Tech & UDL: Giving Students Voice and Choice

Teachers are faced with the challenge of meeting the needs, finding the spark, and moving a diverse group of students towards adulthood every day.  Designing your lessons so that they address all the different learning styles, strengths and weaknesses of our children seems like a daunting task. So how do we help every student succeed without being overwhelmed?  Universal Design for Learning (UDL) helps by providing a framework that breaks this task into manageable pieces.  Technology provides the resources and tools we need to design, deliver and assess those lessons. 

UDL at a Glance

UDL is a framework that can help you design and plan accessible learning in your classroom.  Essentially, you examine your goals, materials, methods and assessments and provide a variety of options to make sure that everyone has equal access to learning.

CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology designers of UDL) proposes we do these 3 things to design lessons for all our kids:

1.       Present information (content) in different ways 

2.       Allow students to approach learning tasks (manipulate information) and demonstrate what they know (assessment) in different ways.

3.       Allow options that will engage students and keep them interested.

While you can certainly design a UDL lesson without technology, technology can help you find and organize great resources, to accomplish the challenging task of offering students voice and choice in the way they learn and the way they demonstrate that learning. Check out Karen Janowski’s comprehensive Wiki, the UDL Tech ToolKit with great tools for multiple means of presenting information, expressing learning and engaging students to help you remove the barriers for all learners.  Looking for more? Check out the resources in this livebinder, UDL Resources for Middle Schools. 

Implementation of the “Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)” is right around the corner (Fall 2016). What better way to ensure that “Every student succeeds” than designing lessons that encompass the diversity of learning styles, interests and passions of our students.