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Offering Choices of Content and Tools is a UDL strategy presented in Chapter 6 of Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age.
Key Concepts:
1. Giving choice can increase engagement.
2. Learning is enhanced when students can make personal connections to what they are learning.
3. Flexible digital tools offer many options for choice and engagement.
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Sample Lesson
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A teacher in year 1 of the project wanted his students to learn the anatomy of the eye by dissecting a sheep's eyeball. When a group of students refused to do the task he gave them a digital camera and asked them to take photographs of the dissection and write up the lab report as a PPT Presentation. They produced the best work that they had done, surprising themselves as well as the teacher!
A year 3 team has written up LOR lessons on Visual Effect and Anatomy of the Eye. (soon to be posted)
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Discussion
1. Do you see increased motivation and engagment when you offer choices?
2. How do you evaluate fairly if students are producing different products?
3. Are you having difficulty establishing common criteria for evaluation?
4. Do you think your students experience benefits from seeing different types of presentations and products by their peers?
5. Do you have trouble finding time to mark different types of projects or fit in student presentations?
The Fairview team (year 2) reported that when students were given a choice of presenting in a variety of formats, the whole class benefited from seeing learning represented in different ways.
A year 2 team leader reported that her marking is easier because she has fewer papers to grade; she finds time to evaluate student projects individually during the school day and fits in presentations to the whole class where she can.
In our online discussion year 3 team leaders confirmed that providing choice for students was very motivating and increased ownership of learning. Although students may show what they know in different ways, they are still working toward the same goal. That common goal should be the main focus of a rubric. Everyone is using rubrics so establishing a common criteria was not difficult.
Some difficulties surrounding tech use were noted such as the availability of cameras or laptops when everybody wanted to use them at the same time. Tech projects often require more time than expected. The teacher needs to have very good troubleshooting skills if students are all using different technologies; some pre-training on tech tools is required before they are listed as choices, e.g. students are likely to be familiar with PPT but not Animoto.
Teaching Strategies/Activities/Resources
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This is not just a single lesson but a complete online course on Differentiation using Technology . |
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Students are more likely to engage if they can see how the learning is related to their world. For example, students may be bored by doing math problems on worksheets but motivated by calculating the cost of a trip to DisneyLand or analyzing angles in ski jumping. How about leveraging their interest in hockey to see if The Matthew Effect holds up for a local sports team? Students may also be engaged by concrete examples such as learning how engineers calculate the volume of a solid such as a pyramid at the Real World Math site which uses Google Earth in the math classroom. Math Apprentice allows students to role-play using math in several careers.
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Learners who are motivated by authenticity will enjoy working with primary source materials. They may enjoy interviewing seniors or elders or putting together a real or Virtual Museum Box.
Flickr's Commons, a collection of historical public photos invites tagging by viewers and is an excellent resource for Social Studies and History.
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NASA photo from Be a Martian website
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Role playing can be very engaging. Students may enjoy acting out roles in a play, pretending to be an historical or literary character, or participating in Reader's Theatre. Check out NASA's Be a Martian. Or take BBC's excellent Pyramid Challenge to see if you have what it takes to build a pyramid. |
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Many teachers offer student student choice at learning centres.
Flickr CC photo Preschool Colors by Barnaby Wassan
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Dave Edyburn uses a 9-square grid of activities to offer student choice. Students complete any 3 activities to make a Tic-Tac-Toe. The Diner's Menu is a creative way to offer choices. Here's another collection of Choice Boards for several different curriculum areas. Here are 100s of ways to do a book report. |
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At a summer tech camp for students with visual impairments, students completed a choice of 5 daily challenges related to a camp theme and uploaded their work to a blog that friends and family could view. This document contains the camp plan and challenges for our Harry Potter theme. The building and grounds at this camp are designed for the visually-impaired. Every computer in the lab contained all of the supports that might be needed. Such camps are very close to truly universally designed learning environments.
Often we assume that if students have a visual impairment they must be auditory learners. NOT TRUE! Time and time again we discovered excellent artists, especially graphic artists at this camp. The image on the left, created by one of the students, uses about 18 layers in Photoshop.
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The Literature Circles approach focuses on common strategies and concepts but groups of students read books of their choice.
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The UDL team at Fairview elementary created this poetry wiki on a Non Instructional Day. The activities are organized by Gardner's Intelligences and by level of difficulty in order to provide different challenges for their students. They started building their math wiki in a different way, organizing it by learning outcomes and level of difficulty. |
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