So it has been a busy month! Multiple full day trainings, pilot teams kicking off, meetings with Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) and overall getting the message out about Universal Design for Learning! With all the craziness it still has been so encouraging! Teachers are interested and wanting to talk more about this whole "UDL thing" and overall the buzz has been extremely positive. Our year 2 pilots just had their full day training at Bitwise and we are very excited to see what new frontiers of learning their students will experience because of their hard work! Our year 1 pilots are also working through their first UDL training at Fresno State now and developing solutions to the problems of practice they are facing within their classrooms. 

Remember Universal Design for Learning is a design lens that we apply to the instructional strategies and environments we already are working in. For those of you who have already been trained reflect on the aspects of UDL that were interesting or inspirational to you and try something out! Take a little risk and see what happens. 

So what have been your thoughts everyone!? Take some time and let us know what you are feeling around Universal Design for Learning. We are just so excited to see how this way of design thinking will have a positive impact on the kiddos of Sanger Unified. 

So here is one of my favorite little podcasts episodes showing the power of trying something new. Check it out!

A Cautionary Tale. So last year in our beginning pilot trainings I dove into tech as the primary means of representation and expression for focus learning about UDL. We were doing fantastic Prezies, learning UDL principles via video games, all the notes were on google drive via a shared folder, and all was shiny and new in terms of the tech connections. Midway through the year though, a teacher came up to me and asked for handouts. I had stopped printing handouts because all was available online and in one of those fancy means. I was taken back! Handouts! But for her she really felt comfortable handwriting notes on handouts. She also happens to be a calligraphist and has beautiful handwriting. For this teacher the technology was actually a barrier for her accessing content. Rather then force her to acquiesce to my design paradigm, I had to go back and reevaluate the goal of our trainings. The goal wasn't to learn new technology, it was to learn UDL and to put it into practice each day.  If I am honest my first inclination was to want to teach the technology and for teachers to experience the technology, if it wasn't for Universal Design for Learning, I would have totally taken my preferences over those of the teacher group. I could have easily made technology knowledge a prerequiste for Universal Design for Learning knowledge. So now needless to say, all presentations and professional development has handout options that teacher are welcome to grab should that be helpful for them. ​