UDL Structure
The UDL materials will consist of modules.
Each module will consist of an introduction, a series of linked activities, and a wrapup.
The module will be linked to standards and an assessment based on the standards. It will also have a full set of other teacher materials.
The introduction includes an overall-question, encourages thinking about the questions, states the expectations for student accomplishments for the module, and a pre-test.
The activities will each require 20-30 minutes of class time.
There will be activities for science, mathematics, and language arts.
There will be four science activities for grades 3-4.
There will be four additional science activities for grades 5-6.
Molecular workbench will be used only in grades 5-6.
The science activities will all use computers, except for non-probe alternatives to probe-based activities.
The non-science activities will all be off-computer, except for some math activities that require a grapher.
We will have non-computer activities paired with each computer-based activity. ("Paired" activities complement but don't depend on each other. They are suitable for two centers in a classroom and therefore useful for classes with limited numbers of computers.)
The dependence of activities will be variable---some will stand alone, others will depend on prior materials.
Each activity will have metatags that describe its dependence, point to alternatives, link to standards)
Each activity can have alternative treatments that the teacher or student can select.
Teachers can easily make alternative treatments. One major use will be to link with assignments to texts and other materials specific to a class.
Perhaps we can make a specialized assignment template for teachers to author alternatives.
All off computer activities should include a finding, artifact, or conclusion that students can quickly enter into the computer the next time they are on, to create an online record of their accomplishments. Perhaps this is a simplified template, too.
For our initial run, we may not provide many alternatives, but for every probe activity we need to have a non-computer equivalent.
The DYI authoring capacity will permit us to create more alternative activities later.
The Wrap-up activity will be a scaffolded report writer that will link to artifacts the student created in the activities (answers, drawings, data). It will include a post-test.
There will be scaffolded questions in most activities.
Agents will provide the scaffolding by giving advice.
There will be a teacher portal that simplifies the assignment of activities to students.
An activity can be marked as required, optional, or invisible. Teachers can do this for all students, groups of students, or individual students. The software would warn the teacher if the prerequisites were not assigned, or if too few were assigned.
Teachers also need to be able to assign activities to certain dates or range of dates. The software can compute how many computers and what supplies are required for each day.
Teachers need to be able to see where students are and how well they are doing. Views need to include summaries and details by student and by group,
All activities will have similar templates, not unlike a pared down version of DIY-TEEMSS. There will be lots of optional steps--we will take full advantage of the ability of DIY to ignore empty template blocks. So, for instance, there might be a "safety" block for probe activities that would be ignored for non-probe ones. Non-visible data, such as metatags will be easily authored, too.
The different scaffolding levels need to be supported in the author template. Every assessment block (open ended, multiple choice, true-false, numeric input) should support five levels of scaffolding. There should be default content-free scaffolding for the highest levels that the author can easily import. The author supplies text that is delivered (in bubble text or voice) by one of two agents.
We have not thought through how to author scaffolding for other objects, but we want it for graphs and models.