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NCAC: Research & Solutions: Students Make Progress with UDL: Party for Poetry!

Party for Poetry!

Try Universally Designed Instruction To Extend Poetry's Reach to More Young People

About NCAC

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Teachers, you can dress in beatnik clothing and head for dimly lit urban coffee houses, or you can sink into soft couches and listen to guest poets at chain book stores. But, if you really want do something important for poetry, create conditions where poetry can flourish in your classroom. By teaching with universally designed instruction and poems in digital formats you can bring poetry to young people and give them a voice in how they learn.

Universal design in education is based on next stage technologies, brain research, and time honored teaching practices. When used by trained teachers, this approach helps differentiate, personalize, and individualize instruction. Experienced teachers are using the principles and the methods of universal design in education to inspire learners of all kinds from those who are hardest to those who are easiest to teach.

If you are not yet presenting poems in digital formats and using the range of beneficial features that can support student learning or vary individual challenges, then read on. "Party for Poetry" was created to help teachers connect students with poetry and benefit from it during National Poetry Month (NPM), Young People's Poetry Week (April 16-22), and into the future. Poetry reading, writing, and discussion-and all subjects-are far more fun when students learn in the ways they like best.

Consider our suggestions for using e-text, particular learning tools, and universally designed instruction to open doors to the curriculum. You may find the approach has special value for young people who turn off or tune out to poetry that is printed on paper or youngsters who balk when asked to write out their thoughts in longhand.

April is Poetry Month

Inaugurated by the Academy of Poets in April 1996, NPM brings together publishers, booksellers, literary organizations, libraries, schools, and poets around the country to celebrate poetry and its place in American culture. Thousands of businesses and non-profit organizations participate through readings, festivals, book displays, workshops, and other events. During the third week in April, the Children's Book Council (CBC) sponsors a week-long event to highlight poetry for children and teens and to encourage everyone to embrace poetry-read it, enjoy it, write it-in their homes, childcare centers, classrooms, libraries, and bookstores. The CBC collaborates with the Academy of American Poets and The Center for the Book in The Library of Congress on this annual event. Be sure to explore the poetry week and national poetry month Web sites listed above.

The National Center for Accessing the General Curriculum at CAST (the Massachusetts-based Center for Applied Special Technology) invites teachers to celebrate poetry and all subjects by making instruction more inclusive for learners who have diverse abilities, interests, experiences, and backgrounds. We hope the information that follows helps teachers create effective conditions for teaching and learning, even when their groups are large and comprised of diverse learners.

Party for Poetry With NCAC During National Poetry Month:

Explore Digital Poetry with Universally Designed Instruction

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Party Welcome: Learn How Universal Designs And Careful Teaching Strategies Enrich Your Curriculum Honk Your Horn For E-Poetry and Other Luminous Resources Add Sparkle with Reader and Writer Software That Helps Teachers Support Learning And Vary Challenges Make New Acquaintances: Meet Bobby And Help Your District Broaden Its Web Audience Party On: Join the National Consortium To Keep Up With Universal Design For Learning

Pre-Party Reminder: Before the fun begins-and our examples are full of fun- please note that there is no totally universally designed curriculum and there are no perfect products. This brief introduction is your springboard to the emerging field of universally designed instruction. More in-depth information about universal design in education is available on the CAST Website and from the ERIC Clearinghouse at the Council for Exceptional Children. Information about those Web sites follows.

When this party's over, add universal design to your teaching repertoire. Consider using any or all of the following ideas:

• Make comparisons and select universally designed software with built-in features and supports serving a wide range of learners. Look for products that include the capacity for turning text into speech, highlighting text, taking notes, providing dictionary definitions or links to other reference materials, revealing examples, providing summaries, and offering controls for font style, font size, foreground and background colors, and the speed of presentation of text and images. Investigate other options on the CAST Web site.
• Explore freestanding software programs, such as electronic readers, that can be purchased individually or downloaded at no cost. These run simultaneously with e-text that you provide. Readers can expand a teacher's instructional options.
• Investigate read-aloud software that combines text-to-speech functions with word processing to overcome barriers presented by writing longhand. This learner tool can speak words and sentences, read whole entries, and repeat text on demand. Other built-in features include a spell checker, font selections, search functions, and more.
• Seriously consider purchasing educational materials from publishers that are producing CD-Rom versions of print-on-paper textbooks and collateral materials.
• Equip students who have sensory, physical, and cognitive disabilities with needed assistive technologies that create access to the curriculum for their particular needs.
• Investigate e-text options available through your public library, such as netLibrary services.
• Do your part to see that the Web site for your school district is accessible to the widest possible audience. CAST offers "Bobby," a free Web page evaluator. There is a briefing for you at the end of this trip and a direct link that you can pass along to your district's Web manager.
• Return to the NCAC Web site and consider joining the National Consortium on Universal Design for Learning.

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Party Welcome: Learn How Universal Design And Careful Teaching Strategies Can Enrich Your Curriculum

Teachers who set and adjust goals to match the diverse skills, needs, interests and abilities of each student and who offer the flexible teaching materials and methods of universally designed instruction can make learning come alive in meaningful ways as students reach for standards set by their states.

Universal design in education has its origins in architecture and city planning, which sometimes imposes required measures from builders, such as building in curb cuts on sidewalks, in order to make housing and the surrounding environment accessible to people with disabilities. As a result, there are many other beneficiaries including senior citizens, mothers using strollers, joggers, and others. Now, that concept of accessibility for all has come alive in the form of universally designed instruction that opens the doors to the curriculum for a wide variety of learners.

Based on new brain research, next-stage technologies, and careful teaching practices, universal design creates multiple avenues for learning and for expression so that students can show what they know. By providing alternatives in addition to traditional instruction, this method appears to be successful and appropriate for a wide range of learners, even when they are part of large groups and when they learn differently from one another. Universal design's built-in flexibility enables educators to tailor, to personalize, to differentiate, and to individualize teaching and learning.

While no curriculum is as yet fully universally designed, much is known about reforming classroom instruction using this approach so that students can connect with the curriculum, benefit from it, and measurably improve their performance.

Gaining full access to the general curriculum is the goal for all children. For children and youths with diagnosed disabilities, a universally designed educational approach supports Congress's 1997 amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). For students who have diverse learning styles and special needs who are not labeled disabled, and for bright and gifted learners, this approach addresses the standards-based educational reform movement that seeks improved educational results and the chance to realize individual potential for everyone.

For more about Universal Design for Learning, the best-known application of universal design in education, visit CAST and the National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum. You can visit the UDL section of the CAST Web site with the following links:

• UDL: Theory & Research
• UDL: Tools & Resources
• UDL: Examples & Illustration
• UDL: Activites & Collaboration

The Council for Exceptional Children also has a storehouse of information about universal design in classrooms. Go to

• A Curriculum Every Student Can Use: Design Principles For Student Access
• What is "Universal Design" for Curriculum Access?
• Curriculum Access and Universal Design for Learning

More information is available at CAST's Web site, www.cast.org. The CAST eReader™ is a trademark of CAST.

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Honk Your Horn for E-Poetry and Other Luminous Resources

Finding good sources for digital text can be time-consuming and complex. Resources cited here are favorites for their rich content and usability. Some layouts correlate well with research findings at CAST that show that many students prefer text that is presented in a single column format with lots of white space beside it. NCAC urges that teachers pre-screen Web content for appropriateness before presenting it to young people.

The Academy of American Poets

Favorite Poem Project: Americans Saying Poems They Love

American Verse Project

Poetry Daily

Poetry Writing with Jack Prelutsky

Gale Group's Free Poetry Area

Electronic Poetry Center

The EPC at the University of Buffalo is a collaboration between the Poetics Program, Department of English, and the College of Arts & Sciences at the University at Buffalo. The center offers free access to many copyrighted primary literary materials and other poetics resources for educational use. This edited collection is organized into an author library and poetics documents area. Learn about E-Poetry 2001: An International Digital Poetry Festival held in April, with international pre-festival events on the afternoon of April 18. The festival will focus on poetry using networked and programmable media, kinetic/visual works, hypertext, and multiple practices in digital media.

More Resources:

The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Program Initiative

Part of the largest poetry event in North America held every other year since 1986 to advance poetry, this four-day festival is jam packed with discussions, conversations, and workshops for students, teachers, and the general public. A year-round program also operates in New Jersey schools. Find a guide, the Poetry Heaven Teacher's Guide, that results from past activities. TV personality Bill Moyers developed and aired public television programming from the festival. Check this site for online poetry readings, a lesson plan, and a teachers guide entitled Fooling With Words. Home versions of the TV production also are available.

The Internet Poetry Archive Home Page

Sponsored by the University of North Carolina Press and the North Carolina Arts Council, this site includes the work of living poets worldwide with text, sound, and graphics. Find works by Czeslaw Milosz, Seamus Heaney, Philip Levine, Robert Pinsky, Margaret Walker, Yusef Komunyakaa and others. Check the archive entry by poet and select audio clips of the poet reading commenting on the works, and other enrichment curricula such as presentations in the author's original languages, and English translations.

Christian Science Monitors Poetry Special Feature

Find a wealth of information here including poems of the month, poetry interviews, teaching ideas and a teacher's guide. Also find poetry book reviews, poetry news, features, and links.

ISLMC Poetry for Children--Especially for Teachers and Librarians

This James Madison University service and meta-site is designed for elementary and middle teachers, librarians, parents and students. It identifies Web sites with poetry curriculum resources including Forms of Poetry, Poetry in the Classroom, Selected Poetry E-texts, and Poetry Bibliographies. Also see, Elementary Resources. Poetry, Poetry for Upper Elementary Students, Middle & Secondary Resources. Poetry

Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet (RKCP)

Here is a playful and free of cost poetry generator that could be useful for some students. This device finds rhymes, alliterations, and ideas for expression. RKCP reads your selection of poems, creates a "language model," and then writes original poems from that model by incorporating computer-based language analysis and mathematical modeling techniques. The poems have a similar style to the author whose work was originally analyzed, but the results are an original new poem.

The Rhyme Zone

This online device might be useful for some students. Users type in a word and hit the "search" button to find rhymes, synonyms, and more.

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Add Sparkle to the Curriculum with Reader and Writer Software That Helps Teachers Support Learning and Vary Challenges

Digital text alone does not create access to the curriculum. Trained teachers working with universally designed tools can give learners a voice in how they acquire information and show what they know. Here are two tools that can open doors to the curriculum. You can explore these and other tools with universally designed features by going to Web Resources on CAST's Web site.

CAST e-Reader

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One way to aid reading electronically is with electronic readers. Learn about the CAST eReader (formerly ULTimate Reader) an electronic reader that adds spoken voice, visual highlighting, document navigation, or page navigation to any electronic text. The software can take content from any source -- the Internet, word processing files, scanned-in text, or typed-in text -- and combine it with the most powerful features of talking and reading software.

Both the Macintosh and Windows versions of CAST eReader let users:

• Select volume, speed, and pitch of the reading voices
• Choose speech and highlighting speeds and increments
• Change the default font, style, color, and size of the text
• Control movement through the text (automatic and manual stepping)
• Take notes and receive speech feedback while typing

These and other features give users a variety of ways to read and navigate through written material, and provide a supportive environment for readers with all types of learning differences.

• Review eReader's UDL features.
• Download a Windows demo version. You can download a full-featured Windows demo version of CAST eReader(10.2MB). The Macintosh demo will be available in the future. Download the demo when you have the time to evaluate the software as it runs for two weeks or 10 executions, whichever occurs first.
• Pricing and Ordering Information.

Write:OutLoud

• Review this program's Universal Design for Learning features
• Visit the publisher's Web site at http://www.donjohnston.com

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Designed for adults, Write:OutLoud is an easy-to-use word processor that lets users see and hear what they type. Equipped with a text-to-speech function, the software can speak words and sentences, read whole entries, and repeat text as often as users desire. Write:OutLoud offers all the features of a word processor, including a spell checker, font selections, search functions, and more. It provides special customizable functions for those who want read-aloud and other capabilities.

Product Highlights

Write:OutLoud offers:

• Shortcut buttons: Menu options or key commands run all functions, so users can easily move through and format the text without complicated commands.
• Customizable color options: Users can choose screen and font colors, and easily highlight words or sentences in different colors.
• Multi-sensory cueing abilities

Because it offers essential word processing functions and speech capabilities, Write:OutLoud has many applications both at home and at school, for those with and without disabilities.

Disclaimer

CAST does not necessarily endorse this product or consider it fully universally designed. CAST applauds the inclusion of universally designed features in this product and wishes to illustrate some of those features for educational purposes.

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Make New Acquaintances: Meet Bobby and Help Your District Expand Its Web Audience

Many schools are posting their students' poetry, art, and other work on a district Web site or they intend to in the future. An NCAC goal is to be sure that your site and all of your students' poetry and other work is accessible to the widest possible audience. Here is your chance to get acquainted with Bobby, a web accessibility evaluator, and to introduce him to your Webmaster.

Bobby is a free service provided by CAST to help Web page authors identify remedies and repair significant barriers that prevent individuals with disabilities or readers with low bandwidth from viewing its content. For example, a blind user or auditory learner could have access with the simple addition of a sound track to a movie. Similarly, a hard-of-hearing user would be helped if a written transcript were added as an option when a sound file is the sole source of information.

Bobby evaluates each site that is referred and reports back solutions or suggests a next course of action. Most suggestions amount to small additions that add clarity and help Web browsers to work more effectively. If students in your district are posting written works, odds are that Bobby will see to it that more people enjoy those pages. Celebrate "Poetry Month" by checking for the Bobby icon. If you don't see it, send a link to your district's Webmaster with a request to make your site accessible to the widest possible audience.

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Party On: Join the National Consortium To Keep Up With Universal Design For Learning

The National Center invites teachers and all other school professionals and personnel to join the National Consortium on Universal Design for Learning. It can be an important first step in learning about universal design in classrooms and a great place to find tips and suggestions from practitioners.

Join the National Consortium on Universal Design For Learning. This is a national partnership of educators, schools and experts who want better results for all students, no matter how diverse or different are their backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and learning styles. The consortium intends to capitalize on collective expertise of a wide range of educators and to promote the use of UDL in classroom practice alternative learning rather than one approach to learning for everyone. Instead, it reflects an awareness of the unique nature of each learner and the need to accommodate differences, creating learning experiences that suit the learner and maximize his or her ability to progress.

Launched in 1999, the National Consortium on Universal Design for Learning capitalizes on the collective expertise of regular and special educators and other professionals to foster shared responsibility and accountability for the educational needs of all children in the general education classroom, especially those with disabilities. It advances this goal through research, professional development, demonstration of best educational practices, and collaboration with experts.

About the National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum (NCAC)

More about NCAC Partners.

	National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum (NCAC): In a collaborative agreement with the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Programs (OSEP), CAST has established a National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum to provide a vision of how new curricula, teaching practices, and policies can be woven together to create practical approaches for improved access to the general curriculum by students with disabilities.
	Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP): Funding for the National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum is provided by the Office of Special Education Programs in the U.S. Department of Education.
	Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST): Founded in 1984, CAST is an educational, not-for-profit organization that uses technology to expand opportunities for all people, including those with disabilities.
	Council for Exceptional Children (CEC): CEC is the largest international professional organization dedicated to improving educational outcomes for individuals with exceptionalities, students with disabilities, and/or the gifted.