PATINS UDL Project

Project Forum at NASDE (National Association of State Directors of Special Education along with CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology) met to identify challenges to implementing UDL and then develop policy recommendations to address those challenges. The document linked here summarizes panel presentations from the higher education, state-level, local-level and national-level perspectives. Throughout the panel and during the subsequent group discussions, several suggestions and proposed strategies to improve policy to impact implementation of UDL were given by participants. These are summarized in the document.

Click here to view the document.

Teachers’ Domain is an online library of more than 1,000 FREE media resources from the best in public television along with lesson plans for English Language Arts, Mathematics, Social Studies and the Arts. These classroom resources, featuring media from NOVA, Frontline, Design Squad, American Experience, and other public broadcasting and content partners are easy to use and correlate to state and national standards. [http://www.teachersdomain.org/]

The National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) at WGBH recently has received funding from the National Science Foundation to develop a version of the Life Science portion of the Teachers Domain digital library that is accessible to users with hearing, vision, and physical disabilities.

AND…You can help develop the lesson plans that are accessible to students with disabilities and earn a stipend. Read on….

This comes from:   Mary Watkins
Director of Communications and Outreach
Media Access Group at WGBH
Email: mary_watkins@wgbh.org
http://access.wgbh.org
One Guest Street
Boston, MA  02135
617 300-3700 v/fax
617 300-2489 TTY

The Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC), a nonprofit research and
development organization, is working with NCAM to conduct research with
teachers of students with disabilities to inform the development of the
accessibility features for the Teachers Domain library. As part of our
research activities, we are currently looking for teachers of students with
hearing, vision, or physical disabilities who are interested in planning six
life science or biology lessons incorporating resources from the life
science section of the Teachers Domain digital library and then carrying out
these lessons with their students. The lesson planning will take place at
teachers’ convenience. The research involves documenting how teachers use
the Teachers’ Domain digital library for planning (using interviews and web
statistics), the lessons they planned (collecting copies of the lesson
plans), how the lessons are being implemented (using teacher
questionnaires/logs), and how students respond to the lessons (through
student questionnaires, work samples, and assessment tasks built into the
lessons). Teachers will receive a stipend of $800 for planning six lessons,
carrying them out in their classrooms, and participating in data collection
activities.

If you are interested in participating, please contact our project partner at EDC, Babette Moeller.

Babette Moeller Email:  bmoeller@edc.org

This is a great web site for locating open source (free) software that addresses a multitude of barriers to accessing the curriculum.   http://www.oatsoft.org/

You can search the software database by the need that it meets, by the type or category of software, or see all the titles. (There are over 150 titles listed.)

You can also contribute toward projects developing new software or introduce software that you have developed.  There is a forum area for discussion and a news section with the latest developments. There is something here for everyone.