Thoughts on Session 2 of my Capstone Class

Project Based Learning is a great instructional idea. You start a class with a big idea or question which gets students thinking about their own questions. You provide opportunities for students to research their questions and then get the students to take what they learned and create a product for public consumption. My issue with this kind of project is that the school does not have nearly enough technology based resources to pull this off with every teacher.

The struggle I am having right now with this program is that I don't have a good understanding of how to teach at the elementary level yet. I don't know what these students can do. It makes it really hard for me to plan a lesson, not knowing what they are capable of learning. My formal training is at the secondary level and this is my first year at the elementary level.


I like the curb cut analogy being applied to technology instruction in the classroom. When curb cuts were introduced for individuals with handicaps it also benefited other people. In education, accomodations designed to help students with learning disabilities also can benefit the other students in the class. I checked out the National Center for Universal Design and Learning and watched their introduction video. The ideas sound good, but once again I didnt come across any practical applications for the classroom outside of closed captions on videos.


As I dive deeper into UDL I am recognizing value, but at the same time recognizing some of the immense hurdles to creating lessons of this nature. In parituclar the resource of time. To truly design a good UDL lesson you need to do things in triplicate in various forms with various components. The examples mentioned at http://www.cast.org/teachingeverystudent/ideas/tes/chapter4_4.cfm are just too time consuming for a regular teacher to design, day in and day out. Over time, say the course of a few years, I think a teacher could get to this point in their lesson planning. I like the idea of selecting tools that have built in flexibility. The article also argues that digital tools, just by being digital, have an inherent flexibility that other tools do not.


Another component of this lesson is Gardner's multiple intelligences. I am curious to know what the latest research is on this subject because I was under the impression that recent research has debunked some of Mr. Gardner's ideas on multiple intelligences. Multiple intelligences obviously ties in neatly with UDL as these two both get at the idea that lessons should be designed to engage a wide variety of student interests.