UDL Basic concepts

"The central practical premise of UDL is that a curriculum should include alternatives to make it accessible and appropriate for individuals with different backgrounds, learning styles, abilities, and disabilities in widely varied learning contexts" (cit. CAST website). The UDL starts from the idea that allowing to every student to learn means the need to accomodate the materials, the curriculum and the learning technologies to his/her needs: considering as a normal situation a "continuum" in learning needs of students without placing a clear boundary to define disabled or not disabled person.

New technologies & UDL

The role of new technologies in applying the UDL concept is quite high: the chance to accomodate the teaching materials to the user needs are wider through the digital knowledge repositories. The information could be adapted, modified, printed, re-arranged in a number of different kinds in economical and feasible ways. The same development of the so called "assistive technologies" brought to a dramatic improvement in disabled student chances to learn in a feasible way, but as it is said also the other students received benefit from the same technologies and adaptation strategies.

Putting in place UDL

The study organisation and the assessments should be tailored to the student performance itself. So the need to evaluate and, above all, to understand the student learning modalities constitutes the starting point. Moving from that, teaching strategies could be putted in place, including the utilisation of digital systems to represent information. Refer to the listed references for a deeper discussion.

Further readings	Reference websites
a brief introduction to UDL concepts written by David Rose The CAST sponsored book "Teaching every student in the digital age" now available on-line (html format)	TRACE Research Center, where most of things began... CAST Center a comprehensive information repository Curriculum Access and Universal Design for Learning at ERIC Clearinghouse on Disabilities and Gifted Education an introduction to Universal Design for Learning and Assistive Technology (AT)