mrsfrench

 Universal Design for Learning This week's focus on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) made a lot of sense to me because it frames "support" as something we build into the lesson from the start, not something we tack on after students struggle. In Craig, Smith, and Frey's study (2022), the authors looked at a weeklong UDL Summer Institute and compared teachers who attended (n=73) with teachers who did not (n=70). They describe the Institute as strong professional development because it was content-focused, included active learning, modeled UDL practices, and built in feedback/reflection over a sustained duration. Administrators used a Teacher Success Rubric to evaluate UDL implementation, and teachers who attended the Institute showed greater growth in UDL implementation than those who did not, suggesting that well-designed professional development can meaningfully increase real classroom use of UDL. That connects directly to the kindergarten rhyming lesson I'm d...

Magic School AI Part 1: For this assignment, I explored the Magic School AI site. This is a really resourceful site that I appreciate getting familiar with. I wanted a kindergarten lesson, so I chose phonological awareness as my focus. I used the Lesson Plan Generator to design a lesson aligned with the Oklahoma Kindergarten English Language Arts standard K.PA.2, which targets phonological awareness skills like recognizing and producing rhyming words (Oklahoma State Department of Education OSDE, 2021). The objective for my lesson was for students to identify and verbally produce rhyming words using picture cards during a small-group activity. I also connected the lesson to ISTE Student Standard 1.1 (Empowered Learner) by using a digital tool to support learning and practice with teacher guidance (International Society for Technology in Education, ISTE, 2016).  The lesson Magic School generated was a helpful starting point. The objective matched the standard, and the lesson included...