The hands often serve as the eyes and ears of children who are deaf-blind. The hand-under-hand technique involves gently placing your hands underneath or alongside the hands of a child with deaf-blindness to help them explore and engage with the world around them. When used effectively, the hand-under-hand technique provides respectful, tactile…

Ariadne is a touch-based program for the learning of homotopies of paths, without the use of formalism, by building mental models. Using Ariadne, the user can construct points, paths by dragging points and homotopies by dragging paths as well as compute winding numbers of paths, all on a variety of surfaces, through touch gestures. Ariadne…

The geologic method of stratigraphy which studies the structure of the earth by making layers was employed with 3D laser cutting techniques to make more easily defined tactile regions in templates of cells, tissues and anatomic regions containing muscles and bones. Templates were made audio responsive by hand-drilling a small hole in a template…

The development of effective oral communication skills is a high priority for beginner-level, adult English language learners, and clear pronunciation is an essential part of this development. The perception and production of English vowel sounds can be a particularly challenging area of pronunciation for beginner-level learners. If adult learners…

This article outlines a somatic-based class that illustrates how the integumentary system can be introduced to dance students to further their understanding of their physical instruments. It justifies why incorporating information about specific biological systems into dance teaching is apt and beneficial for dancers, and it describes how guided…

This article presents information on the impact of hyper or hypo-sensory responses and specific strategies that can balance the systems. We examine the five sensory systems (tactile, auditory, visual, proprioceptive, and vestibular), common behaviors associated with each system, and recommend instructional strategies designed to support student…

Context: Musculoskeletal palpation is taught in our athletic training programs as part of the injury evaluation process. However, as palpation skills are taught, the focus is oftentimes on accuracy of surface-anatomy landmarks instead of the ability to discriminate qualitative information such as tissue tone, spasm, or pain response from the soft…

Students sometimes struggle with visualizing the three-dimensional solids encountered in certain integral problems in a calculus class. We present a project in which students create solids of revolution with clay on a pottery wheel and estimate the volumes of these objects using Riemann sums. In addition to giving students an opportunity for…

Our interaction with digital resources is becoming increasingly based on touch, gestures, and now also eye movement. Many everyday consumer electronics products already include touch-based interfaces, from e-book readers to tablets, and from the last personal computers to the GPS system in your car. What implications do these new forms of…

Social studies students can learn to glean historical information from the study of material culture through active engagement as curators. Teachers can guide students through a pre-survey of helpful reading materials and then through selecting items of personal significance to them: creating labels that objectively describe the chosen items as to…

Allowing a student to "see" through touch what other students see through a microscope can be a challenging task. Therefore, author Joan Bradley created three-dimensional (3-D) models with one student's visual impairment in mind. They are meant to benefit all students and can be used to teach common high school biology topics, including the…

Acknowledging the performative sporting discourses which continue to dominate physical education, and the emerging focus on disease prevention within this context, this paper presents a socio-ecological framework for physical education that aims to shift the focus towards more multidimensional understandings of what it means to be "physically…

The process of learning involves interaction with the learning environment through our five senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste). Until recently, distance education focused only on the first two of those senses, sight and sound. Internet-based learning environments are predominantly visual with auditory components. With the advent of…

Amy Bower is a physical oceanographer and senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts--she has also been legally blind for 14 years. Through her partnership with the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts, the oldest K-12 school for the visually impaired in the United States,…

This article describes a lesson plan model that applies principles of universal design for learning (UDL) and multisensory learning centers to the framework of a traditional direct instruction spelling lesson for elementary students with learning, social, and attention problems. It reviews essential components of UDL and demonstrates how to…