September and October

Amanda was much more disciplined than I during the past several weeks. In fact, you can check out what's been going on on her side of the grant by visiting http://amandaleavitt.blogspot.com. Amanda is a natural blogger; with smoothness and great wit, she supplies a candid and insightful look into her experience of implementing universal design in her science classroom.

So, whatever happened when Amanda turned on the audio description on a NOVA video she showed in class? Students' responses varied, with most finding the description feature to be distracting, even annoying. Several, however, stated that the descriptions were helpful and aided their ability to understand what was happening. Amanda asks that students take notes while watching videos, and some students said that the description assisted their note-taking by providing details that they otherwise would have missed.

What does this tell us? Not much, I realize. We'll examine this again when Amanda shows the next video. In the meantime, my orientation is that closed captioning and video description (when available) should always be turned on in educational settings. If students are trained to accept that "this is the way that we watch videos in school," then they will adjust and adapt to the features and perhaps even benefit from them in ways they don't even consciously realize. On the contrary, if we wait until it is necessary because a student in the class has low vision, is hard-of-hearing, deaf, or blind, then reactions will likely mirror those of Amanda's students.

Having said that...we did learn that some video description is better than others. It's not always seamlessly integrated. I think that is a symptom of videos that are "retrofitted" with description. If it's planned for, then the video can be produced/edited with video description in mind. Otherwise, it's going to come across as contrived when the narrator speaks very quickly to fit in the description or talks over the dialog.

I had a chance to observe Amanda's class last month, which was very helpful and I look forward to returning. From the outside looking in, the casual (or even experienced) observer would likely have seen a traditional lecture on the parts of animal and plant cells....little would one suspect that everything that was being recorded on the whiteboard was getting captured electronically and being made available to all students. Talk about seamless!

Amanda and I also had the opportunity to co-present at the ACTEM conference. For it being scheduled in the last time slot on a Friday afternoon, we had a satisfactory turnout. It was great fun to share our project with others - from the early stages of curriculum development to choosing the technologies to reflections on how things are going. One of our next conversations will be to strategize additional venues for publicizing this work.

The school year begins!

Amanda and I met at the end of August to finalize curriculum plans and to to test out the projector and eBeam. She had mapped out the unit in a concept map created in Inspiration, and we referred to it as a guide as she walked me through how she aligned the lessons with our UD planning. It was very cool - the map is fairly complicated (huge, actually!), but we moved back and forth between diagram and outline views whenever I got lost. Amanda's really taken off with Inspiration and although her students won't have it on thier own iBooks, it'll be a really useful instructional tool.

The first day of school was September 4, and by the end of the week I had received eBeam whiteboard images. The first practice runs were underway and, once tech integrator gets the iBooks into students' hands, things will really start cooking!

Last night was Gray-New Gloucester Middle School's Open House, and Amanda used it as an opportunity to tell parents about the project and to inform them about how the integrated technology will help both them and thier kids. (And I used it as an opportunity to distribute photo release forms so that we can catch kids in action throughout the unit.) I sat in the back and didn't say a peep - didn't have to because she did such a great job describing UD and explaining and demonstrating the technology. The project and eBeam were running throughout the presentation, and Amanda referred them to the need to get on Studywiz once they get their accounts - homework and online lessons from class will soon be posted! Amanda also introduced parents to blogs and podcasts, and reassured them that all online activities will be password-protected.

Oh! I almost forgot to mention that the snowball mic arrived the other day - podcasts, podcasts, podcasts.

So...away we go! The most immediate next step is to test out kids' reactions to a video with both closed captions and audio description turned on....stay tuned for my next post!

Latest purchases

We've added Inspiration concept-mapping software to our repertoire. Students won't have this program on thier iBooks, although they will have a program called FreeMind. Amanda will be able to use Inspiration, however, as an instructional tool, enchanced by the projector!

I sneaked in an external microphone, as well. Amanda wasn't as excited about this idea as I am, but I think we'll be able to demonstrate some exciting UD applications with it.

I think our summer shopping spree is about over...not that we went nearly over budget! I pondered an iPod, but I'd like to see how we make do with less...more later.

Moving ahead...

Amanda and I met this morning to keep moving ahead on her unit. She suggested adding standards related to time and formation of the earth, which was a great idea as it wil add continuity to the whole unit. She is going to investigate with her district's curriculum director whether it might be possible to do some curriculum scope adjustments so that she can spend more time on this unit in the coming school year. So we spent a good deal of time simply trying to uncover standards in the Maine Learning Results and the NSES that relate to Earth history and geological time...it was a force fit but we finally found something to call relevant.

We had an interesting conversation about some (albeit few) students' and parents' adverse reaction to the teaching of evolution. We considered having students prepare a constructed response about the distinction between science and religion, but we couldn't find an established content standard...hence we shied away from such a potentially controversial assignment.

I've been pleasantly surprised at the ease with which we've been uncovering accessible videos. Amanda was already using several NOVA videos, and upon a little investigating, we've learned that they are available in described video. I have a call into WGBH to find out whether we need to make a new purchase or if the videos she currently has (likely locked in the school library as it's the middle of summer vacation) are already described.

Amanda arrived today with an active account for StudyWiz, an online course management system maintained by the Maine Learning Technology Initiative. This was a wonderful surprise as I was just looking into StudyWiz the other day and feared we'd have to wait until the end of August to get her set up with an account. She'll be getting to know StudyWiz over the summer. We're excited about it because it will lend to a more digital curriculum, increasing the accessibility for all students.

After our meeting, I sent our individual to-do lists via e-mail and cc'ed the district curriculum director. We are certainly on our way to having a UD pilot ready to go! A lot of work between now and then, as well as during the implementation of the unit, but I think the planning is moving ahead swimmingly! (And so is my dedication to this blog...this is already twice as many posts as my previous attempts at blogging...)

My UD in Education Blog

Well, here it is...my second attempt at maintaining and sustaining a blog on universal design in education. I love the concept of blogging, and even enjoy getting consumed in others' blogs once in awhile. I also love universal design, the topic of this here blog. My problem is discipline...will I come back here regularly to post updates on the latest and greatest UD happenings? Will I use this space to document my own evolving conceptual understanding of universal design?

The answer to my question (dilemma??) remains to be discovered. In the meantime, my motivation for returning to a blogging space is to support a 7th grade science teacher with whom I'm working. Blogging has been shown to motivate and engage many types of learners, so we're thinking about giving it a whirl in her classroom as a universal design strategy.

If I can keep this blogging thing up, I'll return later this week to post a discussion of where we're at with planning her curriculum for the fall and how we got there...