Participation in this course and interaction with members of my Differentiation Station social network have contributed greatly to adding to my list of technological resources and suggestions for their use. Among the many resources suggested by this coursework and my cohorts are the following...
The tools I will use to determine my students' academic strengths and weaknesses will be a pretest which I wil use to determine English language usage and basic scientific knowledge, and http://www.terragon.com/tkobrien/algebra/ which will help me determine the mathematical preparedness of my students.
To determine my students' academic interests and learning preferences and profiles, I will use Survey Monkey to attempt to elicit student classroom preferences, goals and interests. For learning styles, I will use the Memletics Learning Styles Inventory.
The main modification I will incorporate into my learning environment wil be to become more flexible in exposing students to content (not just lecture-oriented) and assessment (allowing for various modalities of testing knowledge). This is a basic tenet of UDL. Having established the learning styles preferred by my students, I can incorporate best practices into all of my lessons to meet the needs of students with a large variety of learning styles.
I will start out small, learning the many Web 2.0 tools out there, and incorporate them piecemeal into my lessons, geared to particular students. This differentiated instruction will be a necessary precursor to Universal Design for Learning, which incorporates all of these technologies into the foundations of lesson design, thus requiring a mastery of them by me at the outset of the design process.
I will provide various means of assessment of student knowledge, and evaluate the outcomes of these various papers, projects, and presentations using Rubistar. Students will be given a copy of the rubric at the outset so that they will know exactly what is required of them regardless of their choice of assessment artifact.
Since my classroom has only one computer, just about all of the technological applications I do with my students will have to be managed using "outside the classroom" forums such as Google Groups, Google Docs, Wikis, Blogs, and Voice Threads. All of these free Web 2.0 tools will allow me to extend the classroom beyond the school day. Participation can be monitored from any computer, and rubrics can be made so that students know what is required. From the school district it would be obviously to my advantage to repeatedly request more classroom computers following the adage the "the squeaky door gets the grease."
In conclusion, I will begin using the many Web 2.0 tools that are out there before incorporating them into DI. After field practice with these tools in DI I can then progress to the level where I can design technology seamlessly into my UDL lessons. The important thing for me is to begin with small steps, and maintain my pace. The end product should be a 21st centure classroom.
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