Professional development for Universal Design for Learning and Response to Intervention

In my district, all of the school psychologists help with professional development by providing workshops from time-to-time throughout the school year. The latest topics are Universal Design for Learning(UDL) and Response to Intervention (RTI).

I'd like to know if anyone who does professional development related to instructional technology is collaborating with other disciplines to provide workshops on these topics. I recently spent some time with one of my school districts instructional technology specialist and found her input to be valuable.

To be effective, UDL efforts require that all teachers are pretty good at technology integration. For RTI to work, good data collection and data representation needs to be in place. For example, Inspiration's InspireData could be a tool to use for documenting interventions and progress-monitoring.

I've posted some resources about RTI and UDL on my TechPsych blog.

Over the past couple of years, I've used some of my blog posts as resources for teachers.

Blogs:
Interactive Multimedia Technology
TechPsych

-Lynn Marentette

Tags: RTI, UDL, blogs, collaboration, development, professional, resources, workshops

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Fred Tchang on May 31, 2008 at 9:21pm

I'm an assistive technology specialist, and have started to work with school districts in my state who are interested in learning more about or implementing UDL. As might be expected, the only time we get to spend any significant amount of time on this topic is when there is a grant. Fortunately, the state of NJ DOE has an interest in UDL.

So far, what we're finding is that, 1- teachers are not so consistent in doing lesson plans in any case. Since UDL is based on DESIGN, it's more difficult to apply the principles on the fly. And even if they are interested, it's hard to have the planning time to redesign instruction.

2- to get buy-in from teachers, we tend to start with more simple techniques that can be part of a UDL approach, such as low-tech accommodations that can be available for all the students, or accessible text initiatives (books on CD, electronic text and text-to-speech), again for all the students.

But what was the purpose of your question, really? You were asking do other collaborate to do such PD? I work for a non-profit organization that provides supports to school districts as outside consultants, and we have people of different disciplines on staff. We plan things out with the district, and often change things as we go, seeing how things are going with the teachers.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Fred Tchang, ATP

RESNA Certified Assistive Technology Practitioner

Director, Assistive Technology Services

www.cpofnj.org

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