Universal Design for Learning: April Cervantes

   Universal Design for Learning  

April-Renee H. Cervantes     

      Teaching can be overwhelming when trying to meet the needs of the many different learners in your classroom. Universal design for learning, an approach to provide multiple means of engagement, representation and action to help learners succeed in their tasks at hand (The UDL guidelines 2024). Learning to be flexible with the way students learn and removing any barriers to comprehension are pivotal to the UDL framework. Robinson mentioned in his article, “ UDL as a scientifically valid framework for guiding educational practice that: Provides flexibility in the ways information is presented” and “reduces barriers in instruction, provides appropriate accommodations, supports and challenges” (Robinson, Universal design for learning and school libraries 2017). After reading more about UDL, I realized there is a lot of room for growth in the way I present information and how I can give students multiple and varied opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge. 

This year I did a very diligent job of using UDL guideline Checkpoint 1.1- “Offers ways of customizing the display information,” as I have a student who is visually impaired under SPED and so I would sit him in close proximity to the IFP and I increased the font size of his iPad because after discussion with his vision coach we determined he was struggling to accurately tap on his iPad even with glasses.  

I believe what I could add right now to better support my student would be to make a custom overlay for touch screens and keyboards as mentioned in Checkpoint 4.2 “optimize access to tools and assistive technology. I came upon a YouTube video on creating a tactile overlay for iPad and thought it was so interesting, but this is something I would need to work with the visual coach to see if it were something that would help him achieve his goals.  

Checkpoint 2.4- “Promote understanding across languages,” would be something that I would love to implement, however I believe it would be something that I need help with. Being able to embed visual, non-linguistic support for vocabulary clarification sounds very helpful for my ELL’s and although I do have vocabulary cards up on the wall, using embedded vocabulary support seems more complicated than I expect and would need either professional development support myself or I would need to research and investigate more into this.  

Reflecting on my year and learning more about UDL I believe I could have given my students more support in accommodations and support for their learning during center rotation time. I think back to this period of the day when they oversaw their own work and all I remember is the multiple questions on how to decode a word and even with that linguistic support they wouldn’t know the meaning of the word with images provided.  

Upon researching UDL articles I came across the book by Loui Lord Nelson and related very much to this part of the book for removing barriers, “When looking through the UDL lens, you see the hard copy text as a barrier. You realize that you have resources available to you, which means you can make more resources available to them, maybe you use partner readers. Maybe you find a video on YouTube that provides the background information necessary for understanding the experiment.” (Nelson, Design and deliver: Planning and teaching using Universal Design for Learning 2021). This made me realize how I can make it easier for my students to be successful on their own. I realized how my students were either getting the answer from someone else or completely misunderstanding the lesson until I gave corrective feedback. What I would like to do would be to teach students to use the text-to-speech function on their iPad and know how to navigate through a dictionary application. I found a YouTube video on how to turn on the text to speech function which was very helpful and something I’d have to do manually per iPad. After being taught how to use this function students will be able to get immediate help for any text in question when navigating their iPad.  

Teaching students the many ways a dictionary application is helpful will give them the opportunity to type in a word, hear its pronunciation and see images corresponding to the word through related article. This will set them up to become empowered learners. I looked into the Mirriam Webster for Kids webpage and thought this would be a great resource to teach and thumbnail to the iPad dock. The students can also use the text-to-speech function for the definition parts that are not audible. Nelson mentions how, “...expert learners are identified as purposeful, motivated, resourceful, knowledgeable, strategic and goal oriented”(Nelson, Design and deliver: Planning and teaching using Universal Design for Learning 2021). Giving students the opportunity to learn how to be resourceful using these resources will help them inside and outside the classroom and beyond their school years.  

 

Resources: 

Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Find definitions written for kids. Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/kids 

Nelson, L. L. (2021). Design and deliver: Planning and teaching using Universal Design for Learning. Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. 

Robinson, D. E. (2017). Universal design for learning and school libraries. A Logical Partnership, 46(1), 57–61. 

The UDL guidelines. UDL. (2024, May 14). https://udlguidelines.cast.org/ 

YouTube. (2014, December 10). Creating a tactile overlay for the iPad. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3OOqSAGnvs 

YouTube. (2020, May 11). Using text to speech feature on the iPad. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyIvYxhn0uc