Options that provide or activate background knowledge

Example:  Advance organizers such as KWL charts; PWIM poster method.

CAST explanation

Options that highlight critical features, big ideas, and relationships

Example:  Cueing or highlighting important features to make them explicit, using graphic organizers.

CAST explanation

Awesome Highlighter is a free application that allows you to highlight and leave stick notes on web pages.

MS Word includes a highlighting feature.

Education Oasis provides many free downloadble graphic organizers which help students focus on key concepts and information.

The free public domain novels at UDL Editions have been engineered according to UDL principles.  These online books, essays, and poems feature mentors with think-aloud modeling and many embedded scaffolds.  Users can build and share their own udl engineered books at CAST's Book Builder.

Options that guide information processing

Example:  Breaking a task down into smaller, sequential steps.

CAST explanation

Clusty is a search engine that returns results organized by category, which helps to make sense of search returns.  For example, a search for "salmon" returns subcategories for salmon recipes, habitat, species, etc.

Students can learn how to write a simple sentence or paragraph with the help of this step-by-step extremely engaging tutorial.  The tutorial breaks the task down into simple steps and models how to create a sentence about an orange and a paragraph about apples before turning the task over to students.  Since the tutorial uses such familiar fruits for the content, the student can concentrate on the writing aspect.

Fact Fragment Frenzy is an interactive tool that models how to approach the task of extracting important information from text for note-taking.  This is an absolutely brilliant think-aloud that really breaks the task down into manageable steps.  The website then provides ample practice in an engaging activity that involves dragging key words and concepts out of the text.  This is just one of a large number of online graphic organizers found at the ReadWriteThink site.

Options that support memory and transfer 

Example:  Checklists, graphic organizers, concepts maps, linking to previous knowledge.

CAST explanation

This gallery of concept maps from Logotron shows many different examples of the way information can be represented to make it more comprehensible and memorable. 

Online games, such as those at Sheppard Software, provide students with practice that enhances memory for information such as math facts and geography.