do how to link still photos. I'm going to use the book very hungry Caterpillar which I'm sure you're all family with. This is assuming you have already scanned the pages of the book and you have them saved. This is all in your hand-out, by the way. You're going to want to make the background of the slide the page of the book. All you're going to do is right click. This loose different than the hand-out but it's the 2007 version but it's all the same steps. You're going to fill the background with a picture that you already have. Saved. And with the 2003 version you don't have to do this part. It just stretches the picture kind of weird but if you have the older version of PowerPoint you do not need to do that. Now I have the picture as the background of the slide. I'm not going to link anything on the cover so I'm going to go ahead and choose a new page of my book where there's a word I want to hyperlink. I'm going to -- you know very hungry Caterpillar goes through the days of the week. Let's say we're going to focus on the days of the week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. I'm going to jump to the page that has Monday on it. And sit stretched. You know how the pages of the very hungry Caterpillar are. They are kind of cropped. Have the little tiny pages. Typically you won't have the problem with the words being so stretched but the way the formatting of this book is, you will. I want to link the word Monday to a picture of somebody signing Monday. So what I'm going to do is draw a rectangle around the word Monday. And that's going to become the object I link to the picture. But I want to be able to see through my rectangle. So I have to format the rectangle. All you do is right click on the rectangle and I want it to match the background of the slide so it's invisible. Now that I have my -- I have what word I want, I need to get the picture of the sign into my presentation. And the good thing about linking still photos is you can put the photos right into PowerPoint. Can't do that with video. You have to link to the video in an outside folder which I will show you in a minute. I'm going to go ahead and make a slide that has the picture of the sign I want. And I'm not going to make the picture of the sign, the background of the slide. I want to put it in there and I'll show you why in a moment. I'm going to insert a picture. And I already have it signed here from a previous workshop. And while I'm at it I'm going to go ahead and add Tuesday. So I'm going to make the background of my slide another page from the book. Here's Tuesday. Okay. I'm going to draw a rectangle around Tuesday. I'm going to format the rectangle to match the background and then I'm going to put in the picture of Tuesday. Now, when I open this into the slide show version, and the kids are going through it, actually I'm going to go back a step and I'm going to go ahead and hyperlink these first before I explain that. I'm going to hyperlink this rectangle and here is hyperlink. And I want to hyperlink it to a slide so it's a place in this document. And it's going to list the slides I have. I want to link Monday to this slide. This slide is slide number four. So I'm going to click on slide four. Now, after -- I'll go into slide show sorter here. Here is my sequence. Now after -- when the student clicks on Monday it's going to jump to slide four. But after they are done seeing that sign I want it to jump back to the page that says Monday. I need to link that picture back to slide number two. The same way. So I right click and that's the reason we don't make this picture the background. We make ate separate picture so I can hyperlink it. Otherwise it's nothing to hyperlink, it's just the slide. I hyperlink this back to slide two. And then in the natural progression this will go to slide three and I want to hyperlink Tuesday to slide five. Because that's where the sign for Tuesday is. And then I want to hyperlink that back to slide three where the word is. And this seems kind of complicated but the cool thing about PowerPoint, once you do the hyperlinks. If you want to switch them later hyperlinks follow you. If I move this picture down, this is all going to fix itself. You don't have to go back and relink everything and put it in the right order. That saves you some time. Okay. So now I'm going to test out my hyperlinks even though I haven't included all the pages of the book. That's it. Are there any questions just about how to do the still photos part? This is all in your hand-out step by step. Now I'm going to do video. And I'm going to use the book there is a "nightmare in my closet." It's a really fun book for second and third graders. There's some tricky English-to-ASL phrases that are great for using this technique. So I already have the pages scanned in. Let's take out the first page and put it back in. So I do format background, I want to use a picture. I have to find it. Here's the page I want. Okay. So I have all my pages scanned in. So can any of you find a phrase, that's kind of small. Let me bring it up. That might be tricky for a second grader to go from English-to-ASL? Used to be. Okay. So let's go ahead -- yep. Nightmare is another tricky one. Let's go with "used to be" since it's a phrase. I happen to have a video clip of someone signing the phrase. Same thing. We're going to make a rectangle around the phrase. And then we're going to format the rectangle so we can see through it. Now I want to hyperlink the rectangle to a video clip that I already have on my computer. So instead of going to a place in the document I want to use an existing file because the movie is not in my PowerPoint. It's on my computer somewhere. So here's my -- it's a lot easier if you name the clips, the English phrase you want. A lot easer to find. Finally figured that out. Okay. So let's test it. Just like that. Let's find another tricky phrase. How about on this page?

>> Turn around.

>> Turn around and look. I was thinking the same thing so I have a video clip ready. Okay. So we'll make a rectangle, we'll format it, and hyperlink it. Then we'll test it. Let's do one more. How about on this page? Anybody?

>> Once and for all.

>> Sara Hansen: Once and for all. Is there another one?

>> Get rid of.

>> Sara Hansen: Let's do get rid of because I happen to have a video clip for that one. Okay. Rectangle. That's it. So that's just a basic lesson. This step by step is also in your hand-outs. If you're using a different version of PowerPoint the steps are still the same, just look as little bit different. So again it's kind of a process with the scanning the books in. I know that can be kind of lengthy but once you get a lot of these things in place, it's very easy after that. The initial startup takes a little bit of time. I found it's extremely worthwhile. The kids love it. They love having the ASL, the adult signing it, they have the confidence and they want to make it themselves. It's always right to have the excitement about reading. It really gives them the confidence. Nice to see that. Anybody have any questions about the process or about anything?

>> One of the challenges for my student is signing in front of the video camera and regular what they say. Sometimes there's the English text and they need to do the translation on the fly and it's hard for them. Do you rehearse them in any way or prepare them? Do you have cue cards? Memory going to take you to challenge.

>> Sara Hansen: Thank you for asking the question because people asked me that before. And we do a lot of preparation before we get to the videotaping part. But I try to keep it in short enough chunks. You can kind of tailor it to the readers. If you have a student who is going to be able to remember a whole -- how to visualize a whole chunk of text in ASL that student can do a little bit larger chunk. A student who is not going to remember as much or cue cards aren't really going to help, still want the student to feel like they are making the book, doing the translation, give them a shorter chunk of text. Sometimes the students just want to write down a couple key words that they know. Sometimes they want the book in front of them. But as you probably experience if they have the book in front of them they are looking down. Hard for them. They get stuck with the English. Not thinking in ASL. I want them to think in ASL. So I typically just give them a chunk that they can handle or we do a lot of practice before we actually get to the videotaping part. Is there another question?

>> How do you deal with copyright.

>> Sara Hansen: That's a very good question. I have looked into this with our school's lawyer. And since we own the book and we're not making copies of the book to give to kids. I'm using it for educational purposes I'm okay and you would be okay, too. I've done this presentation before and I have given poem copies of the CDs which have the books in them which was a copy right concern, also. Basically if the person has a copy of the book, if I was to give you a CD with the PowerPoint on it. If you told me that you had a copy of it and you weren't going to make multiple copies of the CD and didn't give it to people that didn't own the book then we would be okay. The key is it's for educational purposes. Not selling it and we're not giving cops to people for free that don't already own the book. Good question.

>> The media is on your computer. So it -- how do you use it -- can they take that to another computer then? Does it only have to be on the compute they're the video is loaded on to.

>> Sara Hansen: That is a good question, also. What I have do. I have written this on the hand-out. Make a folder that has everything in it. Has the scanned pages of the book, it has the video clips, the pictures I'm using. If the kids are going to watch it on the computer I do have to put a copy on each computer, yes. With the videos since the video is not in the PowerPoint like the picture is, you're putting a link in the PowerPoint. Linking it to somewhere on your computer. If later I move that video like if I was reorganizing folders if I move the video my link gets messed up. It was linked to that place and now the video is gone. So the easiest way I found is make a folder with all the video clips in it and if you always move the folder around together, then you have no problems. If you have the PowerPoint like I have the PowerPoint in here, I have the video clips and I have the scanned pictures of the book. All in one folder. I copy that whole folder on my thumb drive and plug it into each computer. If you want to put down your mailing address and e-mail address I can send you a copy of the CD that has all of the videos and PowerPoints already on it. Again it's on your honor that you already own this book to protect this from copy right issues. But I have some paper up here. I can pass that around. Any other questions? Thanks.

>> I have something.

>> Last question? We have one last question? I was wondering have you tried this with the older students in sixth, seventh, eighth grades? What did you use? Is it still picture books?

>> Sara Hansen: I haven't done it with older kids. A couple of my colleagues have started using hyperlinks. A lot of people in the audience, the other presentation were middle school and high school teachers and they e-mailed me and said they tried it. Most of the feedback is again it's a lengthy process to get started with all the scanning of the books. Once they did it it was really easy from then on. I haven't personally done it with older kids and I know it has been tried and so far it sounds like it's been successful.

>> I really need to cut off questions and maybe you can deal with them later, Sara. And I'll leave the evaluation forms here on the table. Please fill out one of these or go on line later and go ahead, evaluate it on the website, if you can, thank you.