Recently, a graduate student of mine introduced me to a site called Answer Garden, which is an online brainstorming tool. All you need is a question and computers for your students to use to answer! Answer Garden makes it easy to embed on your website or just provide a link for your students to access.

If you are lucky enough to have a few extra computers in your classroom, you may want to use www.vocabulary.com. Your students are given the challenge of answering a variety of multiple choice questions about vocabulary. The questions appear on a note card, giving it a classroom feel. The site has built a database of over 40,000 words and you have options for narrowing your choices down or getting clues. As you compete, you can accumulate points, making it a competition.

“Universal design usually means creating buildings that are physically accessible to everyone, with hallways wide enough for wheelchairs,” he says. “But, in promoting ‘universal design for learning,’ we have to simultaneously confront the technological, social and psychological barriers to equal education.”

“Rather than see one person as being blind and another as having dyslexia, we’ve found that it’s most useful to think of both of them as having difficulty processing visual information.