Thing 5: Differentiated Instruction and Diverse Learning

I have tried over my years of teaching to be very conscious of trying to reach different types of learners. I have a weakness in that I am very word oriented. Reading had never been difficult for me. When thinking about concepts, I tend to see them as words and not as images. I KNOW that there are kids who "see" ideas as images much more clearly than me. I work hard at thinking about visual tools like photos, symbols, charts, graphic organizers, etc. that add a visual context to the information I want them to learn. I also try to explain things clearly and provide pronunciation guides and definitions for key words; not just concepts, but difficult vocabulary words from the text they may not have encountered before.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, my philosophy students have just completed a PhotoStory project that required them to answer a series of questions comparing Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, reformulate those answers into a script, find appropriate photographs, paintings, graphic organizers to represent the ideas they are discussing and then add a music track that also appropriately represents the theme and mood of their presentation.
When we get back from Spring Break, we will start a unit on Descartes and they will have to create a Manga book about his life and ideas using Comic Life software. Each student will take a piece of the chapter and translate it the information, concepts, and ideas into two comic pages. While they will be able to use images found at Google and Flickr, they will also have to use a still camera to take pictures of themselves and put them in the documents.
The use of Curricular Supports is an area where I am weak. While I had out pretty thorough project and lesson descriptions, I don't always produce the best assessment rubrics. I really need to work on that and I know my kids would appreciate it more. Generally, I know what I am looking for in the product of an assignment, but I need to be much more specific and clear in communicating all expectations to my students. The Curricular Supports section was very valuable to me. Made me think.
WOW!!! Just got done looking at the history resources at the UDL site and was blown away but the three things there. The Google Maps with Street View and Virtual Museums sites were cool, but the YouTube video on Thinking Like An Historian produced by Stanford University really got me where it hurts. Teaching kids how to use and question primary sources is another weakness and the video made commit to teaching those skills more consciously.

Well, I believe that some kind of text to speech converter software would be useful for some of my students, I don't think Vozme it the tool. It's mechanical voice with lack of emotion would be a problem for some kids who need the auditory context. The good ones with better and more diverse voices are charging, but if the need is there, probably worth the money.