SETSIG UDL Playground

""We feel like, in order to reach the point where we're at a 95 to 100 percent graduation rate, we really need to change the rules that we're playing by," he said. "We're questioning what we do in the traditional setting and looking at putting things in place where we put students in the center.""

Westerville high school quadratic equations video

"Text Help has made a new toolbar available for free for anyone who uses Google Docs and the Chrome Browser. What is now possible is dual highlighted (two colors) text to speech in Google Docs! This is huge, an amazing benefit for our struggling readers, writers and researchers."

Check out free online thinking tools/graphic organizers. Also explore the Online Interactive Resources. These are text heavy/dependent resources so consider how you can make them accessible to all learners. For example, use word prediction support, recreate them in a tool such as Inspiration that allows learners to add ideas in pictures, words and recordings. Or recreate the graphic organizer in another format such as an interactive whiteboard application - build in supports for success.

Download this free app for your Google Chrome browser. Within Google Docs a TextHelp toolbar provides many features including: highlight and read text, dictionary, picture dictionary, translater and collect highlights. While there are some glitches - I noticed that the highlight and collect feature didn't always pull what I highlighted - this free tool is a great additional to supporting students reading and writing.

Basically Pinterest for Education.

"The Assistive Technology Blog is a publication of the Virginia Department of Education's Training and Technical Assistance Center (T/TAC) at VCU"

Educational and Assistive Technology to support Universal Access and Universal Design for Learning"

Interesting article. I'm not so sure that Ian Jukes, quoted liberally throughout the article, would be a big fan of RTI but I could be wrong. "Drill and kill" has been around a long time. Whether this transfers to higher level thinking is debatable. Simply providing apps that replicate drill activities we do on paper won't, in my opinion, capture students used to video game quality action - at least not for very long. The reality is classroom time is limited. If we drill students this time has to be taken from somewhere - inevitably it comes from the "real" learning time. My greatest fear of mobile technology is that it will become modern day "flash cards'. If we are going to use mobile technology, let's use it to build in support (within an exciting cross-curricular, inquiry-based classroom) such as screen readers/word prediction, and use it to provide access to apps that help students analyze, synthesize, evaluate, collaborate and create - real 21zt century fluencies. http://www.committedsardine.com/fluencies.cfm