School Activities Using Handmade Teaching Materials with Dot Codes

Abstract

Practitioners have been using three communication aids in conducting many school activities at both special needs and regular schools. In the simplest system, voices and sounds are transformed into dot codes, edited with pictures and text, and printed out with an ordinary color printer; the printed dot codes are traced to be decoded into the originals by using a handy tool, Sound Reader. In the most complex system, in addition to audio files, multiple media files such as movies, web pages, html files, and PowerPoint files can be linked to each dot code; just touching the printed dot code with sound or scanner pens reproduces their audio or multimedia, respectively. The present chapter reports the software and hardware used in developing originally handmade teaching materials with dot codes and various school activities performed at both special needs and regular schools.