Tonight I watched a recorded CAST UDL session by Leela Dolan, Robert P. Dolan, Angel Morgan, Cameron Morgan, Donna Murray & Maggie Pickett. Their session was entitled “Engaging Learners and Families in technology Planning: AJoint Panel Discussion.” Angel Morgan is a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University interning with CAST. Pickett shared several resources from the CITES website. Pickett provided an overview of family engagement. Morgan spoke about how families influence and support learners. They used the Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory and CITES Framework Categories to learn more about family engagement. The Ecological Systems Theory starts with the child and learning and moves on to the microsystem with teaching and assessment. The mesosystem is the infrastructure. The exosystem is the leadership structure. The macrosystem is policy. The chronosystem is the larger view… and things like a pandemic and transitions from one school year to another. The session included some resources that were shared including slides and a literature review on family engagement shared by CITES and licensed under a CC 4.0 license.
The panelists included parents and children with connections to neurodiversity, UDL, and technology. The first question was: how do you use technology to engage in the learning process? Leela Dolan spoke about using software and assistive technology for math and then in college, using computers to support learning through different ways of engagement. Murray spoke about the journey as a parent with a child with needs that could be supported by technology. Murray’s daughter uses an iPad as an augmented communication device. Cameron spoke about using technology to write essays at first. Later on, Cameron struggled since lots of plugins are blocked by school districts. The next questions were: what are the barriers you wish educators knew existed during instruction and assessment? How can technology help? Cameron mentioned that a barrier they encountered was the disconnect between the challenges they faced and how these were perceived by educators. Murray responded to this question by emphasizing how technology is giving her daughter a voice and a barrier is how technology evolves and varies depending on the task at hand. Dolan explained how we still use traditional tools for reading. Angel Morgan mentioned that her son can read, but auditory instructions and information are processed less efficiently than other ways of engaging with the information. Murray spoke about how they start with technology at home and then share it with teachers and schools, though the transitions between academic years were difficult. Angel Morgan told the audience about how the lower technology solutions like Velcro didn’t work. Still, the technological solutions were seen as a liability since they were parent owned and taken to school. The Dolans mentioned that computer monotone is difficult to grasp. Cameron explained that online learning occasionally had technical issues, and they felt unable to get help and were easily distracted. For the next level of the ecosystem, Pickett asked: what would you want the people who plan for technology to know before next year? Angel Morgan spoke about thinking ahead as you are planning and provisioning technology to make sure it meets students’ needs. Murray shared that her daughter received a Chromebook yet cannot use it, for example. The last question was: what must we get right to best support students with disabilities and their families? Leela asked who gets to decide how I am going to learn. Cameron talked about helping teachers how to work with technology. Murray emphasized: that if we say all students, we need to mean it. This was a great way to end this session.
