Importance of Technology for Education of Deaf Students

Technology is playing an increasing role in the education of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students. This chapter discusses two uses of technology to provide communication access for DHH students (real-time captioning in classrooms and messaging and related technologies to facilitate communication in small groups) and two ways that technology is used for instruction of these students (multimedia materials for development of literacy and online tutoring). Several studies on real-time captioning and multimedia materials indicate that these approaches are beneficial in the education of DHH students. The limited work to date on messaging to support communication in groups with DHH and hearing students and online tutoring indicates that they are potentially important because they address unmet needs of DHH students. It is important to conduct additional studies to determine the effectiveness of these latter two approaches because current findings are preliminary.