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Finding
Tools, Media and Materials
In many schools around the nation, teachers are finding that collections of
digital tools and resources expand their options for presenting information,
scaffolding students, offering choices for student expression, adjusting levels
of challenge, and offering students choices of content. The flexibility of digital
media makes it possible to provide a wide range of options to reduce curricular
barriers to recognition, strategic, and affective learning.
In general three kinds of digital resources are essential to UDL implementation:
adjustable software tools, digital content, and World Wide Web resources. These
are broad categories and within each are resources that can support any of the
suggested teaching techniques for UDL. We offer some examples as a way to get
started and become familiar with some of the tools, content, and Web sites that
other teachers have found useful when building flexibility into their curricula.
Some multimedia software tools, especially those that are “Web capable”
(able to be hyperlinked to the World Wide Web), can help you create varied ways
to represent information, varied ways for students to demonstrate what they
know, and varied options to engage learners. For example, with Inspiration (Inspiration
Software, http://www.inspiration.com/home.cfm ) you can create multimedia interactive
graphic organizers that can be used to present concepts visually (multiple representations);
to scaffold student research and presentation with a multimedia template (multiple
options for student expression), and to provide different levels of challenge
by offering different degrees of scaffolding for different students (multiple
levels of challenge).
Some examples of useful resources:
Programs that support the translation of content from one medium to another
(e.g., text-to-speech and text-to-image) such as CAST eReader, Pix Reader, Pix
Writer, and Intellitalk II.
Writing tools with text-to-speech and other writing supports such as Write Out
Loud (Don Johnson, http://www.donjohnston.com/ )
Multimedia composition tools such as HyperStudio, Kid Pix, and PowerPoint.
For more extensive lists of resources please see: