Recently I wrote of a bottom-up approach to bringing Universal Design for Learning (UDL) into the classroom. I’m happy to share a fantastic blog by Lisa Parisi which provided a teacher’s perspective of UDL. As she describes in her blog, she feels that for successful outcomes the following classroom requirements must be met:
- Educators must believe that they are responsible for teaching every child
- Educators must teach students how to access tools and then allow them the access
- Educators must give up that position of power to allow students the freedom to do what they need to be successful
I can’t do justice to Lisa’s blog, by describing it again here. I urge you (parents, teachers, administrators, school board members…) to read her post. If you have already read it, forward it to your peers, and your school board.
Today, I wanted to call attention to some resources for UDL content tools. First, the amazing UDL Toolkit site. This site is a massive resource of content tools, fact sheets, guidelines, etc. that help to facilitate the universal design of learning content. The creators of this site are teachers, Karen Janowski and Joyce Kasman Valenza, PhD.
I happened upon this site some time ago, but hadn’t really spent much time there until I began pondering summer learning activities for my son, who will soon complete kindergarten. Upon revisiting this site a few days ago, I realized what an excellent repository this is. Many thanks to Karen, Joyce and all of the wiki’s contributors for making this site possible.
In addition to learning more about the tools in that wiki, I also discovered this blog entry by Ira Socal which describes 10 UDL tools that are freely available.
And of course, there are great tools available from CAST, the UDL mothership. At the CAST site you’ll find tools that will enable you to create digital books, provide scaffolding to your students’ learning, or to check your curriculum to promote flexibility in your learning materials.