UDL Guidelines

After going thought my Colombian Exchange lesson plan, I realized that I could improve my lesson immensely based on the UDL Guidelines.  I had a variety of benchmarks that I needed to improve on to help my students achieve success.  For example, although I showed a very quick five minutes BrainPop video on Christopher Columbus, that was the only auditory part of the lesson.  I realized that including an appropriate learning video or two on the web hunt would have helped students who were not auditory learners.  Overall, this lesson was best for visual learners and I was not taking into account other types of learners effectively.

Another problem was that although collaboration is good, I had 24 students jammed on 12 computers.  Unfortunately, this is the computer lab in my school; however, I could have put twelve kids on the computers while other students were working on another engaging assignment.  This would have made students take ownership for their own learning, while also being able to assist others.  Students would not have had as many distractions.

Also, it would have been a good idea to demonstrate what I wanted their final product to look like.  Although I modeled how to get to napieralanews.weebly.com and where they were supposed to put their response, I should have created an actual rubric with the points I wanted them to write about.  Some students were taking control on the blog, while others were watching the work being done.

There was good that came from this lesson though.  First, students got the opportunity to learn through the internet and not just reading their textbook for information.  They were more engaged in their learning and had clear objectives that they were working to achieve.  Students were much more apt to use dictionary.com then to get out a dictionary to look up a word.  The information presented was at grade level which helped students to be successful, but also challenged them in ways.

Overall, analyzing this lesson helped me see what guidelines I should use when creating a lesson.  Although it is unrealistic to do the checklist for every lesson, I was able to see what were important ideas to focus on next time such as creating a lesson taking into account auditory, visual, and hands on learners.  https://docs.google.com/document/d/14BTP7Q0heU7Fv_qmI6DMysTmjDQyjsTEb5b7kequXUc/edit?hl=en_US