Universally Designed

I was just forwarded a link from a friend of mine to the new UDL Editions by CAST website. According to the press release:

Wakefield, MA, April 23, 2008—In partnership with Google, CAST today celebrated World Book Day by introducing two new online literacy tools that provide robust, embedded learning supports for readers at all levels. UDL Editions by CAST are world literature classics presented in a flexible online interface that supports and engages novice and expert readers alike. CAST Strategy Tutor offers adolescent readers customizable mentoring and support as they conduct Internet research and read websites.

In the limited amount of time I had to experiment with the site, I found it very user friendly providing you are familiar with Texthelp’s Read&Write Gold toolbar. You can choose from 7 books and be provided with 3 levels of support on each book depending on student specific needs. These levels are as follows:

1. Maximum Support – “Stop and Think” prompts are multiple choice. Highlighting critical features, models, and hints available. Immediate feedback on responses.
   
2. Moderate Support – “Stop and Think” prompts elicit constructed responses and text revisions to explore author’s craft. Highlighting critical features, models, and hints available. Immediate feedback on text revisions only.
3. Minimal Support – “Stop and Think” prompts offer strategy choice and open responses. Students are guided to highlight and collect key elements in the text, thus actively highilghting critical features for themselves.

Give the site a look when you get a chance. The address is http://udleditions.cast.org. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come. Anytime you can get organizations like CAST together with companies like Texthelp and Google, you can expect great things to happen.

Occasionally I like to highlight new devices that I believe could make an impact on many of our students. I recently had the opportunity to acquire the new Writer Fusion and am very impressed with what I’ve seen. Let me explain…

Many times I am asked to come in and evaluate a student for assistive technology. More times than I can count on both hands, parents or staff members believed the best solution for the student was to have his or her own laptop. Don’t get me wrong, computers a great and laptops are sometimes even better because of their portability, but they are not always the best answer.

When you really start looking at what the student needs, many times a simple portable word processor will do the job. You’ve seen them before… Neo (Alphasmarts), Dana or Dana Wireless, Writer, etc.. They offer many of the advantages of laptops without the disadvantages. For example, many of the students I met who were being considered for a laptop simply had writing issues that caused them to fall behind when the assignment required taking notes, journal writing, story writing, etc… Portable word processors offer many of the supports writers need without the extra (and expensive) stuff they can do without. Not to mention their battery life is much better!

Having said the above, my personal favorite portable word processor is the new Fusion from Advanced Keyboard Technologies (see pic on left). Not only does it offer your typical word processing supports, but it also includes word prediction and text-to-speech. Features that are not always available in similar devices. In addition, you can purchase a memory card for the Fusion that will allow you to transfer text to and from the device. This is great when teachers want to type up tests or reading assignments ahead of time and transfer them to the device where the student can have them read out loud using a headset. In the limited number of times I’ve used this with students, all enjoyed the device and I’ve yet to run into any trouble with it. Although I’m not sure if available yet, I just saw the newest version, which includes a speaker so a headset isn’t required, at a state conference last month.

Feel free to make a comment and let me know your experience with the Fusion or similar device.

First off, I should apologize… I created this blog with the intention of keeping it updated. By updated, I was thinking a post every week or so, not once a month. With that said, once again I am going to try to provide a new post every week or two if not more in hopes that it will encourage those that visit the blog to continue doing so.

Today’s post goes along with the third principle of Universal Design for Learning: Multiple Means of Engagement. It is critical to keep students engaged in your lessons if your goal is for them to retain the information you provide. To do this you must engage them. Engagement must be often and relevant. Relevant simply means something related to the content you are teaching. It should build on students background knowledge. Research shows time and time again that relating content to background knowledge increases retention, so why shouldn’t engaging activities do the same?

The picture above is something I picked up from a Bob Pike Group training a couple years ago. You will see me mention things from their trainings quite often as I think almost everything they teach relates to good teaching and Universal Design for Learning. It basically says this: In a 90 minute window of time (think block scheduling for some of us) we should chunk our content into 20 minute sections making sure to engage learners every 8 minutes or so. Simple, right? Let’s take a deeper look:

90 Minute Block – This may not work for some of you teaching 50 minute classes, but the remainder of the rule still holds true. In general, whether we provide training, teach a class, or anything else that involves holding a groups attention we should be sure to provide a break at least every 90 minutes. This has been the case time and time again. How do you think they came up with 90 minutes being the optimal time for block scheduling in the first place? I can assure you it wasn’t by accident

20 Minute Chunks - You must break your content up. No one can hold attention for 90 minutes straight. You must break this up into chunks. 20 minutes has been shown to be the optimal amount of time for any section of content.

Engage every 8 Minutes – This is just a general rule of course, but it does have some research to back it up. Did you know that by the time your students graduate high school they have spent more time in front of a television than in a classroom? What happens about every 8 minutes when you are watching TV? If you guessed a commercial break you would be correct. So imagine how tough it is to hold attention for an entire class period with out some type of break in the action. This is where the engagement piece comes in. It doesn’t have to be complicated, in fact it can be as easy as having everyone stand up and sit back down. I would recommend putting a bit more thought into it than that however. For example, one social studies class I work with has a student be the timer. Every 8 minutes they ring a bell that signals time to throw a blow up globe. Whoever catches the globe must find whatever the person who threw it asks them to. The whole thing takes maybe a minute and instantly engages all students with something relevant to the content. Who should you make the timer? Doesn’t really matter, but any student who likes to make disruptions would be an excellent choice.

Hopefully this quick and easy strategy will help you design some of your lessons to be more engaging for your students. If you happen upon this post and try it, I would love to see comments about how you made it work in your classroom.

The idea of using images or videos of appropriate behavior in hopes to get individuals to replicate that behavior is a rather common strategy used today. We see it anywhere from exercise tapes to instructional videos. An adaptation of this strategy that you may not see as often is known as video self modeling (VSM), which allows individuals to see themselves perform a behavior. This behavior may be something the individual already knows how to do or a completely new skill set that he or she needs to learn.

According to Dowrick (Hitchcock, Dowrick & Prater, 2003) Video self modeling was first seen back in the 1970s when Creer and Miklich used it to help a boy improve his social skills. The idea was that role-playing would increase the boy’s social skills, so the researchers video taped their progress. To their surprise the role-playing had next to no effect, but when the boy viewed the video of himself doing the role-playing he started having success.

Much has been done with VSM since that point, but the outcomes continue to show the same promising results. VSM has been used successful with helping selectively mute students carry on conversations, helping autistic students to break out of their patterns, assisting with individuals and students transitioning to new places and much more.

Basically there are two types of video self modeling: Positive Self Review and Feedforward. The difference between the two is that positive self review is used to review a positive behavior that the student already knows how to do. Think following the directions, or getting to class on time and sitting down quietly. These are behaviors that a student has probably already performed several times before, just not repeatedly. By using positive self review, the teacher can catch the student performing the behavior correctly on video, then show the student the video of him or her performing the behavior.

Feedforward VSM is a bit different in that it is used to show a video of a student performing a behavior they currently have not done before. Sounds difficult huh? It can be, but doesn’t have to. All it requires is a little creativity. Let me give you an example. A friend of mine who works with VSM quite often went to assist with an autistic student who was bothered by several things. For example, if he were to hear a student screaming it would set him off. My friend, along with the student’s teachers, talked the student into sitting quietly and doing some work while the video camera was rolling. After catching a couple of minutes worth of footage, my friend was later able to capture audio of his daughter screaming and insert it into the video. After editing out any non-positive behavior, the autistic student was able to watch himself sit quietly and do his work even when loud screaming was occurring. Data was collected and the negative behavior was immediately reduced after the student watched the video.

Lucky for us, VSM has now become much more affordable and easy to do than ever before. There is no longer a need for thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Many times the result you are looking for is only a video camera and some free software away. To learn how to get started look for the Part 2 of this Video Self Modeling post.

I just came across a free screen magnifier called iZoom for PC’s that looks like a great option for students with visual impairments and those of us over 40 who keep sliding back from the computer screen to read e-mail!

I used it for about an hour and it has a lot of the same features found in the expensive magnifier we typical buy for students. It is easy to control with hot key commands and also has a screen reader. The reader part is limited but I have not fully explored that option. You can download the free version 1.1 from Issist a company based in Ontario Canada.
They also have version 1.2 which has enhanced performance and cost $79. Another cool thing they have which seems to be the up and coming technology allowing people to have mobile USB access on a flash drive anywhere they go is called Zoom2Go, it cost $249.

I will be interested to see if anyone else has been using this magnifier and how it is working out, post a comment to this site or e-mail me at gerald.abner@jessamine.k12.ky.us

- Gerald Abner, AT Specialist, Jessamine County Schools

I’m writing this post for a couple of reasons… First, I believe that blogging is a great new way for educators to embrace a universally designed classroom. Secondly, after asking my class to create a post regarding blogging in education I feel obligated to at least make a short post myself.

So, why should classrooms embrace blogging? There are the obvious reasons, which include writing for a larger audience and engaging students. Then of course there are the not so obvious reasons for some that include making assignments more accessible for students with diverse needs and helping to create that universally designed classroom you will hear me mention so often.

Let me expand a little – first with the more obvious reasons. If a student is at the point to where she doesn’t care about school and is frustrated with assignments, I’m not sure that she is really interested in what the teacher thinks about her writing ability. But what if the rest of the class, or the rest of the world, may read her writings and heaven forbid – leave comments on what they think about it! That student may start to re-think what it is she is writing. No one wants his or her friends to think they aren’t smart.

The engagement piece is probably self explanatory as well. If you were a student would you rather sit quietly and write with a pencil and paper or use the internet and computer with all of its wonderful tools and resources? Yeah… me too.

Moving on to what some teachers may not realize, the accessibility features that can be used when blogging are incredible. Are your students more visually oriented than text oriented? No problem, add some pictures to support your ideas. Trouble writing due to fine motor or other disabilities? Again, no problem. Maybe your student would benefit from using one of the hundreds of specially designed keyboards that are available. If a regular keyboard isn’t available, how about using an on screen keyboard with switch access? Or maybe your students have spelling problems. Did you know that spell check is available in most web browsers now? If that doesn’t work, maybe word prediction with phonetic spelling features would do the trick. Hopefully you see where I’m heading with this. Not only is a digital medium more engaging, but it is much more flexible as well. Think about all of your struggling readers. How much help would a text reader be for them when reviewing their peers’ blog posts?

Hopefully this post has given you a few ideas. I would recommend starting your own blog just to see how simple it is. Go to www.blogger.com or one of the many other blog utilities out there and give it a try.