Chicago mayoral and aldermanic elections are scheduled for February 26, 2019. As a Chicagoan, I can vote early and (this year most likely) vote often. Polls opened in January and we can vote throughout the week, so we popped into our neighborhood polling place on Sunday. However, we’ll probably be back to vote again. With over…
I was excited to open my copy of Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style on my Kindle app last night. Billed as a guide: “Chockful of advice, insider wisdom, and fun facts, this book will prove to be invaluable to everyone who wants to shore up their writing skills, mandatory for people who…
The education conferences are starting in 2019, and today I received our new bookmarks that I’ll be handing out during booth duty. Even though we are a virtual organization and spend much of our programming teaching how to integrate technology, we’re going “old school” to drive home our mission to support literacy. On the front…
As I’ve been chewing on this week, here is the latest iteration of the lead paragraphs for an upcoming proposal related to accessibility: Accessibility is a top concern for educational professionals. In a recent survey by EDUCAUSE Learning Initiatives, the 1,400+ respondents placed Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (e.g., “implementing effective practices and course…
In case you’re like me and missed the rollout of live captioning within Google Slides, here is a link to the announcement on the Google blog from October of 2018. h/t to Cara North who shared her observations on LinkedIn. This is an amazing enhancement and one I’ll be testing out in a few weeks in…
Building on the articles I reviewed yesterday, my deep dive into universal design (UD) continued today. Here are two literature reviews that will make my list of top finds: Rao, K., Ok, M. W., & Bryant, B. R. (2014). A Review of Research on Universal Design Educational Models, A Review of Research on Universal Design…
Today, my continued deep dive into universal design included two works that are part of a literature review I’m compiling for a conference proposal. Here are the citations, and the second is open access (yay!): Edyburn, D. L. (2010). Would you recognize universal design for learning if you saw it? Ten propositions for new directions…
As I noted in a post yesterday, we in the education field have a tendency to give different names to similar things. I used service learning as an example. I frame what we do at Designers for Learning as “service learning”, but have been told that others now use “community-engaged learning”. I did some light…
As I’ve been doing deep dives into accessibility-related design issues, universal design has been something I haven’t been able to get my head around. While I have an appreciation for the general intent, much like other terms we use in education (e.g., interaction, engagement, etc.), the definitions and applications in practice are variously described making…
We frame the work we do at Designers for Learning around service learning. I’ve been working on several conference proposals where I’ve pulled (ok … self-plagiarized) a definition of service-learning from the same tired citations I’ve relied on for years: “Service learning is an educational approach that combines community service, academic coursework, and work-based experience (Bringle…