Welcome to Episode 129 of the Think UDL podcast: UDL Toolkit with James D’Annibale. James D’Annibale is the Director of Academic Technologies at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and has created a UDL Toolkit for his faculty at the small liberal arts college to help faculty integrate UDL into their teaching in no tech, low tech, and high tech ways, and with low lift to high lift options. This instructor-focussed toolkit systematically sorts some teaching responsibilities into UDL categories and may be a helpful way to engage your campus without having to reinvent the wheel yourself! Stay tuned as we talk about the UDL Toolkit for college instructors and thank you for listening to the Think UDL podcast.
Resources
Reach out to James D’Annibale on LinkedIn and
Find the UDL Toolkit here, and a recent update from James:
We’re still working on cleaning some things up like how the technology suggestions are Dickinson-specific and the strategy names are too long from when all we had was a table. We’d also like to add resources and/or testimonials for each strategy, but we need help to get there. When you get there you’ll see a “Suggest Additions” link in the top-right. Currently it’s only 3 people working on this and it’s definitely not at the top of our priority list (unfortunately); so any help we can get will be greatly appreciated.
Also, if anyone interested in the toolkit is attending the EDUCAUSE conference, Dr. Tom Tobin and I will be presenting how the toolkit can be used to push UDL at scale. It’s Wednesday Oct 23 at 10:15 am. UDL From Grassroots to the Boardroom | EDUCAUSE Events
Transcript
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
UDL, faculty, toolkit, learning, students, teaching, accessibility, Dickinson
SPEAKERS
James D’Annibale, Lillian Nave
Lillian Nave 00:02
Welcome to Think UDL, the Universal Design for Learning podcast where we hear from the people who are designing and implementing strategies with learner variability in mind. I’m your host, Lillian nave. And I’m interested in not just what you’re teaching, learning, guiding and facilitating, but how you design and implement it and why it even matters. Welcome to Episode 129 of the think UDL podcast. UDL toolkit with James D’Annibale. James D’Annibale is the Director of Academic Technologies at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. And he has created a UDL toolkit for his faculty at the small liberal arts college to help faculty integrate UDL into their teaching in no tech, low tech and high tech ways. And with low lift to high lift options. This instructor focused toolkit systematically sought some teaching responsibilities into UDL categories, and may be a helpful way to engage your campus without having to reinvent the wheel yourself. Stay tuned as we talk about the UDL toolkit for college instructors. And thank you for listening to the think UDL podcast. Thank you to our sponsor, Texthelp, a global technology company helping people all over the world to understand and to be understood, it has led the way in creating innovative technology for the workplace and education sectors, including K 12, right through to higher education for the last three decades, discover their impact at text dot help forward slash learn more, that’s l earn m o r e. Alright, so I want to welcome James, thank you for joining me on the think UDL podcast.
James D’Annibale 02:13
Thank you for having me.
Lillian Nave 02:14
It’s really great to have you here. I really appreciate that. Tom Tobin has introduced us. And I wanted to start with my first question, which is what makes you a different kind of learner?
James D’Annibale 02:28
Yeah, so I’ve had quite a few concussions over the years playing football. And I have some some lifelong issues that I deal with now. The main one that that factors into learning is that I just get cognitive fatigue, at least I think that’s the term for it. That’s kind of what I call it. Just anytime I have to think for a long time. Or reading really does it where I just, I feel like my brain just has to shut down and I have to rest for a bit. And it even sometimes turns into a physical fatigue based on the cognitive fatigue. So reading is difficult, not difficult, like I can read, I can comprehend. But I’m not going to sit down and read a whole book, you know, it’s got to be one chapter at a time. Or I really like audiobooks. For some reason, an audio book doesn’t trigger this issue for me. But you know, being in the job that I’m in, sometimes it’s a full day of meetings. And when I get home, in the end of the day, I just have to crash, which is probably something most people deal with. But it’s just that that little extra more.
Lillian Nave 03:43
Well, and when did you start noticing this? Did this happen while you were still in your college days? Or? Like when did you start realizing that you had this like cognitive fatigue that you had to really be mindful of?
James D’Annibale 03:57
Oh, no, not until later. And I really didn’t even notice that I was experiencing anything different than anybody else until probably five or six years after I was done playing. My my wife would, you know, just talk about things that were, you know, happened in our lifetimes. And I’d be like, I have no recollection of this. Like, I don’t remember this event happening. Or she’d be talking about stuff from our wedding. And I’d be like, I I have no memory of this whatsoever other than going back and looking at pictures or videos, right? And so that’s where she was like, you know, like, you’re not remembering things that you should be remembering. And so I went I went I talked to a doctor, and my family doctor had me go talk to a specialist, of course, and that’s where, you know, he asked me, have you ever had a concussion? And I said no, because like I never had at a sports Trainer. or a doctor or anybody telling me I had a concussion? And he started describing, you know, okay, did you ever feel like you got your bell rung? Did you ever have, you know, have that feeling where you kind of like saw stars for a minute? Did you do this? Did you do that? And I’m like, yeah, a lot. And, you know, we started thinking through some things, and I think I have it narrowed down to like six or seven occurrences where he would he The doctor said, I likely had a concussion. But you know, I never told anybody I never told doctors, I never told anybody because I wanted to keep playing. You know, it was just the culture of a football player is you want to stay in. And on the teams I was on in college, I was the long snapper. And I didn’t even have a backup most years. So like, if I took myself out, there was just no long snapper. So like, I don’t feel like I felt pressured to keep playing, not pressured from the coaching staff not pressured from the medical set. Like, I never felt comfortable joining any of those lawsuits or anything. Because it was me like I made myself keep playing. I made myself not before anything. But yeah, so you know, five or six years after things started to really affect me as one I kind of noticed.
Lillian Nave 06:19
Wow, so Okay, so now that you’ve understood that about yourself, so do you just give yourself some time to kind of relax and recuperate? And then you can kind of go back into that activity? Or do you have to do something different? You just need to rest? Or what is it that you figured out that you need to do?
James D’Annibale 06:43
Yeah, I do a really good job of trying not to book things back to back plug for maintenance. I like to give myself at least a half hour in between things where I’m really going to have to think a lot. And yeah, it’s just, you know, maybe doing something in a different modality. You know, like, if I’m reading for a while, I’ll just commit to not reading for a half hour or so afterward. And other times, it’s just, I have to just sleep. You know, I try not to sleep during the workday. But when I get home, my wife will attest to this, I get home sometimes. And I just lay down on the couch, and I’m out for hours, hours and hours, sometimes through the whole night. I’ll get home at six o’clock fall asleep, and she’ll wake me up at 11 to go off to bed and I just keep sleeping the whole way through the rest of the night.
Lillian Nave 07:36
Wow. Yeah. So it sounds like you have really learned a lot about how that that has affected your understanding of how you take in information, how you absorb that information, and then how you can eventually access right, that information. Yeah. So have you been able to figure out then how you can now remember those things? Like you said, Now, like, I can’t, I just didn’t remember these things that I that I was supposed to remember. So if you’re supposed to remember some things, what do you do if you have to remember those things.
James D’Annibale 08:13
So the long term things that I just don’t have like our wedding day, the doctor says there’s no getting that, what that fiscal. But I do a lot of like, I take really good notes. My calendar just runs everything for me. And I’ll even like, if I know, you know, on Tuesday that I need to get something in my boss. On Monday, there was a reminder, you know, reminding me to do that. But if it’s like things that I’ve learned and things that I need to remember from learning, it’s just I have OneNote and OneNote is just full of every Yeah, I find that if I if I listen to something, I’m able to retain it a lot better than if I read it. So I tried to find audiobooks of whatever I need to need to take in. Or I’ll use the browser extensions but do the robot voice that’s not really that great, but a lot it’s like if I can hear it while I’m reading it, then it helps me Yeah.
Lillian Nave 09:17
Oh, that’s fantastic. So I love how tech has enabled that for for you for so many of us I am such an audiobook person now. I am such a podcast you know person I I do not love reading with my eyes anymore. I love reading as an audiobook person. Yeah. And that’s definitely my my go to like I’m always like, well just to come in an audiobook because that’s before I joined a book club. I’m like, Wow, am I really gonna read it because I need to know if it comes in an audiobook. Same thing. So, so it looks like you have like a lot of real personal investment. and multiple means of representation already. I can see that. Yeah. So I wanted to ask Second of all about your role at Dickinson so your tickets in a small liberal arts college. And one of the things I’ve wanted to do on the podcast is talk to people all over the world in all different venues, because I’ve seen how UDL needs to be applied in small colleges in large universities, and not just in the US, and then places all over the world, and how it gets applied differently. So I wanted to know about your role at Dickinson, and how you learned about UDL? How do you came in contact with it first?
James D’Annibale 10:41
Yeah, so um, UDL kind of became a thing for me a long time ago, mainly because just, I think, growing up, my family just always had connections with, you know, like, people that had, you know, families with kids that had special needs, or I don’t know if that’s to the term we’re supposed to use anymore. But, you know, like, one of my greatest friends growing up her sister had that has Down syndrome. Even myself as a, as a twin, my twin and I had a twin language when we were really little. And we had to go to like a special preschool for me to learn English, because I would use my twin brother as a translator. And then I had to keep going through speech therapy for years, I stopped when I got to I think fourth grade, because I felt like I was getting picked on for it, you can probably still hear a list, but that I have and some other things. So yeah, that like just kind of growing up, I was just always around the need to, like make sure that there was a fair playing level, or what do they call it a level playing field, right? My varsity football coach in high school was a special ed teacher. And you know, we like I’d go to his classroom to watch film and just be around those kids. And just, he did a lot to make sure that as a team, we embraced people that that may be, you know, were on the team that that weren’t necessarily had all those abilities. You know, we had two or three of his students on the team, and we all just kind of took care of those guys. And then I went on to meet my wife in college and we got you know, we got married and she’s now the Director of Accessibility Services at our local state university. So you know, I every day we her the way she processes her workday is what I call the daily Deepa. Yeah. So you know, I get home and I hear it all, obviously, no names or anything. But you know, I hear a lot of what she does on the on the daily. And so I don’t think I could be successfully married if I didn’t care about access and, and accessibility. Yeah.
Lillian Nave 13:04
So you’ve had a long history of, of knowing about accessibility, and multiple means of representation and knowing about the need for universal design in general. Yeah. And you know
James D’Annibale 13:19
what, no, it was called universal design. But yeah, got it. So
Lillian Nave 13:23
So what prompted you then to create this UDL toolkit at Dickinson?
James D’Annibale 13:30
So Marnie Jones, who’s our she has a really long title that I can’t remember. But she’s, she’s our leader of accessibility services. She, she and I partnered on a series of workshops in the fall of 23. To just offer faculty and introduction in the UDL. And we, she had this really good vision. She’s really good at making things usable, and, and, you know, not always, like, not always being preachy about things but like being like, Okay, where are you now? And how can we get you to do that one more thing, right. And her whole workshop that she designed, I say, she designed it, because she really like did the lion’s share of design, and it was just super usable. And then I got to thinking, okay, like, I see what Marnie is doing with this. What’s, what’s something that that our faculty can take away? Like, like an actual document? And I was thinking, like, almost like a football playbook, right? Like, like, Where’s where’s the UDL playbook doesn’t exist. And I couldn’t really find one. So I was thinking, okay, like, why don’t I make something that the faculty can use? That’s super practical. And I created just this Word document, and I printed out like way like 30 or 40 people coming to these workshops. So I printed out a whole bunch of them. And then I got to thinking oh, Crap. Dickinson’s whole thing is is environmental sustainability. I’m killing all these trees printing out this, right? So that’s when I’m like, Alright, I need to make this digitally accessible. Yeah. So it just became a PDF that I emailed the people and then Marty was like, Hey, why don’t we just put this on my webpage? Yeah. And we worked with Mark calm to make it a webpage that I hope people can find and is usable. But yeah, marinades workshop series was definitely the impetus for this. Great.
Lillian Nave 15:31
So. So UDL came to Dickinson through kind of accessibility channels. Is that where it came from?
James D’Annibale 15:42
Yeah, yeah, mommy’s been. I’ve been at Dickinson for about a year and a half now. And from what I understand, Marnie has been trying to push the UDL bandwagon for for quite a while here. And we have other areas that have been pushing for a lot of inclusive pedagogies across the faculty. And the faculty seem to really like that approach. We we haven’t had a Center for Teaching and Learning up until this academic year, is a brand new center. So it seems like the faculty have wanted for a long time to do more inclusive pedagogy and from what I understand a lot has been done. But there is what I’m looking forward to it. This new Center for Teaching and Learning, headed by Dr. Noreen Lake, is kind of having that almost like a central strategy of pedagogy. And so Marnie and I both contribute to the center. So I think we have a faculty that for a few years now has been really, you know, craving improvements in these areas. And now I think with the Center for Teaching and Learning, and Marty and I working together, I think we really have a good opportunity to really keep pushing.
Lillian Nave 16:59
Excellent. Okay, so let’s dig in. So can you just explain a little bit about what is this UDL toolkit and explain a bit about its layout and its uses? And who is using it on campus? And of course, we’ll put a link on the resources here so people can take a look at it. We won’t have to send out, you know, PDFs or, or paper copies, so you can see it digitally. Of course, yeah,
James D’Annibale 17:25
yeah. So so when you look at it, it starts out as kind of just some information UDL basics type of stuff. I really borrowed from from Dr. Tobin’s book with the plus one plus one stuff. I’m trying to get Mark calm to put in a citation there for his book. But I that ticket hasn’t been resolved yet. But like, just really focusing in on like, what’s that one more thing that you can do? Because I, Marnie and I, both with our workshop, really, we’re focusing on like, not making it overwhelming, you know, like, we’re not trying to all solve 100% of everything today, you know, so just what’s that one next thing you can do? So at the very beginning of the toolkit is kind of just informational. And I got the thinking that, you know, the UDL language of engagement, representation, action expression, most people if they haven’t read a book about UDL, don’t know what those things mean, right. And when I was explaining all this to my wife, she used the term or she is the language of like, people who don’t want to have to learn everything, they want to be told what to do. And so that’s kind of how I got to thinking of this, like I thought of as, what a way where we can just tell people what to do. And they don’t need to learn at all, they need to just do it. Right. Like, we don’t need everybody to be an expert in these in the framework. Really, what we need is where the rubber meets the road, to just do
Lillian Nave 19:01
some easy and so I thought it was right, that somebody could employ that right.
James D’Annibale 19:05
Yep. Yeah. So I got to thinking, Alright, what’s a way that that I can word this in a way that teachers will understand if they’ve never even heard of UDL? Right? And that’s where I got to, what are the things teachers? Do? They prepare materials or select materials? They teach in the classroom, and they assess organ? So those are, you know, every educator, those are the three main things that we all do, right? So I structured this as okay, what can we do with educational materials? to level that playing field? Right? What are the things that we can do in our classroom strategies? What are the things we can do with our learning assessments? And so when you open up the toolkit, each of those little accordion menus, if you look at educational materials, there’s what’s the strategy? How much effort does it take? So people that do want to just do the easiest thing, they can look for that if you Before that made me do have more time to investigate and look for the medium or high levels. And those those level of efforts were like totally just my opinion. I’m sure people might disagree with what I think it might be a low effort. To me, it might be easy to somebody else it might not. But that’s what it is for now. And then Marnie had a good idea of putting in that relation to UDL column. Just to like, even though I wanted it to be like, Hey, you don’t even need to know UDL to do this. Marnie was like, Yeah, but we should tie it back to you the audit, you know, keep the keep that training in motion. And then being an academic technologist, I had to have the column for how can technology help with this because I feel like a lot of what we do with UDL, technology does make it easier, or, or more effective in a lot of cases. And then Marnie did a really good job of the final column. The impact on on diverse learners and students with accommodations. I just don’t have the experience to be able to fill in that column. I needed morning to do that. So yeah, it’s just kind of what what I could think of in the two weeks that I had before the workshop. I haven’t had a chance to grow it since I first made it in the fall. But I think that’s something we could do. We could grow this originally. You know, I just kind of was like, Hey, this is a thing that, that we can use a Dickinson right. And then a few weeks ago, I remembered that, that Tom, I took a EDUCAUSE course, that Tom was teaching on UDL. And at the end of it, he gave us all his email address, and was like, hey, if there’s anything I can help you with, let me know. And this was over a year ago, and just it just popped into my head one day, hey, I should ask this guy. You know, what do you think? So that’s I haven’t spoken to him since the course. But let’s see if he’ll if they will help me out. And, and he, he was talking about, like, just how I broke it into those categories and how he thought that was useful. And that kind of got me thinking like, okay, like, is maybe this is a new thing, like, right, like, like, to me, it just felt like common sense. But maybe it’s not to people. And so that’s what led led to us talking but that that got me thinking like this may be could grow, right? Like, like, if it is a concept that people are interested in, maybe we move it off the Dickinson web page, put it on to something that’s, you know, more generic and have some kind of forum that people can, you know, submit ideas to? I don’t know, yeah,
Lillian Nave 22:51
it’s, it’s a really great way of thinking about it. And, and I really liked the way that you’re also thinking about low tech and, and high tech and low tech. I mean, a lot of people think, Oh, you have to have technology for UDL, you don’t, you can have zero tech, right. You don’t have to have technology at all to have universal design for learning. But you can also have incredible improvements using technology, technology. So just the way that you’ve thought about all of these things, is a great way I think to categorize and simplify for new folks to Universal Design for Learning to help them understand, Okay, here’s how I can think about my teaching. Because for many of us who are teaching at the college level, we have lots of knowledge about our subject matter, but very little about how to teach today’s students, we know what we’ve been taught, we know how we’ve been taught, but not about pedagogy, and how to teach, how people learn, etc. How to grade what grades are for, you know, how to engage how to motivate the science of learning. So the simpler, the clearer we can be boy cuts through all that red tape. And yeah, it’s better than having a year long seminar and how to be a better teacher. Right? So that’s why we need some folks at every college to help our faculty to be better teachers than just kind of spouting off the stuff we know like, just because we’ve been here I am using air quotes in a podcast that doesn’t have a video. Just because we’ve covered something doesn’t mean the students have learned it. Right? Yeah, you can cover something but just like you said, you might read something and completely forget it. I know I have. So I might see something I might hear something and completely forget it doesn’t mean we’ve learned it. So what are the ways that we can really engage students and how can we give the students something in multiple formats? How can we engage the students how Could we make sure that they’ve learned something? And, and, and have touchpoints along the way, have feedback. So I do think you’ve caught onto something that’s, that’s very useful as we’re thinking about the practice of teaching that we haven’t looked at it. Cool. So and just curious, like, Have people been using it on campus? Have you seen it kind of rolled out with faculty? Or has it been used in workshops? Or what’s its use so far?
James D’Annibale 25:34
So the 30, or 40, faculty that came to our workshop series, they all really liked it. And we’re like, hey, yeah, this is absolutely something that I’ll use. Marnie does a survey at the end of each academic year, that asked the faculty, you know, like, what are some things that you’ve been doing? It’s not like an exhaust. It’s not a checklist from the toolkit is, you know, basic stuff, like the record class, right, you know, just kind of some entry level UDL stuff. We don’t have the results from that yet for this academic year. But I’d love to see, you know, like, how it compares to what she did last year. So maybe that I can follow up with you on that later on. Yeah, we because our Center for Teaching and Learning is so new, we don’t really have I don’t know if assessment would be the right word. But you know, we don’t really have those practices in place yet to see like, how are people teaching? What are they doing differently from year to year? So I think that’s something that’ll, that’ll come with the maturation of the Center for Teaching and Learning. But I know, Noreen linked to the UDL toolkit on her page, so just, you know, wherever we can talk about it, we’ve been talking about it. And
Lillian Nave 26:58
so you’re at a small liberal arts college? And have you seen or how have you seen UDL and maybe even the toolkit specifically? Have you seen it change or enhance instruction? And student learning already at Dickinson? How do you think like UDL is needed at Dickinson? How does it fit your campus? Specifically? Do you think, you know, why is there a need for you to yell at Dickinson? I guess is, is what I’m looking for, as well. Yeah,
James D’Annibale 27:36
I know, I’ve talked to a number of faculty that have started recording their classes, you know, that like most of our classrooms have recording capability. Before I got here over the pandemic, they put in cameras and microphones almost everywhere, because they were doing some kind of hybrid courses, or whatever. So I’ve talked to a number of faculty that have started to record in their classes. And, you know, the big concern, whenever you record is, oh, well, will students just start skipping class, right? And it’s like, well, if you have an attendance policy note, they’re not going to just all of a sudden start skipping class. But, you know, they, they’ve told me and I’ve heard from some of their students to that just having that as a study tool really helps. And we use, we use Panopto, for our recording and video management. You can take notes in it, you like all of the text and in on the screen, and what’s being said become searchable. So, you know, it’s all it’s all indexed, it’s all very easily studied. So we’ve definitely seen improvements there. I’ve had a number of different faculty tell me that, like they’ve just been doing a better job of thinking about when, like, you know, especially if you if you’re in a larger classroom, student asks a question. You know, the student on the other side of the room might not hear it. So then they repeat the question, right, just to make sure that everybody’s hearing that, you know, just those little things matter, right. And that’s part of what the toolkits about right, like, I forget where it is in the toolkit, but there’s something in there about just face your students when you’re talking to them. Yeah, right. Like, that’s a thing. And it takes no effort. It takes no technology, you just face your students when you’re talking to them, so they can understand you better. We, you know, little things like that just bass what we’re hearing a lot of the faculty really doing since we started talking about all of this, something I’m working with, with some faculty and some larger classes on doing is you know, we have a lot of students that whether it be anxiety from a disability or just generally discomfort with with speaking up in class, you know, I don’t know liberal arts college. And really I, you know, I went through a state school that wasn’t technically a liberal arts college. And we did a lot of the same things that we all talk about at liberal arts colleges. So I don’t want to shoehorn this into a liberal arts thing. But like a class that has a lot of discussions, especially if there’s a lot of students, there are going to be students that are not comfortable raising their hand and speaking up. So one of the things in the toolkit that I’ve been trying to get more and more faculty to do is just, you know, have a way for those students to submit their ideas digitally, it could just be an office 365 document that you have up on the projector screen, that you share with the students and somebody is able to go in, and just write a sentence for what they would say, if they did have the, the ad and even know what the word would be ability or whatever to raise their hand and speak aloud. And then the teacher is able to look at that and you know, give voice to it, give credence to it, amplify that and be like, Hey, that’s a really good idea. Thank you for sharing whoever that was. Now, whoever is willing to speak loud, let’s talk about that. Right. And so that way, the students are able to participate, even though they’re participating in discussion, they wouldn’t normally feel comfortable participating. And it you know, I, I don’t, I don’t have the research numbers on it or anything, but I would imagine it increases their confidence. You know, and we know, we know that a confident learner is a more effective learner. So I’ve been hearing from a lot of faculty that they’ve been looking to, to do that a little bit
Lillian Nave 31:35
more. Yeah. So that, you know, every campus has these issues, whether it’s a small campus or large campus, whether it’s a small class or large camp, a class, there’s going to be issues of the ability to participate and access to resources, all of those things. So, and every course and every class is going to have these UDL issues. So I think that each campus needs to have somebody like you that’s looking at what the UDL toolkit needs to be for their campus. And what I appreciate is that you’ve said, Here’s kind of what works here at our campus, like, here are some really quick things that seem to be focused here for our students and for our particular area, and our particular students and our particular size of classes. And what we do here, and this could be really easy, and we can take some of the guesswork out of it. That can make it a more inclusive place, it can take out some of those barriers, right, the accessibility, we can add into that. So and it’s usually the things that are the things we don’t think about, right? The fact that somebody on the other side of the classroom didn’t hear that question like, because as the professor, the lecture, the guy in the front, the woman in the front, right, that’s, that’s trying to get through the material or trying to present this. And you’ve got 25 Other things on your mind. You might not think about that one thing, right. So having some
James D’Annibale 33:17
back channels is hard. Like it’s hard to be Yeah, that one person in the in the center of the discussion that has to think about okay, did student number 17 feel comfortable participating today? Not that we like to do numbers that Johnny or Jane feel good participate in today. Right, like, and I know, at our Center for Teaching and Learning. Noreen has a program where she has students that are being trained as pedagogical partner. Yes. Yeah. And so they they go to class I think once a week it with these faculty that have volunteered to partner with this, and they go to class once a week, and you know, they might sit in the back and and look for stuff like that. Right? Like, like who’s getting called on who’s speaking? You know, is the professor gauging understanding before moving on. So, you know, having that separate set of eyes, especially with this with the student perspective, can really be helpful. And I just thought I’d I’d plug Norton’s program there. Because I think I think I need to talk to Marina about this first, but I think the next step in that program could be giving those student pedagogical partners some UDL training, and then that’s another thing that they could be looking for in
Lillian Nave 34:34
their partner. Absolutely. And actually, that’s another episode that’s that. We have in think UDL that’s come that will already be out by the time this episode comes out, which is about a UDL pedagogy partners with students as partners. So yeah, there’s some other universities doing that. And it’s such a great thing to be thinking specifically about UDL and using our students because they are seeing thinks that that one person in the front of the classroom, or who’s managing that large classroom, can’t see everything and can’t really understand all of the things that are happening for sure. So, you know, I know when I was a very young first time, Professor, lecturer, and I remember my brother came and helped out, like, he just wanted to see what his little sister was doing. And I was teaching at a state university in New York and sat in the back of my 110 person lecture hall, and he was his lawyer came and sat in, and he’s like, you don’t even know what they’re doing in the back of that classroom. And he’s, he’s, like, gave me a whole other understanding of like, what is what’s going on? And I so appreciated it too. Like, we just need that to understand Yeah, like what’s going on on the the 12th row, not just the first row of what’s going on in your classroom. So, so Okay, so one more question, too, is about this toolkit, how does your UDL toolkit complement? You’ve kind of talked about this, some of your other things that complement the other UDL work your campus is doing? And where do you want to go from here?
James D’Annibale 36:18
Yeah, um, so yeah, I think the, how it complements what what we have going on. I think it’s just in my mind, I think, whatever we do with Inclusive pedagogy, whether it’s a workshop, book, discussion group, you know, whatever it might be, whatever that faculty engagement looks like, I think this is just a place that we can point people to, like, Hey, this is a thing you can do to get started, right. And, you know, there’s not incredibly advanced stuff in there, like, like, in the Learning Assessment category, there’s, you know, the, all the stuff about like, hey, you know, maybe have, you know, give students the choice of like, you know, do they do a paper or speech or whatever, there’s a whole lot more to that than just what’s in the tool, like, in the toolkit says, think about doing this. But to really do that, you need to, like, do a deep dive with somebody that really knows what they’re doing with that, you know, whether it’s designed in a good rubric, or the instructions that you give, you know, there’s a lot more to that than just what’s in the toolkit, like the toolkits kind of at for the low effort stuff. Yeah, you can just go but for the medium to high effort stuff, you know, you you need that next step of talking to somebody at the Center for Teaching and Learning, or Marnie, or myself or, you know, maybe one of our we have great education faculty that do a ton with alternative grading and, and with UDL, so they’re a great resource to. So yeah, I, it kind of, I see it melting into all of that engagement with faculty, as this is a thing you should go look at when we’re done here today. As far as where I where I’d like for it to go in the future, I’d really love for our faculty to start contributing to it, you know, or we could make a whole nother column that maybe links out to, hey, I tried this, and here’s what I learned from it. You know, but I, I need to figure out how to actually make that happen. Like I said, I’ve only been here a year and a half, and it’s a much larger faculty than then at my previous school, my previous school, Wilson College, I think we had like 50 full time faculty members. And here, I think we’re over 200. So it’s, you know, at Wilson, I knew everybody, right, like, I could just go to their office and just talk about stuff all day. Here. It’s just a different environment. And I need to figure out with my colleagues, Marnie, and Noreen and everybody else, like what is the best way to really get this going wide and fun? Well,
Lillian Nave 39:12
you’ve also only been there a year and a half and you’re already making waves you’re already doing wonderful things and I do think it’s a great just idea ticket out to other campuses like it’s a it’s a good stepping stone to for for those who don’t have a student says partners kind of thing yet with UDL, but something that could be a an easier thing now that you’ve laid the groundwork to send out that’s so helpful, really helpful for for faculty, I think, would be just something that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel and that’s why I wanted to, to have a chance to talk to you and to just make it easy and relatable for faculty and for faculty to have calibers and you as a director of academic technology, because we know there’s there’s a couple different people in the organization of a university that deal with UDL. Some are on that faculty development side, some are on the Instructional Technology decide some are on the instructional design, you know, all of those different areas. And I like to hear from everyone because I think we all have a role. So, thank you so much.
James D’Annibale 40:28
I really appreciate all that you said there the I’m not real big on being super active in the professional community like I like, I come to work, I go home, I play fortnight with my brother. You know, I play with my kids take them to soccer practice I I’m just not super active in the professional world. So like, I don’t know what I’m doing is cool. We’re not so it’s kind of cool to hear from, from both you and Tom that this was cool, and I should do more. Absolutely.
Lillian Nave 41:03
So and it was it was a pleasure to talk to you. And I’m really glad to to to see it and to share your work and hope other folks can can use it and take advantage of some some good ideas as well. You can follow the think UDL podcast on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to find out when new episodes will be released. And also see transcripts and additional materials at the think udl.org website. Thank you again to our sponsor textile Texthelp is focused on helping all people learn, understand and communicate through the use of digital education and accessibility tools. Texthelp and its people are working towards a world where difference disability and language are no longer barriers to learning and succeeding, with over 50 million users worldwide. The Texthelp suite of products includes Read and Write equates to an orbit note. They work alongside existing platforms such as Microsoft Office and G Suite and enable them to be integrated quickly into any classroom or workspace with ease. Texthelp has changed the lives of millions worldwide and strives to impact the literacy and understanding of 1 billion people by 2030. Visit text dot help forward slash learn more that’s l earn m o r e to unlock unlimited learner potential. The music on the podcast was performed by the Oddyssey quartet comprised of Rex Shepherd, David Pate, Bill Folwell and Jose Cochez and I am your host, Lillian Nave. Thank you for joining us on The think UDL podcast.