Accessibility

The Mike Phillips video was a heart wrenching story that is a harsh reality for to many people. The biggest takeaway from the video was his perseverance to do as much as possible in his situation and he used and was thankful for all the tools that have helped him in his journey. In my personal experience, the biggest accessibility was the headphones and cassette player that read a book to the people wearing the headphones and they followed along in a paper copy of the book. I  constantly use talk to text to write my papers because it is easier to write down my thoughts flow that way. That is actually how I’m writing this post right now. It gives me the ability to not worry about losing my space when I’m writing and I can just focus on the materials that I’m trying to put into what I’m writing. For my UDL tool, I chose graphic organizers. They are great for organizing ideas and mind mapping and are a professional way to unscramble information that you have, but can organize enough on your own. The benefits are improving brain storming skills and they use a gradual release of responsibility and they can help a student have more independence, especially in the writing process. Limitations that are involved with graphic organizers is that they themselves don’t provide ideas, they just help organize them; so if a student is having trouble coming up with ideas in general, the organizers wouldn’t be of much use. I am embedding a link below to a list of a seven more UDL tools that were on the website where I found information about graphic organizers.

https://www.understood.org/en/school-learning/assistive-technology/assistive-technologies-basics/8-examples-of-assistive-technology-and-adaptive-tools