In my last blog post, I talked about the PAL Toolkit, a tool to help educators plan UDL lessons that are aligned to state standards! In this blog post, I am going to be talking about the CAST: Teaching Every Student website! The purpose of this website is to support "educators in learning about and practicing Universal Design For Learning (UDL)"(CAST(. In addition to using the PAL Toolkit to help educators create lessons and units involving UDL, an educator could use the additional support of this website to help them learn how to practice using UDL in their classroom!This website would be a fabulous reference for an educator! The Cast: Teaching Every Student website introduces those who are unfamiliar with UDL, to what UDL is. It also provides an educator with numerous tools they could use to help make materials for their class to help engage all learners and provides learners multiple forms of reading books! Additionally, after an educator used the PAL Toolkit to produce lessons and units, they could use this website to help them check to see if they have a UDL "rich" curriculum and to help them identify any barriers in the materials they decided to use to teach their class.
Getting To Know The UDL Way:
This part of the website was really intriguing. This activity reminded me of how closely the principles of UDL are linked to the three domains of the brain. I had mentioned previously in my blog how great I thought this concept was, since we use our brain to do everything! The "Getting To Know You" activity stressed the fact that we use our brain to do all tasks. This activity allowed us to pick a task we might do, like cooking an Indian dinner. I first had to think about what background and skills I would bring to cooking an Indian dinner, next, using my recognition, strategy and affective networks, I had to list my strengths and challenges I would come across when making an Indian dinner.
This activity really got me thinking about struggling student's I have worked with. This activity taught me that no matter what skill we might be working on in the classroom, that if I try to tap into these student's strengths and interests, and relate them to the activity, it might just "outweigh" their challenges!
| Goal: | Cook an Indian Meal for a Group of Friends |
| Individual: | You |
| Your background, skills, and interests: | |
| NETWORK | Strengths | Challenges |
| Recognition | ||
| Strategy | ||
| Affect |
Pam, great connections to previous posts and relatable information. I also appreciate direct links to the provided videos as a reference. The table shown breaking down strengths and challenges is a great visual showcase for a student of what they may need to work on and where they fall in terms of the subject matter. I also appreciate that they label with language such as "challenges" as opposed to weakness. I think its more productive :)
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