Oser Communications Group
AN INDEPENDENT PUBLICATION NOT AFFILIATED WITH FETC
Hearing Is Personal: How Lucid Technology Adapts to Your Ears
Every day each of us experiences an extraordinary variety of sound that is, in many ways, personal to us. The alarm tone that wakes us up, the conversations we have with people – each of these are uniquely experienced individually and personally. While we can’t individually manage all of our aural exposure, we certainly can have our preferences. Normal ears contain around 15,500 sensory hair cells that sit alongside a membrane that vibrates with each incoming sound. Each frequency of sound vibrates the hair cells in specific locations, which is why we are able to hear differences in sounds. While different sounds vibrate different parts of our membrane, louder sounds increase the amplitude of the vibration. When it comes to hearing loss, the majority is sensori-neural loss, where inner and outer hair cells have been damaged. This leads to an inability to hear soft sounds, while still being able to hear (and be sensitive) to loud sounds. So, while a person experiencing hearing loss can still have a dynamic range of hearing, it is a much smaller range than a person with normal hearing. The standard for today’s hearing aids and amplifiers is a technology called Wide Dynamic Range Compression (WDRC). WDRC logically amplifies softer sounds more than louder sounds, in an effort to balance what the user hears. It gives the most amplification to soft sounds, less to average sounds and even less to loud sounds. Ears that are experiencing hearing loss have a decreased range of what they can hear and WDRC attempts to generically boost the range of soft sounds. Lucid identified the need for a more nuanced approach that highlights and differentiates Continued on Page 5
Schools Meet Challenges with Help from Trafera
Schools have unique challenges. Trafera has built its business around helping with those needs. Trafera takes time to understand what’s important to you and add expertise to your corner. That’s why Trafera is one of the top nationwide partners for Chromebooks in education. But its mission to transform learning experiences through technology goes beyond pushing boxes of equipment.
Orlando Wednesday, January 26, 2022
ELMO Introduces Connected Ecosystem for Education
ELMO USA Corp. introduces the most comprehensive connected ecosystem for education on the market today. As the learning environment changes across the world, ELMO has advanced its technology to support and enhance its award-winning document camera line up. In-person and virtual lessons are taken to the next level with ELMO’s newest connected devices. At the center of the connected ecosystem is the document camera, the product by which all ELMO’s connections are inspired and created. The trusted and award-winning ELMO document cameras seamlessly broadcast images and videos, allowing you to capture every tiny detail of a lesson. For an evenmore dynamic lesson, wireless document cameras allow educators the ability to capture images and videos around the room or outside the classroom. You can still have the freedom to walk around the room with the ELMO CRA-2 Writing Tablet. It allows teachers and students the opportunity to annotate while live broadcasting the notes directly on the image or board. Next up, ELMO has supercharged the classroom with the ELMO Board. The ELMO Board is the link between students visualizing the images from the document camera, WIFI enabled devices, and student engagement. It allows educators the ability to quickly capture ideas, share the images on screen, save quickly, and to expand further creating dynamic, memorable lessons for students. Its industry-leading intelligent touch technology responds to fingers, palms, and a stylus, so you don’t have to worry about misplacing your stylus for the umpteenth time. It’s a breeze to navigate and connects wirelessly to WI-FI enabled
BOOTH #535 Encourage Robotics and Computer Science Student Engagement
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Trafera measures success not based on how many devices it sells to schools, but by how those devices are being used to enrich and transform student learning. Trafera believes that all the devices, panels, and gadgets in the world couldn’t improve learning
The coming decade will bring unprecedented changes within the workplace. From education, to retail, to hospitality and transportation, virtually all industries will be transformed by robotics and artificial intelligence. Millions of jobs will be eliminated by technology while millions of new jobs will be created. Still millions more jobs will be transformed and students that graduate from high schools with strong technical skills (including robotics and A.I. literacy) will be significantly advantaged. However, despite the increasing importance of robotics and computer science education, enrollment in these courses in the USA continues to lag behind many other countries. Within American high schools, enrollment averages less than 3 percent of boys and 0.3 percent of girls. To put those numbers into perspective, a school with 2,000 students will often have less than 30 boys and 3 girls in their robotics programs. This means that 1,967 students are missing out on a literacy that is rapidly becoming a key differentiator across a huge spectrum of jobs. Within middle schools, the results are marginally better with 5-15 percent of students typically enrolled – still tangibly below the needed levels. “It’s truly a crisis,” says Dennis Kambeitz, founder of Robots.Education. “Robotics and A.I. will impact all industries, but it’s only our most engineering-minded students who tend to take this type of education. The unfortunate truth is that the students who need this education the most are often the ones who are least likely to enroll.”
BOOTH #3635
BOOTH #3911
Just see what customers have to say: “While I have a large IT reseller network at my fingertips, I always, easily choose Trafera to supply all of our school district’s Chromebooks! The warranty program they have is absolutely top-notch, as is their ‘White Glove’ service. When I have had questions and requests, no matter how big or small, I am treated like I’m part of a team. There are so many businesses out there competing for our [attention], but there is no way I am switching from Trafera. When you find a company that does such great work, provides more than enough value in products and services and has people who truly care and respect your business’s wishes, you keep and nurture that relationship.” – Branden Strong (Technology Coordinator | Triton Public School, MN)
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