OPEN-SIGN, socio-educational e-magazine for European deaf children Erasmus Project

Project Title

OPEN-SIGN, socio-educational e-magazine for European deaf children

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Access for disadvantaged; Disabilities – special needs; Inclusion – equity

Project Summary

Worldwide, one in every 1,000 children is deaf, in Europe-28 that represents close to 500,000 deaf people who are trying to gain access to knowledge and employment. However, this community suffers from a lack of inclusion: 80% of the deaf are illiterate and have a lot of difficulties to find a job (the employment rate is 71% for people with slight deafness, 59% with middle deafness, and only 34% for people with deep deafness). This shows the importance of instilling a wide breadth of knowledge early on, to ensure that deaf children have as much opportunity to receive knowledge and information and to become responsible citizens. 

However, the dissemination of existing information adapted to the deaf audience is seriously deficient for deaf adults and dramatically non-existent for deaf children. This prevents deaf people from accessing information and this is even more critical at school, where teachers are unable to use pedagogical content adapted to their deaf students.
Existing material uses content too rich in text (with sentences often long and complicated to be easily understood by deaf children) and videos are containing voice-overs and subtitles. This has the effect of demotivating many deaf children in school learning. This has the effect of demotivating many deaf pupils in school learning.

Open-Sign project aims to develop the first e-magazine adapted to deaf children. We focus on pupils between 7 to 13 years old. Indeed, it is the age range when children learn how to read and write and the needs become crucial.
With pedagogical elements that are easily understood by deaf children, we want to support teachers to nurture children’s interest in school learning, to open deaf children to the world, to arouse their curiosity, to develop their knowledge and to give them the means to communicate with their environment, including their family. What then allow them to improve their learning performance and to enhance their access to abstract concepts and reading potentialities.

The e-magazine will be proposed in two different and complementary media:
• a web site to gather all the available contents (combined with a search engine)
• an enriched digital magazine with a structured and editorialized content, sent through subscription and readable offline.

Information will be proposed through written texts (in English and in the national languages of the different partners) and videos using sign language (with a specific usage of the International Sign – IS).

We intend to use interactive potentialities of web site and e-book to propose unprecedented content for deaf children (culture, educational games and activities to make by themselves), along with educational sheets than can be used by teachers and family members:
• 6 Thematic topics (e.g. Dinosaurs, Ancient Egypt, What is a democracy? …)
• 15 Educational games using 3 different game engines (e.g. Memory, MCQ video…)
• 32 Manual activities videos made with pupils (e.g. cooking, scientific experience, creative activities, magic trick…)

The Open-Sign project brings together 6 complementary specialized partners:
• Les Apprimeurs – Leader (Paris, France), a small enterprise specialized in ebook creation
• Media’Pi (Paris, France), an association created by deaf people specialized in news content for deaf people
• SignFuse (Antwerp, Belgium), a small enterprise created by deaf people specialized in web development adapted to the deaf community
• Yomma (Berlin, Germany), a small enterprise created by deaf people specialized in graphic design and videos
• Istituto dei Sordi (Turin, Italy), one the oldest deaf school of Italy, founded in 1814, working with about 250 deaf students, from kindergarten to university
• Liceul Tehnologic Special pentru Deficienti de Auz (Cluj-Napoca, Romania), an institute with over 125 years of experience in the field of education rehabilitation of children with hearing disabilities, working with about 200 deaf students, from kindergarten to high school
Next to these partners, Open-Sign already gathered interest from 6 other institutes that become associated partners, located in Italy, Spain, Turkey, Hungary and Portugal.

Deaf children between 7 to 13 are estimated at 37,000 in EU-28, 16,000 in the 5 countries of the partners (France, Germany, Italy, Romania and Belgium), and 30,000 in the 9 countries of partners and associated partners (including Spain, Portugal, Hungary and Turkey). During the program, we aim at gathering:
• 2,000 ebook subscribers
• 5,000 Facebook fans
• 300 public bodies, associations, schools, educational institutions, public libraries
• 15 contributors who will create new contents

Open-Sign is designed to function independently at the end of the project. By developing an easy-to-use platform and by providing detailed explanatory sheets explaining step by step how to create and upload autonomously new contents, we expect contributors and users to appropriate the platform and make it live.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 334715 Eur

Project Coordinator

Les Apprimeurs & Country: FR

Project Partners

• SignFuse
• yomma GmbH
• Media’Pi!
• ISTITUTO DEI SORDI DI TORINO
• Liceul Tehnologic Special pentru Deficienti de Auz Cluj-Napoca