Prompt: Choose one (or more) of your planned learning activities from your Blueprint and identify any barriers to student success. How can you alter or adjust your current plan to reduce those barriers?

I plan to look at two different activities in my group’s blueprint for our Interactive Learning Resource; an activity involving labelling a complete water cycle diagram, and an online quiz tool that asks students questions via a video, and passes along the way to have students answer those questions based on what they have just watched or heard.

The first activity is going to be rather basic in nature. After learning all of the parts of the water cycle, students will be required to label a water cycle diagram by themselves as a way of checking for student understanding. This activity is great and simple but also presents some barriers for students. To make this activity more inclusive, I would make it more accessible to all students. For example, the activity could mainly be done on a worksheet with a pencil or pen, but I would also make it available to be done on a computer or some other digital format to include students who may struggle with writing or have motor skill issues. The online version could also have an audio component to make it even more inclusive with its design. This type of inclusive change would fall under the sections of “Providing multiple means of representation” in the Universal Design for Learning Guidelines (Meyer, et al., 2014). This is because the redesigned activity can be represented in multiple ways so that it comes available to all students, and provides equity within their learning, even if that change is just on a small activity like this.

The second activity can be changed to not only include the auditory component of the video, but include the voice of someone reading out the questions orally, and also include subtitles along with all audio. The small adaptations and changes made to this activity fall under the same designation on the UDL Guidelines as the first activity I spoke about above, but it specifically provides multiple means of perception, as it provides a visual and auditory way of perceiving the activity (Meyer, et al., 2014). Offering alternatives to the original format of this activity helps make this activity accessible to more students than it would have been without these adaptations and barriers being removed. Subtitles have always been something that teachers need to consider when playing anything with audio, as it is beneficial for hard-of-hearing of deaf students, but also for EAL (English-additional language) learners so that they can hear and read the audio to enhance their comprehension.

Meyer, Anne, et al. Universal Design for Learning: Theory and Practice. CAST Professional Publishing, an Imprint of CAST, Inc., 2014, UDL Theory Practice, retrieved from: udltheorypractice.cast.org/