At the beginning of the Applied Digital Learning (ADL) Program, I started my innovation plan with the idea of implementing ePortfolios in my self-contained classroom setting. As the semester’s have gone by I have noticed a trend within the activities and topics that I have chosen. The trend was that of all of my ideas and perspectives for students with disabilities and others, they all relate back to a learning approach called the Universal Design for Learners (UDL). The goal of the UDL approach is that all students are retrieving, constructing, and building on the new knowledge that the educators are teaching (Hunt et al., 2022). This is reaching all learners, despite their learning styles, barriers, challenges, or anything that may get in their way of being successful in their learning.
In the course on digital resources and environments, I was able to construct an article on accessibility resources within a variety of digital platforms. I started with creating an outline that would assist me and brainstorming all areas of my publication article. This includes what my topic would be, where I would like to publish, the content of my article, and the overall goal that I would like other educators to receive after reading it. Next I went into constructing a rough draft of my article on digital platforms and resources that are available to learners. Even though it was a difficult time for all of us in our collaboration group, we would create a rubric that we used to provide a score and feedforward on each other's rough draft. I was then able to use the feedforward from my peers to create my final publication post.
In addition to the assignments leading to my final draft of my publication article I was able to create a media post using one of the platforms that I mentioned in my article. Using Canva allowed me to create a video that would serve as a pitch to introduce my article to other educators at my own fingertips.
Digital platforms have resources that are available to all individuals. These resources can reach these individuals where they are at, and allow them to complete tasks that include a variety of writing samples successfully. Digital platforms can be used in a classroom that aligns with the UDL approach because it is providing all students a way to be successful in retrieving information through immersive readers and text-to-speech, and allowing these students to construct and build on this knowledge through the use of speech-to-text and other resources.