CAST+and+UDL

"UDL or Universal Design for Learning is a blueprint for creating flexible goals, methods, materials, assessments that accommodate learner differences." (CAST) One resource on the @http://cast.org web site is a lesson plan builder. This week I explored building a series of lessons on the UDL lesson planner site. I feel that UDL is a great tool for meeting the needs of all students. It forces teachers to really think about the various parts of a lesson and how they come together to meet the diverse needs in a classroom. Although I can appreciate the thoroughness of a lesson developed with UDL, the time it takes to complete a lesson plan or even a unit plan is not practical. The average teacher does not have the 4 or 5 hours it takes to completely develop a lesson. An elementary school teacher would then be planning upwards of 20 hours for each day of lessons. I can see that if teachers formed a partnership and shared the lessons they developed it could make it a little more doable, but even then, if we are to meet the diverse needs of our own students, we would have to do the planning ourselves with our students in mind. I really liked that it forced me to think about the networks, to make sure I was giving new knowledge, ( recognition network) planning for the performance of tasks, ( strategic network) and making sure that there were components to engage and motivate students (affective network). I think that I would like to plan a lesson that I already had done, or had the rough outline for with UDL. I wonder if that would make the actual building of the lesson a little less time consuming. This week we also had an opportunity to learn about book builder at http://bookbuilder.cast.org I had a lot of problems with book builder. I wanted to write my first draft in Word so that I could edit more easily and then it would not let me copy and paste. The same problem occurred with a graph that I had created; it was not a saved image so I could not get it into book builder. Having said that, once I got the hang of it, and realized what I was doing I really enjoyed it. I see so many possibilities for my classroom.

I have a monolingual Spanish speaking child who is not progressing as he should be. I can see that I could create some books for him to use that could give him translations and read it aloud to him. I could make a picture dictionary, or even just give him short and easy ESL lessons on the book.

I also think it would be great to have for my Special Education students. I already shared some of the possibilities with the Reading teacher and the Special Education teacher.

I also think it is actually pretty user friendly, thus making it a great tool for students to use to self-publish. It is highly motivating and I can see allowing my students to show what they have learned by creating a book. I like the feature that allows the students to share with others what they have created. All in all, I think this is something I will enjoy putting into my bag of tricks!