EDLD+5364+Week+3+Assignment+Reflection

This week's learning was intensely rewarding. I gained knowledge in constructing a UDL that has renovated my teaching and planning. I now feel equipped to design effective units and lessons that will target the needs of my diverse learners making learning enjoyable and fun as it should be. The recognition, strategic, and affective networks must be incorporated into a lesson to ensure this. To gain full understanding of this, I was intrigued with the UDL exercise that showed me just how to use these networks. The activity called for you to look at a picture of people in a room, mosty middle age with one youth in the picture. They seemed to be in the dining room and a woman had begun to stand up and look at the male visitor who had just entered the room. To excercise the recognition network, I was asked to list what was in the room. Through the strategic network, I was asked to determine what time period this was or what was the emotions of the people in the room. Through the affective network, I was asked what did I look at to help me make the determinations. I liked how this activity proved to me how the affective network works by showing me how my choice in what I chose to look at to get to my conclusions was the essence of this network. That activity helped seal my understanding of why it's so important to allow students the liberty to round out their learning through a vast array of practice models. By doing this, our curriculum is flexible enought to meet every need. When we use technology to support this, we definitely affirm Rose & Meyer's point, "This is generating curricula with built-in flexibility that inherently accommodates diverse learners." (Rose & Meyer, 2002)

Rose, D., & Meyer, A. (2002). //Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age: Universal Design for Learning//. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Available online at the Center for Applied Special Technology web site, http://www.cast.org/teachingeverystudent/ideas/tes/