A common question is: “Oh, you know sign language! Then you can speak to the deaf people in Australia and US, too?” Wrong! Sign language is not the same everywhere. It is as different as all the spoken languages. Otherwise, there would not be a great need for our web site spreadthesign.com .

As the Queen of Sweden said at the launch of spreadthesign.com in late March 2009: “ Imagine if all deaf children could be united under one language world wide, A kind of Esperanto. But of cause due to different cultures it remains just a dream.” Initially when I did the application for this project I had the idea of an European sign language. But since sign language has to develop from the group of deaf users we can not invent new signs in spreadthesign.com . We can just gather them and present them accessible on our web page. That is a big job enough. But we have invented one sign on our web page. That is the sign for “spread the sign”.

Spread the sign is an international EU project under Leonardo da Vinci and the life long learning programme. Under Leonardo it goes under the heading of Transfer of innovation (TOI). In this TOI project we develop an implement this inventive translation tool of our which we produces under an earlier Leonardo da Vinci pilot project (2006-2008) under the same name, Spread the sign. EU and Leonardo thru its recourses have given us the opportunity to show our capability to improve vocational education for deaf pupils the partner members in Spread the sign.

Our project is like others under constant surveillance of our national agency. The positive is that they also give us valuable feedback on our different reports we have to send in to them. In the final report of the earlier project of ours we had an interesting evaluation by University of Örebro and their Department of Education Deaf Studies. The evaluation hit the highest score we could get by the national agency’s extern proof readers. The evaluation itself is interesting reading and show how we test our product on our pupils when they go on mobility (work practice) exchange in Europe.

We also give you the links to the commission and our national agency where you can find more interesting information.

http://ec.europa.eu/education/lifelong-learning-programme/doc82_en.htm
http://www.programkontoret.se