Great video on UDL!

Check out this great video on Universal Design for Learning!
UDL at a Glance

Read Naturally and WYNN---a great combo!

Today while visiting one of our elementary schools, I was thrilled to hear of a creative and innovative use of technology for teaching reading fluency that was discovered by one of our fabulous teachers and her EA. As some of you may know, WYNN is a software program used in our district to support students with reading difficulties and is now available on all of our computers district-wide. Documents can be opened up in WYNN (much like opening a document in Word) and customized according to the student's preferences. WYNN can then read the text to the student and provides numerous other features such as a highlighting tool, dictionary, text to speech, word prediction, etc. This teacher and her assistant also use Read Naturally to teach fluency but were frustrated by the fact that the reading rate on the cassette tapes seemed too slow for most of the students and did not give them a target rate to attain. They discovered that the reading rate in WYNN can be adjusted to exactly match the student's target reading rate (under the "settings" tab) and have figured out that if they scan the reading segment from the Read Naturally book into WYNN, the student will be able to hear the target rate and follow along with his/her finger while reading along with WYNN. I can't wait to see the results they will have this year!