Each year Freedom Scientific and Quantum support a scholarship program across Australia and New Zealand which aims to help vision impaired Australians go on to either TAFE or Tertiary studies.
We are proud to announce the winners of the 2007 Scholarship.
Catharina Edwards, Victoria
I am a mature age student who has returned to study after 35 years and have a serious reading writing difficulty. I am registered with the disability's section of Deakin University at Warrnambool undertaking Bachelor Of Nursing only my first year of study, and am having great difficulty but thankfully, I have been introduced to the WYNN program through Deakin library the main reason I wish to apply for this scholarship is because most of my study is done at home and unfortunately, I am disadvantaged financially which makes it impossible to me to purchase the software necessary at the moment. I use the Dragon speech dictation, which is very useful, but I believe that, combined with the Wynn program. I could achieve a higher academic standing.
Joanne Harrison, Tasmania
I know that if I was able to have access to the WYNN software, then this would greatly enhance my educational opportunities and my options for future employment.
Due to my learning disability:
- Cognitive processing is periodically affected.
- have difficulty reading and writing text.
- I find audio-visual processing difficult.
- I can not study full time because of my learning disability.
- I need extra time to complete assignments and exams.
- I am slower than others because I have trouble processing the information.
- I have a lot of trouble putting sentences together or into my own words and need to use a lot of referencing in my assignments.
- I find it difficult when lecturers are speaking and can’t get enough of the information written down.
And in summary, I had a lot of trouble writing this application.
Rhys Burridge, New South Wales
I am in Year 12 and doing my HSC. I have learnt about the Wynn software and believe it will be an immense benefit to me in my tertiary studies.
I have a learning disability that impacts my spelling, writing and reading.
Throughout my school life I have struggled with these challenges, which has masked my true academic potential.
My written work suffers because of my limited spelling ability. I can only construct sentences with words that I know how to spell. Getting my knowledge from my brain to the paper is torture. I am much better at expressing my ideas verbally. Having a scribe in year 10 and HSC does help overcome this.
I find reading text books particularly difficult, I often miss the correct meaning. Yet when my parents read it to me; I understand the ideas and concepts clearly and can remember the details.
I am also unable to effectively proof read my own writing, because my mistakes make sense to me.
I have a goal to go to university and study a degree in business or engineering. I am excited about the opportunities that Wynn software would allow me. As I see that it can minimise the roadblocks that I experience with my learning difficulty and would help in making my studies more fulfilling.
As I best learn through hearing, having my text books scanned and read out to me would be a great benefit. I would then also be able to create effective summaries.
The word prediction software, thesaurus and dictionary would expand my vocabulary and allow me to express my knowledge and thoughts, without the limitation of my spelling restrictions. This would also speed up the time and effort it takes to write an essay.
Throughout my school life my parents have acted as proof readers, and made corrections and suggestions! The Wynn software would allow me to be a more independent learner and assist greatly in my current and future studies.
Robert Whittington, Tasmania
in late 2005 I decided to go back to studying after a 30 years. How I come about making this big decision, was the passion I have in helping my community as a volunteer ambulance officer, during the last three years in volunteer and at the same time trying to secure a job as the ambulance officer the disappointments of being declined except into the Tasmanian ambulance service because of my educational skills. This is when I decided to try to become a registered nurse, having a degree in nursing has been very hard over the last six months but I'm still here and learning thanks to the help of the students Association of the Tasmanian University within this group is a disability section that has bent over backwards for me.
I was Diagnosed with dyslexia in December 2005, this ! came about by thinking loan needed glasses the optometrist suggested I spoke a reading therapist, he explained to me that his son had dyslexia and I had the same traits as his son. After being diagnosed I did need glasses but other specially shaded glasses that seemed to bring the print of the paper lost reading.
I use a program at university called Dragon naturally speaking that is how on writing this letter at the present stage. The read back facilities on this program aren't as clear as what I would like, until I was shown of the help that your technology can do.
Robert says 6 months after using the WYNN program "My result for bachelor of nursing degree for the last year and a half has outstretched my expectations on what I could achieve academically."