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the Washington State School for the Blind. This
was for the practical reason that we know it qualifies for the Core Curriculum standards required
by the state of Washington and to focus on specific math functions known to be difficult for a
child who is blind.
This project has gone well and has just been
completed but we asked for a one year unpaid
extension of the two year grant to finish writing
reports and publishing in special education Journals to publicize our findings. The entire textbook
was not converted into an accessible online format. This was a "proof of concept" grant demonstrating that blind students are able to learn and
understand these difficult math functions when
taught online. The rest of the textbook will not be
difficult to convert to an accessible online course
using the same accessible math tools developed
by Dave Schleppenbach and his team at gh, his
company, in Lafayette Indiana. The blind youngsters at 3 participating schools, Washington, Indiana, and Maryland, have been testing the modules as they are developed.
The second grant is from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Principal investigator for this grant is Dr. Derrick Smith from the University of Alabama, Huntsville and his colleague,
Dr. Erika Slate-Young. We had a delay in getting
this one off the ground but finally on August 16th,
2012, it was approved and funded. This grant, at
the request of NSF, is to study the effectiveness
of teaching/learning math online. Unbelievably,
when I inquired of Professor Chris Dede at Harvard (a Guru of Online Education) and of Dr.
Robert Tinker, who designed Virtual High School
several years ago with a $15 million grant from
the U.S. Department of Education, they both said
no research had been done on the effectiveness
of teaching math online.
CANnect was also able to obtain grant funds
to create our Portal Course Catalogue. Now the
