Shure's Microflex Wireless and ULX-D Systems help Alvik School equip students for lifelong learning

RESULT

Students (and teachers) who are hard of hearing are now fully immersed in classroom activities, while teachers can enjoy the enhanced practicality and performance the system delivers.

THE STORY

Alvik School in Sweden caters for over 1,050 students, from Reception up to Grade 9. About 120 of the school’s students are hard of hearing, which can have a detrimental effect on the learning experience.

Conventional wired sound reinforcement systems were initially tested, but these limited the movement of students and teachers within the classroom environment.

As such, Alvik School wanted a compact, unobtrusive solution that was scalable enough to fit many systems on a limited radio arrangement, while being easy to operate and convenient to charge. It was at this point that Shure’s Microflex® Wireless (MXW) system was discovered, delivering everything that the school needed to help with the students’ learning journey.

Borrowing equipment from a local distributor, the system was tested within a small number of classrooms with positive results. Pleased with the progress, the school purchased its first systems and called on the specialist help and knowledge of Hörservice Pontus Egerö AB to design and manage the installation.

Employing a novel hybrid of audio and hearing assistance technologies, the MXW system captures the voice of students and teachers and brings conversation directly to the ears of students, without the need for feeding the audio through conventional loudspeakers.

Instead, the audio is connected to a wire loop in the floor or ceiling of the classroom that radiates the signal directly to the students’ hearing aids. Students then simply switch their hearing aid to ‘T’ mode (for Teleloop or Telecoil) and it picks up the audio being transmitted through the magnetic field.

As the buildings were renovated, the school was able to install this unique approach to a hearing loop system with low cross talk in all the classrooms. These were later equipped with MXW systems, with around 19 rooms in the Middle and High School now featuring MXW attached to the hearing loop system.

Alvik School has continued to invest in technology to optimise the learning experience even further for hard of hearing students. Embracing the developments in hearing aid technology, the school looked at combating the differing latency limitations of various hearing aid technologies.

While standard hearing aids experience latency of around 5-6ms, in cochlear implants this is significantly higher, even upwards of 20ms. When Shure introduced a table microphone to the ULX-D digital wireless system with much lower latency, it was immediately of interest to the school. And when the time came to update the equipment at the Lower School, ULX-D was chosen instead of MXW and is now featured in 11 classrooms.

Students and teachers at Alvik School have praised the positive results that the new systems have brought to the learning experience, with one student commenting: “The best thing about the school is the support you get from the teachers and the hearing technology – you get a different type of support and more personal contact.”