udl and the power of digital media (blogpost 5b)

In our readings for this weekend, we read a chapter from an online textbook called Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age. In our two assigned chapters 3 & 4, the power of digital media was broken down into its advantages, and its implications for teachers in the classroom along with a detailed definition of UDL and how to implement it.

This reading made the advantages of digital media very clear in chapter three, even if those advantages were rather obvious at times. I found the implications for educators to be somewhat vague, and it left me wanting more. I did appreciate its attempt to encourage educators to use digital media to assist the learning of every student. The text made the reader aware of changing culture, the move away from a text driven society to a more multimedia environment, and encouraged educators to follow that change and adapt the classroom to make it a more multimedia learning environment. However, it does make me wonder if something might be lost if we more away from text and into multimedia. What does it mean to abandon text? I don't know.

I found our second reading, Why Won't More Teachers Set up a UDL Classroom, to give a good definition of UDL, and to give more concrete examples of what it means to create a UDL classroom. Her blog made it clear that educators have the responsibility to adapt their teaching and their classrooms to the individual needs of every student. To link this to the first reading, that adaptation could, and should, include the use of digital media.

I've created concept maps for the first reading, shown below.

Chapter 3 concept map




Chapter 4 concept map