EDLD5364+Week+Two

This week's readings gave some good research and data to back up what is already pretty intuitive. Being in the classroom with students on a daily basis, we see this data and research fleshed out in the lives and learning of our students. Technology helps them learn. That success, in turn, gives them greater self confidence and more positive feelings about school. As a special education teacher, I see this on a daily basis. According to the data, technology helps all students, but special populations are seeing even more improvement. This includes special education students, lower socioeconomic status students, ELL's, //et al//. Traditional instruction and teaching does not reach these students in ways that more student-centered approaches can. There is so much truth in the work and research of people like Gardner, though. Students that are not what we would call "book smart," are often very talented (intelligent) in other ways. I had a student who was a teenager but was only able to read and write at a pre-primer level. His artisitic ability, though, was astounding. More student-centered, less traditional teaching approaches are giving us the opportunity to see the talents of our stdents, rather than what they CAN'T do. We are as a profession finally starting to look at students more for what they can do. Technology is one way to help us to do that.

Universal design for learning (UDL) is trying to bring all students to the same point, albeit through sometimes different channels. This offshoot from architectural design is a way of striving to make education and learning accessible to all students, regardless of modality, differing intelligences, and differing levels of ability. It also strives to hold all students to the same high standard of achievement. So often the way we test or assess students does not give an accurate picture of their true abilities. UDL tries to see beyond the traditional means of assessment and tries to get a better idea of students' true performance levels. While not used in project-based instruction, I have been able to use some technology that accomplished this on some level. Classroom performance systems (CPS units) are a wonderful tool for measuring student learning while removing the pen and paper from the equation. Students have a "clicker" that they point at a senor to answer questions that are both visually and auditorially presented to them. I had students who refused to write that would take a test on a CPS unit and ace it. That is just one example of how this can be used to get a more accurate measure of ability and actual learning.