NICC Foundation receives grant from Arlin Falck Foundation

The Northeast Iowa Community College Foundation has received a grant from the Arlin Falck Foundation.

The $5,000 grant will fund the NICC Office of Disability Services' purchase of computer software that helps students who have hearing impairments and are at risk in their academic performance. The Office of Disability Services at the Calmar campus currently serves 74 students with various disabilities, including students whose hearing impairment makes it difficult or impossible to hear lecturers, access multimedia materials and participate in classroom discussions.

A new "AccessAbility - Overcome & Succeed!" project will enable these at-risk students to improve their academic skills using a computer equipped with an assistive software program. The grant allows NICC to purchase and implement I-Communicator, a communication device that assists students with real-time translation in the classroom in the forms of: speech-to-text; speech and text to video sign-language translation; and speech and text translated through a computer-generated voice. The program also contains a built-in dictionary and thesaurus to allow the student to obtain definitions and perform internet searches to gather more information on words and phrases. Using this assistive technology, hearing impaired students are able to save translated, "written lectures" to a software system for future access and review.

The Arlin Falck Foundation offers grant funding to non-profit organizations in the areas of community development, and community promotions and education. The grants are provided for the benefit of persons residing in Fillmore County and Houston County, Minn., and Allamakee County and Winneshiek County, Iowa.