EDLD+5364+Week3

Week 3 reflections

I just finished my UDL lesson planner and it was a pretty good tool. I think it is pretty extensive, though. I don't think that a teacher would have the time to complete that for every lesson they teach. This is a good framework. This tool doesn't really help with differentiating instruction any more than any other planning tool, however. Teachers still have to know how to individualize instruction. That takes a lot of professional development no matter what planning tool they use.

I read chapter 4 in The book ---. A quote stuck out in my mind. "Because blogs and other Web 2.0 writing sites can have more of an audience than just the teacher, students are engaged in sharing, communicating, and exchanging ideas on a larger scale and see permanency to their words that a composition paper can never equal." (Solomon, & Schrum, 2007) In fact these tools enlarges the students classroom to include the entire world. My wife started a project with a teacher in Perth, Australia where the classes were going to use a wiki to tell about the cities they lived in. One challenge to doing this is active participation by both sides of the project, and in this case the Australia side never got their citiy information up. I have done many projects like that with classes in Magnolia and classes in other states, however which illustrates the feasibility of a project as well as the pitfalls. There are safety issues to consider like never publishing student names, but those are easily done. I recommend that teahcers have students create a screen name so that the teacher knows who makes comments, students have ownership of their contributions, and they are still protected. The idea is that Web 2.0 sites have done more than open the classroom to the world. They have brought the classroom out into the world.

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