2012-02-22-Slate and Stylus
Seminars@Hadley
The Slate and Stylus:
Braille Media’s Pen and Paper
Presented by
Sue Melrose
Nafisa Keels
Moderated by
Doug Anzlovar
February 22, 2012
Moderator
You’re listening to Seminars at Hadley. This seminar is the Slate and Stylus, Braille Media’s Pen and Paper, presented by Sue Melrose and Nafisa Keels, moderated by Doug Anzlovar.
Doug Anzlovar
Okay, let’s begin today’s seminar again, my name is Doug Anzlovar, I am the Dean of Educational Programs and Instruction here at The Hadley School. Today’s topic is the Slate and Stylus, Braille Medias Pen and Paper.
I’d like to welcome today’s guest speakers; they are two of our Hadley faculty members, Sue Melrose and Nafisa Keels. Nafisa has worked as a Braille instructor for The Hadley School for 14 years. She came to Hadley after working for 12 years as a teacher of the visually impaired in residential, home and itinerate settings in four different states.
Sue Melrose is currently an instructor for both Introduction to Braille and Contracted Braille for professionals and the family program. She also teaches Internet Beyond the Basics in the Adult Continuing Education and High School programs. Sue is a lifelong Braille user and has been using the Slate and Stylus as one of many means of written communication since age six. I’d like to welcome Nafisa and Sue to the room, and I’m going to turn the microphone over to Nafisa so she can get started.
Please, if you have questions, you are welcome to type them in the text chat, I will monitor them throughout the seminar, and if you would like to hold questions until the end, we will have a question and answer session. Thank you, and Nafisa, the microphone is yours.
Nafisa Keels
Thank you Doug. I am going to start with the history of writing for the blind with the slate and stylus in particular. When you consider the writing instruments from early times to the present, it seems that the slate and stylus is rather innovative and modern, yet all writing instruments with which paper is the medium, they are still relevant and desirable today, even in an age when computers are used frequently. People still enjoy all things paper and the writing instruments that go with them.
The Braille code and the Slate and Stylus have roots in a Military application. Back in 1819, Captain Charles Barbier [DeLaSare] met a challenge set by Napoleon to develop a night writing system for soldiers to use at night time to communicate on a battlefield. In its early development the slate and stylus had many more dots, and the system was more phonetic than it was alphabetic. But the general idea of embossing on the spot with a pointed instrument into a form to make impression on paper is by an individual made it a portable and useful tool from the beginning.
Louie Braille did simplify the system and sized it to the fingertip, but he never forgot Barbier’s contribution and he said, “If we have pointed out the advantages of our method over his, we must say in his honor that his method gave us the first idea of our own.” So if Barbier had never made it to the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, who knows how the literacy for the blind would have developed over time. I’m going to turn it over to Sue to discuss the advantages of using a slate and stylus.
Sue Melrose
Okay, the advantages and disadvantages of the slate and stylus, the most obvious one of course is that the slate and stylus is very portable, just like a pencil, the slate and stylus can be thrown in a purse or put in your pocket, or just grabbed and carried along in a notebook. It also doesn’t require any batteries, and most of us who use computer technology today know the feeling of losing the battery at the most critical point. The slate and stylus is also very flexible in its use.
For example, I can use lightweight paper, if I just want to take quick temporary notes. I can use heavyweight, if I want to take notes on something more permanent. I write all my recipes on vinyl paper, because number one, it’s more permanent, and also because I can then wipe them off at the end, and I don’t know about you, but I’ve always got something on my recipe when I’m done in the kitchen.
I can use clear plastic paper which I hesitate to use an embosser, because it oftentimes leaves sort of a sticky substance on the styluses that needs to be wiped off, but I use that paper frequently to label my CDs, to maybe put braille in a child’s book that I want to read to a classroom or to other young children. And I can also use it for just labeling about anything. You can write a label, cut it out, and stick it on a box, a bag, on whatever you want.
I also use magnetic strips, and I find these real handy for my canned foods for example, and once I’ve used the canned food, I throw it up on the refrigerator, and it now becomes the temporary grocery list. And these magnetic labels can be reused many, many times. And of course they’ll stick to anything metal, so I often use them out in the garage on paint cans or whatever else I might want. The slate and stylus many of them, not all, but many of them, have slots in them for [dimal] tape, but if you don’t have the slots you can just put the tape in the top line and line it up, and write right on the [dimal] tape.
And I’ve even used thin metal strips for my gardening supplies or anything I want to label outside, so the weather doesn’t ruin it. I can put the slate right on the lid of a box and label what’s in it; I can also use such materials as old catalogs. I used to use those all the time until I realized I’d better restrict that use to only my personal use, because if I was writing on an old catalog page in a meeting, more people than not would often stop to look and see what was on that catalog page, and the discussion would go there instead of what I was writing.
So again, what I’m pointing out here is that the slate and stylus is just incredibly flexible can be under many circumstances, they’re very portable. There is no maintenance on it, rarely – I’ve never had – well, that’s not true. I sharpened the stylus once but mostly you don’t have to, and the slates are very durable.
The other thing a slate and stylus can do that a lot of the computer devices can’t do easily is it gives you immediate hard copy. If I just want to braille a phone number and either throw it in my wallet or give it to somebody I can do it with a slate and stylus right then and there, and hand it out.
Now a couple of disadvantages are obvious, like the pencil it’s much slower than say a computer or typewriter, although again most of know contracted braille and some of us know grade three braille and so if we use those codes with the slate and stylus, I can easily keep up with the rest, anybody who is writing. And I find it no problem at all to keep up taking notes of speakers for example. But that does take practice, and for a new user the slowness would be a disadvantage.
And the other one is that it’s not as easy to erase things, you’d have to take your paper and erase it, and so accuracy is more important I believe for a slate writer. But again you learn your slate and stylus well, and then you don’t have to worry about that either.
So those are some of the advantages and disadvantages, and now I’ll turn it back to Nafisa.
Nafisa Keels
Thank you Sue. The next thing that we will discuss are the variety of slates and styluses. I have pulled up a slide here.
Vileen Shah
Hello this is Vileen Shah, Instructor at the Hadley School. The best feature I like is about the slate and stylus is portability, you can carry it in your purse or pocket and use it any time you want to jot down something. I just wanted to share a little bit; I had the fortune to use the same slate and stylus that Louie Braille had developed when I was in Paris attending the biennial ceremony of Louis Braille’s birthday in 2009.
Nafisa Keels
Well thank you for sharing that Vileen, that’s very nice. What an honor. I have pulled up a slide here of a few varieties of slates, they come from all over the world, and if you’re ever curious about the extent, go to a search engine and type in Judy Dixon and slate and stylus, and you will see her impressive collection.
The photos that I have here are a sample from her collection, they are designed for many purposes, there is a full-page slate, which I do have pictured here in the slide, that will fit 8-1/2 by 11 paper, it’s usually made out of plastic, dark black, pretty durable with hinges, and you close your paper inside and you can write a whole page without having to move the slate. But the most portable is the four-line slate, and I have one pictured here, some are plastic. The one I have pictured here is metal.
A favorite among those of us who are prone to mistakes is the four-line metal slate with a window and we often call that a correction slate. It has a window that you can open to view and check your work, maybe make a correction if possible and you do not have to remove your paper. But every four lines you will have to move the slate down the page.
Another handy slate that’s useful is the notecard slate. And if you’re someone who has a recipe collection or a rolodex this is very handy to have at your desk. It is designed to easily insert a standard sized notecard, and it accommodates five lines with 19 cells each line.
And then one of my favorites as a teacher is the paperless slate. For beginners this is a fun way, an enjoyable way to learn how to use the slate. It is made of plastic, it’s almost like a brick, a long brick with ten oversized styles and the brick is black with the dots or the pegs are white, and the pegs are movable within each cell, and they can be pushed so than when you turn it over, you can read what you’ve written. It is useful also to keep on your desk to maybe jot down a quick phone number.
With the variety of slates, there is also a variety of stylus and I have a picture taken from Judy Dickson’s collection, many different kinds of stylus with different handles and you can use some that have a saddle which forms with a curve to your hand, some prefer a rounder stylus, others like a design where even though it’s round, it has one side flat, so it doesn’t roll off your desk.
And of course for those of us who commit to Braille there is also the beloved eraser, which can correct certain kinds of mistakes. If you have an unwanted dot, it might be easy enough to push that dot down, but if you make a mistake that’s bad enough, of course sometimes just taking the paper out and starting over is what’s needed, but the erasers also come in different styles, I have two pictured here.
One is a round almost dowel type, another is a knob with a more pointed end, and then the one that I’ve also seen that I couldn’t find a photo of is one that’s shaped almost like a pencil and it’s a hard plastic.
And I’m going to be turning it over to Sue, she is going to discuss some ways to use and operate the devices, and she’ll also give us some input on her favorites.
Sue Melrose
Okay, yes, Nafisa mentioned most of the most common slates, but there are some fun ones as well. Well there is a common one that’s an index – I think she mentioned the index card slate, where you just slide it in, the metal is already put together. It doesn’t open up, you slide the index card in from the bottom, and it’s exactly six lines and the width of the card.
There is also a one-line slate, that I think was designed probably primarily for [dimal] tape, the hinges are at the top, and you open it up, put the dimal tape in, close it, and it’s about a 15 line cell slate. But I always found it handy for just putting at the top of the pages on anything on my desk, and just writing what that paper was, so that it didn’t become this blank anonymous piece of paper. So the one line slate I find very handy.
There is a slate just for Brailing playing cards, I’ve not ever seen one, but I see them in catalogs all the time and it has the cells at each corner, so you just slide the card in and then turn the slate around to braille in each corner. One that isn’t used very often anymore because cassettes aren’t that common but there was a slate designed and this just shows how slates can be customized, but it was designed absolutely perfectly to fit on a cassette label. It had an open slot in the middle where the cassette, little dials were so that you didn’t put braille there and it had cells all around the cassette, so that you could write on it above the opening, below it and on each side.
And then there are all kinds of notebooks that you can buy with slates in them already, where the slate is designed to be exactly the size of the page of the notebook, and the American Printing House for the Blind has several of those kind of notebooks including a datebook that has a calendar and then lots of tabbed pages, so you can put notes to yourself, and put them between whatever page of the calendar that’s appropriate.
So those are kind of some of my favorite slates. Now, I wanted to talk a little bit about resources, and you don’t need to write these down, because you can always get the resource list that will be filed with this seminar when it gets recorded. You can access it by going to the Hadley page and clicking on the access past seminars link, go to the Slate and Stylus seminar, and then the resources list will be available there, but I do want to refer you to a few.
If you want to purchase a variety of slates, the American Printing House for the Blind which is known by those of us who use it APH, the American Printing House, and you can get it at www.APH.org. And there they will have a great number of slates. This is the primary distributor of educational materials around the US, and so you’ll find lots of slates there.