Customizing with UD Features: WiggleWorks

Index

Overview

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1. Multiple Representations of Information

Text attributes are customizable throughout the program.

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You can easily change the size and color of text to suit the demands of a particular session or to save as a preference for individual students. You can similarly customize both the color of the highlight and text background.

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2. Multiple Options for Expression and Control

WiggleWorks activities offer a variety of options for expression such as writing, drawing, and recording.

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In "Write," students can begin a composition by typing text, by recording themselves speaking, by drawing, or by placing words from a word list into their text. As they compose, students can listen to their recording, hear their text read back through text to speech, or elaborate their drawing. These options support multiple approaches to composing.

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3. Multiple Options for Engagement

The WiggleWorks management system offers ways for teachers to structure learning experiences tightly or to enable students broad latitude to explore, construct, and create.

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Teachers can present highly structured activities by limiting students to one targeted program area and a specific task. Through the management system, select the program area and eliminate the others. Use the teacher message button to record specific instructions to focus the lesson for each book or each page. (For example, ask students to "copy into your word list the things the author sees" or "record the name of something you see in your neighborhood.")

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Customizing Tips

• In "My Book," support children with beginning literacy skills by encouraging them to make very small changes (such as coloring the page, erasing part of the picture, changing a single word, or recording personal comments on each page).
  
• In "My Book," provide minimum support for children with high level skills. For example, skilled students might erase the entire image and all of the words, record a brand new story, type in the words (if necessary with support from the My Words and Scholastic Words lists), and draw new pictures. The new story can then be printed or played back on screen.
  
• For young students just learning about text and for students with low vision, choose large text. Teach students how to click the magnifying glass in the lower right corner to shrink the text to better see the illustration or to engage in collaborative reading.
  
• For young children just learning to use a computer, for children with low vision, and for children with attention deficits, choose the large cursor.
  
• For children with color blindness or low vision, change the colors for text, background, and highlight. A good high-contrast combination for students with low vision is yellow text, a black background, and a medium highlight color such as light brown. Students with color blindness may have difficulty seeing blue, yellow, and green.
  
• Encourage children who are distractible to change the text color and background before each session at the computer. This ability to make the screen their own can increase motivation to engage in reading.
  
• For students with attention deficits turn button sounds off to avoid the delay caused while playing the sound. Turn sounds off for children who are deaf or when the program is used in a classroom setting where headphones are not available and sounds would distract others.
  
• For students accessing the computer via a single switch, turn scanning on and adjust speed to suit each student's needs. When students are working in pairs, make sure both students know that the spacebar releases single switch scanning and enables mouse use, after which clicking on the small carat on the lower left of the screen restarts scanning mode. This encourages collaboration among students with varied physical abilities.
  
• For students who are blind, turn on scanning and talking buttons option. Each location in the scan will speak its name, and the student can click the mouse to select options. Turn on talk and type so that synthesized speech provides ongoing feedback as blind students are writing.

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Universal Design Wish List

• Add text captions for all audio.
  
• Add a signed video for all audio.
  
• Include text description for all images.

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Feedback

How do you customize your students' learning with WiggleWorks? We would like to add your ideas to our Web site, space permitting. (If we use your submission, we will give you credit.) Submit your Customizing Tips and UD Wish List items via e-mail to udfeedback@cast.org.

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Product Information

For more information about teaching with WiggleWorks, see the Teaching with WiggleWorks Web site.

For more information about WiggleWorks, see the Teaching Tools section of this Web site.

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Disclaimer

Although CAST created this product, we do not consider it to be fully universally designed. Universal design is a process that we too are learning. We include this product to illustrate some of its universally designed features as part of our educational purpose.

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