Ixchell Reyes
The DIESOL podcast

Brent Warner
Developing Innovation in English as a Second or Other Language

Ixchell Reyes
Episode 65 Universal Design for Learning in ESOL.

Brent Warner
Welcome to DIESOL This is episode 65 – We are your hosts. I’m Brent Warner.

Ixchell Reyes
And I’m Ixchell Reyes. Happy Fourth, Brent.

Brent Warner
Happy Fourth. How are you?

Ixchell Reyes
I’m good. And welcome back from ISTE.

Brent Warner
Thank you. Yes. Still recovering, still recovering a little bit. It is it is overwhelming. Like there’s a lot going on. We had a little bit of a wild and unexpected problem with our session. So I was doing a poster session with the outstanding An Wren and she got stuck in your neck of the woods. She got stuck in Texas.

Ixchell Reyes
Yeah, sure, the rain kept her behind…

Brent Warner
The rain and all the airport problems that are happening right now. So she’s like sending me these messages. The night before. She’s like, man, I was I was at one of the I was at some event, and I had had a couple of drinks. And then she’s sending me these texts. And she’s like, I’m gonna make it. I’m stuck here. Like, I’ve already been in the airport for 19 hours. And I’m like, I don’t really know how to, because she was the lead presenter on it. And so I was like, I was kind of felt like I was there for support, I would be talking about my part on it. But like, so then it ended up being a whole massive switch. And I ended up I ended up doing it. But it was just kind of an open open conversation, I posted a picture of it on Twitter, in the show notes as well, that I just kind of made a cardboard sign saying let’s chat about it. And then I stole a poster from one of the other groups that was the hour before me and I flipped it around. And so then I just had people writing their ideas up on there as well that we could just kind of have some conversation. So it was a an unexpected twist. But it went pretty well. I mean, it was a good conversation. It was it was a good change. I just like it wasn’t what I was thinking I was gonna be presenting on and…

Ixchell Reyes
Yep. As always, though, you made it happen.

Brent Warner
Yeah, well, and that’s what it was actually kind of cool. So the conversation was about today’s topic. So Universal Design for Learning. And so it was kind of cool because it was like, showing that ideas that like hey there ways to make things work right. And like you don’t always have to have it perfectly set up you don’t always have to get things totally right. And so that caught that a lot of teachers that came up and talk to me were like, Oh, you’re doing this stuff right now like in this kind of presentation. You’re making it accessible…

Ixchell Reyes
All you needed was that cardboard!

Brent Warner
Yeah, You’re making it work – I found a piece of cardboard in the in the men’s room and I tore it up and started writing on the back of it. Oh man. Oh my gosh, Brian Briggs if you’re listening, he went and did the good old erase the the message on the cardboard on the picture. And so then he started writing his messages on there and putting that out and it’s like, oh, boy. He was very he was mostly kind with his the new messages that I had holding. But yeah, there was a you know, some some tomfoolery going on with all of that as well. But, but it was good. So we got to talk about universal design learning a bit, I’ll tell you is it is like overwhelming. There’s just so much going on.

Ixchell Reyes
Can you imagine having ADD or ADHD and being there?

Brent Warner
It was like it was hard to pay attention to any one thing at any time. And so I I’m hoping with the rest of my summer off except for cleaning pools that that I can go back and watch some of the video episodes. I didn’t really have time for everything. So…

Ixchell Reyes
No, there’s no time there’s so much and every time even though you think you’re you know, you’ve looked through the app, you’ve selected your sections, you know where you’re going once you get there, you might change your mind because you’ve learned about something else and so that just you just leave feeling like you missed out on something even though you got a ton of stuff. Probably from going there. But yeah, it’s it’s overwhelming.

Brent Warner
Yeah. And so it’s it was you know, just kind of a combination of all of those things. I’ll say New Orleans was absolutely outstanding. Just what an amazing city I could easily spend a lot more time there. I was like if I didn’t have a job like if I didn’t have a full time job I might be applying and considering moving here because it was just so cool. There’s so much great stuff and like, you know, the French Quarter and all that touristy stuff is cool of course too. But like but getting out of there too and going to like some of the other parts of the city. As you know, there’s just tons of amazing culture & things to do.

Ixchell Reyes
Did you try some gator jerky?

Brent Warner
Mmhmm. I had a little bit of Gator stuff. We went on a gator tour. We did all like we crammed in quite a lot. So, so yeah, get get your butt to New Orleans.

Ixchell Reyes
Awesome, awesome, awesome.

Brent Warner
But today we’re gonna talk about Universal Design for Learning. And we’re gonna give kind of an intro to it. It’s it’s deep Ixchell, it’s real deep.

Ixchell Reyes
It is a beast. This is new for me. So I’m very happy that we’re doing this episode. But again, it’s gonna be an overview or introduction, because we’re gonna have to come back to this and do a deep dive and Julie.

Brent Warner
Absolutely.

Ixchell Reyes
All right, so universal design for learning. Brent, just what is it? Every time you mentioned UDL, I’m always thinking, Okay, it’s this fancy word for something. It’s, I just don’t know. It’s new for me. Yeah, I know. You’ve talked about it here and there in a couple of our interviews. But what is it? And what drew you to this approach other than the fact that you’re constantly looking for new new ideas, new approaches, etc? Yeah. So

Brent Warner
basically, if we kind of keep this simple, UDL is a kind of a framework. So we’ve talked about other frameworks, too. It’s a framework and a set of guidelines for designing your classes and designing the activities that you’re going to be doing with your students. Right. So the way that you think about it, well, the the universal part is super important here. Because, you know, the, the kind of the common image that people give when they talk about this is the idea of stairs versus a ramp getting into a building, right? So stairs, if you’re mobile and ambulatory, you can walk up those stairs, and it’s no problem. But if you need a wheelchair, or if you, you know, have any number of issues affecting your muscles, or your strength or your ability to go upstairs, right? A ramp can get you up on the other side, right, but everybody can use the ramp. Not everybody can use the stairs, right? And so the I love that analogy. Yeah. So if you start if you start thinking about that, in terms of how you’re designing your courses, and how you’re designing your classes, you say, Well hold on a second, this stuff that we’re doing, like everybody can benefit from this, but why am I building it in a way that only a certain number of people can benefit from and those numbers might be low. In some cases, they might be high in other cases. And so understanding that idea that like those limitations could be, in our case, language issues, right? Many times. They could be cultural issues. They could be, you know, background knowledge issues, they could be motivation issues, there’s all sorts of different possible things. But this idea is that you are doing your best. And I’ll point now, just like with all the frameworks, you’re not going to get a perfect, like, you’re not going to capture absolutely every possible thing. But if you have this in your mind, in the way of your thinking about things, and the more you continue to build a little bit better you get at it over time. I am also not an expert on this. And so like I wouldn’t, I am still trying to learn and get better and better at it. So So yes, I want to reiterate that today, we’re really kind of scratching the surface just to get people the idea of it. Because I think when you go onto the website, which is outstanding, UDL guidelines.cast.org, it gives you so much information. And that’s kind of what’s guiding our conversation today. But once you start digging deep, it’s like, Oh, there’s more Oh, there’s more. Oh, yeah, there’s more and more and more and more. And so it’s it’s really about like training yourself to hopefully be better at default Thinking in this way. So that your what you’re making does work for more and or even all of your students and so that’s kind of the big idea of it. And yeah, yeah, so does that make sense, Ixchell?

Ixchell Reyes
Yeah, that that makes sense to me, I think. And so this is the first time that I’ve been to their website. And as you said, it’s beautifully done, organized very well, especially for someone who’s new and just kind of clicking around to learn more about it. And what stands out to me when I’m just the first time I look at the there’s this chart that breaks everything down all the categories. The model is something that guides the teachers through three levels of the learner experience or journey I suppose. And that would be access, build, building, and internalizing and for all of these, the end goal is learners or expert learners who are purposeful and motivated and the straight from their website. resourceful and knowledgeable and strategic and goal oriented. And that would be for all the learners not just some of the learners, some of them that have access or etc. So I thought that immediately, you are able to see that within the layout of the framework.

Brent Warner
Yeah. And so that’s kind of the process there. So like, first you access, then you build, then you internalize, right. But the way that they do this is they have it in three different kinds of columns. And so the, the guidelines are built under these three columns. So first is to provide multiple means of engagement, and then to provide multiple means of representation. And then to provide multiple means of action and expression. Now, again, so many choices inside of each of these, like, it’s really going to be hard to get into all of them. But I think we can kind of again, touch touch a little bit on each part of them and to understand what they are. So that idea of the engagement is like, understanding the why of learning. The representation is understanding the what of learning and action and expression is kind of understanding the how of learning. So we thought we would kind of go over these a little bit today, just to get the the the core idea of it. And then also, in the second part may be talking about some tools or some ways that you can actually implement some of these as well.

Ixchell Reyes
Yeah. So to start with engagement, that’s really where you’re recruiting interest. You’re sustaining effort and persistence of the students, and then also, self-regulation, we’re not going so deep into these, there’s a whole section every time you click on these categories. Brian, I don’t know if you wanted to add anything to that,

Brent Warner
yeah, we’ll get we’ll get into it a little bit, just to make sure that people understand what what they mean. So starting with that first one. So when you go inside, it’s like, okay, this is like, this is the big category, and then it’s got a guideline inside of it. And then it’s got checkpoints inside of it. And then they have research inside of those, but like, the big idea, so recruiting interest is like, how are you sparking the interest of the learners? Right? How are you making them curious about things, and some of the ways that you can do that is you can optimize choice, right? So that they have their choice in what they’re going to be doing. You can optimize the relevance. So again, this conversation of like, Are my stories all about, like, you know, white boys who become superheroes? Or is it going to be something that’s more relevant to each of your own students lives, right. And then also, this idea of minimizing threats and distractions, so making an open space for learning where people feel safe, to engage with their work? So that’s kind of just the baseline of getting people interested in things. Then the second one, you said, is sustaining effort and persistence? What does that mean to you, Ixchell?

Ixchell Reyes
So what that means to me is varying the demands and the resources to make sure that that challenge is optimized for the students. Absolutely. promoting an environment that’s going to support collaboration, build community, perhaps, because when you have that your students will be folk focused, more focused on the goals and the objective of that activity. Plus, with with a lot of the things that they have to do, there’s, sometimes there’s going to be failure, but you want students to continue persisting, right? And you want to, you want them to be able to take feedback that you’re giving them, and you want to increase mastery, mastery oriented feedback.

Brent Warner
Yeah, and you know, that was big for me, like a lot of my work recently is very heavily focused on feedback. One of my presentations that I’ve been doing is like about helping people really enjoy giving feedback more. So that was super key to me. And then this last guideline is about self regulation. So you know, getting people motivated for internal motivation, right. So we talked about the, you know, promoting expectations, making sure that students know how to deal with things when they’re having problems or strategies for success. And then also this idea of like, you know, developing self self assessment, right. So how do I work with this? How do I improve it for the next time around all of those conversations? And so again, all of these, I think, individually, Ixchell, a lot of teachers are doing right, but not necessarily with the idea of plugging them into this framework. And so when you start understanding that, like, Oh, when I do it this way, it actually helps more students rather than just one or two students. Right? Then you can start saying I’m going to use this strategy a little bit more, that strategy a little bit less.

Ixchell Reyes
Right. And I think, you know, as you’re reading some of these and talking through them, I’m thinking of autonomy, autonomy, and and supporting that in a student so that a student can eventually self guide their own learning. Right?

Brent Warner
Right. So let’s jump over to the second one, which is representation. And we talked about that one being like the, the what? of learning. Right?

Ixchell Reyes
Right. And so the first item here is providing options for perception. And this case, it might be you, you’ll have no multiple variety of learning styles. And you’re not going to have one individual one that’s solely visual, but you want to offer different ways that that information can be customized. The way that you display the information, you might want to also offer different alternatives for auditory information. And the same thing for visual information.

Brent Warner
Yeah, so a lot of those things like, how are they getting this information, right? If you give them a, if you give them a piece of paper, and everything’s written in eight point font, then they don’t have any way to really like, you know, like, Hey, I can’t see this very well, or I need to zoom in on this right. And so for, we’ll get into some of the tools for this, but like, we can kind of recognize that when we’re limiting those options. And I want to kind of stay away from myself from like, learning styles, right? Like, that’s not really the conversation. But it’s like the ways that you can access this information, the more ways that people can access, the better, the better it becomes.

Ixchell Reyes
And there, I mean, there’s learners who are going to want to look at all different forms of that information, not just the text version, but each time they revisit another option, they’re able to It’s like another layer of affirming what they’re learning.

Brent Warner
Yeah. The second one inside of there is language and symbols. So this one is huge for us and for our field, right? vocabulary and symbols, making sure that those things are clear. And especially with symbols, too, right? Like a lot of times, I think you shall you and I talk about icons a lot, right? That they’re universal ideas. And so those really fit in well, and help students understand better than like, Hey, is just a, you know, a complicated word or a complicated phrasing or something like that. And then this goes into many different variations. So like the ideas of like syntax and structure and helping people make sure they understand that decoding text or mathematical notations, right? It might seem obvious to some teachers that this symbol means you know, greater than or equal to, but it might not be obvious to every student,

Ixchell Reyes
right, and especially, you know, a mathematical notation, such as where to put the percent symbol, either in front or behind a number, or currency symbol and different cultures, you put different languages, you put it in a different place. And so your student, maybe, to you, it seems like they’re getting it wrong, but they’re actually doing it according to their, their, their country. So understanding and recognizing that their use differently. This brings up, Brett, very quickly a cartoon that one of my students sent recently, it’s a man park that parked on the street, and the sign says fine for parking. And there’s a police officer writing a ticket to the man who’s standing there saying I thought it was okay to park here. So again, big in our field. Yeah,

Brent Warner
for sure that like that’s a great example of it right there. So, and it continues going on this idea of promoting understanding across languages, illustrating ideas through multiple media. So there’s lots of different parts inside of this idea of language and symbols.

Ixchell Reyes
So the next category under that column is providing options for comprehension. And this is where you’re activating background knowledge. And if there is no background knowledge there, you can supply something for the students to have anything where you’re drawing attention to patterns, features of that, that are salient features of something, any kind of big concept, big idea and relationships among those ideas. Also guiding students through visualization so that they’re processing information differently, and maximizing opportunities for generalization and transfer of information. So all of this is like the higher level thinking Critical Thinking type of, of activities, I guess. Right? Right. Right, what I’m envisioning,

Brent Warner
yeah, and again, it’s about that those ways of helping to make sure that students can see and really understand that information. So Again, we started with engagement, right? It’s like, okay, I’m interested in this now. Now it’s representation. does it speak to me? Does it have? Is there a way for me to totally understand this, right. And that might also include building things out. And then the final one is action and expression. Right? So this is the the final kind of category. And so the idea of action and expression is this idea is the how or right like, it’s actually like, Hey, I’m going to now create something, I’m going to now make something and show how you’re doing those things. And so again, same as before, there are a number of categories under each one of those. So the first one is physical action, right? So making things accessible, making them start using more accessible materials and tools. So maybe there are different ways to respond to things right. You don’t always want to, you know, you’re not always going to click ABCD, right? Or maybe you’re going to draw your response to an idea. Or maybe you’re going to record your voice for it, right? Like what is what is the way that you’re actually interacting with these things? And then also optimizing access to tools? So it’s like, are these tools accessible? Are they are they options truly accessible? Right, like, can I actually click into this and use it? Or does it require all of these separate steps for me to get started with it? Right? So a lot of those can be like, what is the actual, you know, physical action related to these.

Ixchell Reyes
The next area there in this column is options for expression and communication. And I know that you and I constantly talk about this in our show. It’s providing multiple media for communication, giving students multiple tools to build and compose things to put things together. And again, we’re gonna get into these in the second part of the show, but also building fluency with with graduated levels of support for practice and performance.

Brent Warner
Yeah, and I mean, I really feel like this is again, for, you know, Sol, and all of this stuff like this is stuff that we that a lot of times we know well, because we’re already building these things. Because a lot of the so much of this fits so well. Like I love the idea that UDL like if you just start thinking, hey, I’m teaching English language learners, you’re already going to clear a whole path of the UDL guidelines, right? Maybe a teacher who’s not specifically teaching, ESL is going to be like, Oh, I have to figure this out. Right? Yeah. So we by default, and congratulations, everybody, by default, are often doing things again, like making the assumption that all of our listeners are doing doing well and trying to do their best for their students. But like, but we already do this stuff, right? We’re talking about scaffolding language, right? We talked about

Ixchell Reyes
in itself, there’s so much covers, you have to do it. And when you have these areas, the scaffolding falls into it. And I’m trying really hard not to give away the tools that we use, because I know that we’ve talked about this in Episode blah, blah, blah, we’ve talked.

Brent Warner
Okay, last one. Last one, let’s get the very last one, is it you or me, he was talking about this one,

Ixchell Reyes
you know, executive functions, function so.

Brent Warner
So how do you make the most out of learning? Right? So helping students understand their goal setting and making sure that that’s appropriate, right? How to plan and build strategies for everything, managing your information, right? Like, how are you collecting, saving, using and facilitating all of that, and then also showing a way to understand how you are growing, right? So like, actually building your what they call the capacity for monitoring progress, right? So like, showing it for yourself as a learner? How am I showing myself that I am actually getting better at this? So so these are the kind of the categories that we’re looking at. And then I think when we jump over, and I hope that kind of gives again, it’s just not justified to talk about this for 15 or 20 minutes.

Ixchell Reyes
We’re gonna have to have like a series like sort of like with the standard, yeah,

Brent Warner
no, we shouldn’t do that. Like, we were, we do like a series of 123 where we do dive into each of these categories alone. But we’re gonna get the loose conversation at least going here right now. Yeah. So. So that’s a start the ideas again, of UDL here, the concepts that you might be looking at, and again, I would encourage people to not get too stressed because it’s, it feels like when you first looking at this, like I’m doing the same thing. I’m like, oh my god, like, I’m like, Well, goodbye, right? Like, I’m a terrible teacher, if I’m not doing these things, right. And it’s like, and I still like, I’m like, you know, it’s like, Oh, am I doing this thing? Am I you know, like, I haven’t processed what each of these things mean. Totally Well, right. It takes Is time right there. They’re big concept ideas. They’re, they’re very well researched. There’s tons of information behind them. And so like some of these, I’m like, Yeah, we totally do this. And other ones. I’m like, I’m not sure that I do that. And I think that’s a fair thing to do that we need to understand as teachers like, you know, again, we keep talking about this idea of giving ourselves permission to continue to be human, right? We don’t always know everything. We’re not the best at everything. But we try to get better at it slowly and surely. And so I want to

Ixchell Reyes
cry and, and Brian, even if you were even if you were that the expert teacher that’s got it all there, guess what the learner comes in with new factors. So that is never something we can control?

Brent Warner
Yeah, absolutely. So. So that’s a start. And then we’ll do like a quick run through some of the tools on the other side.

Ixchell Reyes
Thank you for supporting the show, you can leave us a review on iTunes, we are still waiting for our first 2020 to review. If you’re out there, we do have a patreon. And you can also support us by buying us a coffee on our site, it is summer, we are dying for some cold brew. But you can also share the show with a colleague

Brent Warner
That’s actually our number one (laughter), we really don’t care about reviews (laughter). I know we always use but it’s like, but really what happens when someone’s like, oh, I shared this with my, my, my mom was a teacher, and she really liked this episode. I’m like, oh, like that’s what gets my heart. So thank you, for those of you who are out there sharing any individual episodes and or the whole show. Alright, so you shall I know we’re on a little bit of a timeline today, we’re normally we normally can kind of rollick and, and take slow, slow walk through everything. But today, we are going to jump into just a little you know, some of these tools and how we might work with them. And how we can kind of understand them a lot of these tools we’ve talked about already in the past. So we don’t want to get totally into the whole history of them and what they all do. But we just want to say like, Hey, these are how they fit into loosely into these categories. And lots of overlap for sure. So I want to be clear about that. That like nothing is only one or only the other, it’s like, hey, in this case, you can use it for this in this case that might be stronger here. It doesn’t mean not to use it in another place. They’re just kind of ways to understand how those things work. So let’s start with that first level engagement. And we’ll talk about we already mentioned that the feedback can be really important. So I know what you know, you shall the first thing that I’m going to say when we talk about feedback. It’s got to be Google Docs, right? Like it is built for feedback right inside of it. Right, you have the comments feature built right in there. As you know, I love moat. And so moat is a plugin that you can also add your voice into the feedback right there for the students outstanding so they can hear your real voice and they can hear what you’re trying to say. Flipgrid is another one that you can do for feedback, right? You can talk directly to the student after seeing what they’ve said, oh, sorry, you shall we need to? I need to make a grid. Yeah, it’s not flipped. oldie, you don’t know

Ixchell Reyes
what, come on. Now, that was yesteryear. And

Brent Warner
That was so three days ago,

Ixchell Reyes
Three days ago. Three years ago internet time.

Brent Warner
Now it’s Flip. Yes, they changed their name to Flip. And so we can save that conversation for another time. Changes names – uh – I’ll have to I did not go to the Flipgrid party. I don’t know what their story for changing it was. But I’m getting the feeling that they’re trying to expand beyond the classroom and make it kind of its own social media platform. So..

Ixchell Reyes
Oy…

Brent Warner
And EdPuzzle, too. So if you use things like Edpuzzle, where you got those video engagements, and you’ve got the answers already ready to go for them, you could definitely use that.

Ixchell Reyes
Yeah, so another way to foster engagement is again to have a place for collaboration and community. And as always, we go to Google a lot of the Google Apps, the Google Suite already offers that. Another one with visual representation is Canva. Canva can can allow multiple users to collaborate Padlet, which works as a bulletin board and then my fun, fine is going to fall into this category. But I’ll save that till the end. hyperdocs hyperdocs are a great way for students to collaborate. And then having choice boards. Oftentimes, again, it gives the student control over how they’re engaging. And and they’re more tied to whatever it is that they’re doing. Because they chose they chose that particular tool. And so they’re more connected and there’s ownership there.

Brent Warner
Yeah, yeah. And just if we’re not clear, I don’t know if we’ve talked much about Voice boards but transport those Yeah, those grids, right, so it’s like three by three. And it’s like, Hey, you can do a visual one, you can do an auditory one, you could do a written one, right, and then it’s. And then students can choose how they want to respond to an assignment, right? So that, hey, I’m going to do a flip, flip video, I’m going to do a Google Docs written assignment, or I’m going to record a podcast or something like that.

Ixchell Reyes
Yeah, and in K through 12, oftentimes, in the lower, or the primary grades, we call those may dues and the can dues. And there’s usually a list of like you may do. And then you can choose anything from there. Or sorry, there’s a made may dues and then must dues and under the must dues are things that they have to do to to complete that objective. But there’s choices. So no matter what the what the student, where the student, what the student has to accomplish, there’s a lot of choices so that I think it’s made us in the must dues. But there’s always a list of different ways to complete that activity.

Brent Warner
Nice. Okay, so then when we move into the representation column here, we’ll start with perception. So, again, ways for students to make sure that they’re, they’re getting that perception, or they’re perceiving the information correctly, or through multiple means. Google Docs is great. So one of the things is being able to zoom in on that text, or being able to manipulate the text and make it bigger and smaller. So you can do that directly. With any word processor, of course, you can do live captioning. So if you’re doing if you’re teaching online, and you turn on the live captioning in zoom, or something like that, and have that available to them as another means to they’re listening to you, but they can also write what you’re saying. And I will say those are just getting stronger and stronger. They’re definitely not perfect. But, you know, hey, if the students would understand, hey, this might not be perfect, but it’ll help you. And you might be able to pick up on a couple extra words that you weren’t gonna pick up on last time. That’s great, immersive reader. So we’ve talked about this one, this is a Microsoft tool, but there’s a kind of a hacked aversion that goes into Google Chrome. Basically, you can click on that thing, and it will read out the text for you. It’ll highlight out the verbs and the nouns, it’ll, it’ll speed it up or slow it down, all sorts of things like that. And then the similar to that, too, is text, help the read and write text help you show we’ve talked a little bit about that as well. So you can click on a word, and you can bring up a picture dictionary, you can, you know, click on a word and see how it’s pronounced all these different things like that, as well. So So those are some great tools for perception.

Ixchell Reyes
Yeah, and so I’m seeing all across the list. We have Google Docs for everything. So that tells you Roblox really does touch on a lot of these categories. So for representing language and symbols, you can use, again, Google Docs because you, you’re able to embed items into it. We’ve got kami kami app, another collaborative tool. Students can use drawings, they can use text, you can do all sorts of charts if you needed to. And then multimedia embeds. videos or audio here listening to a portion of something, Brent, I’m not sure if there’s anything you want to add here.

Brent Warner
Yeah, I think just to make sure, like if people don’t know what kami is, like, it’s now what I recommend when people talk about PDFs. Yes. Oh, yeah. Because it’s like, their Acrobat is so terrible. It’s so so bad. And it’s like amazing, all this stuff that Adobe is doing. And then they’ve just clearly got like one person who’s past retirement age working in the basement who’s only on Adobe Acrobat k.

Ixchell Reyes
So now you’ve been assaulted that are coming for us, they’re gonna get us coming for us.

Brent Warner
All the best. Speak the truth, because

Ixchell Reyes
kami app is exactly what it’s you can collaborate. Students don’t have to be logged in, you simply share out a link, it shows you who’s who’s on there adding something then you can save that document for later. And it doesn’t ruin your original document. It’s in the cloud. You can add multiple, have multiple sources for that PDF, you can convert to PDF, you can save as a PDF, you can print out notes. It’s amazing. I cannot say enough about kami. Yeah,

Brent Warner
Yeah, it really is like and I’ve got so many teachers who are like, Oh, well, I’ve already got this as a PDF, how do I convert it to a Google Doc and like, it’s gonna be a lot more work than if you just can’t – like in this case, like make new documents that are, you know, accessible. But when you got, you know, 20 years of PDFs, and they’re like, I am not going to demand that people remake everything like every time and Kami is a great response to that. And of course, the like it again, it fits into all of this. So, last part here under representation, we’ve got comprehension. So again, kami can really help out with this. Oh, and by the way, you know, “Kami” vs. “Kammy”. Got to be careful about this. I think they call it Kammy. Right?

Ixchell Reyes
Not “kami” like paper?

Brent Warner
Well, it’s clearly the Japanese word, Kami. And so I was wondering, this is a total white boy question, but like, which is, you know, cultural appropriation using the correct name that they are not saying the correct way? Or using the wrong the wrong pronunciation of something that they’ve chosen to… That’s the connundrum for everyone (laughter)

Ixchell Reyes
I was immediately like kami. Kami like paper? Yeah, paper. That makes sense. That’s brilliant. Uh… wait a minute… Kammy?

Brent Warner
They all call it Kami, right?. So Okay, anyways. Last one, last couple ones screenPal is great. So screen PAL is kind of like Mote but with video instead of audio.

Ixchell Reyes
Oh, this is new for me.

Brent Warner
Yeah. It’s so cool. And I’ve been talking to them a little bit. This is from the people who do Screencast O Matic.

Ixchell Reyes
I didn’t know that’s awesome.

Brent Warner
It’s really, really cool. And there’s a lot of things that they’re building into it and kind of adding and it’s like, they just launched this fairly recently. But it’s nice, because you can actually just hover over it and the video starts playing instead of like having to go in and install. So it’s pretty great. And then as your protocols do, so you can go back to that John crypto episode, if you want to kind of get into the ideas because it was really do help with that comprehension level of building into representation to.

Ixchell Reyes
Excellent. So for action and expression. And this is a lot of the digital storytelling is one way you could do that with Google Slides. You could do that with Book Creator Canva is excellent Adobe Express now that they’re, they’re not they’re no longer. Gosh, I don’t even remember what they were called before this Adobe Express. Smart spark was so much better. But anyway, though, we express seesaw, a lot of you are familiar with seesaw. We do have episodes on some of these. I want to go ahead and read read through the next few breaths. So digital. So we’ve got digital storytelling, and then digital manipulatives. Google Slides, Google drawings. Seesaw can do that as well. And then for annotations, we’ve got kami. Kami. Kami. Again, because you can annotate PDFs and Doxon. Any thing really that you put on there and then hypothesis hypothesis. That is, and I know we talked about this, I know you’ve talked about it, and I cannot remember for the life of me what that was.

Brent Warner
Yeah, so hypothesis. Again, I haven’t used it very much. But some of my colleagues do. It’s a it’s an annotation, it’s like a, it’s kind of turning the annotations on the side into a conversation in the chat board. I think like it’s so like, when you’ve got, especially with the PDF, you bring up that PDF, and then you highlight a section and then it basically starts a conversation on the side of that section. So you can start talking about things. And then your classmates can respond to you and to kind of have deeper conversations over there in the comment sections…

Ixchell Reyes
Hmm. I’m gonna have to come back to that and see how we apply that. And then right you’ve got a ton of stuff that you grabbed from ISTE live.

Brent Warner
I’ll keep this as brief as possible, but these are not vetted. But what I did for my for my poster session presentation that I was alone on, I put up on the wall, and I said, Hey, write your own ideas. What do you think fits under these categories? So I like I said, I have not vetted these but they’re, they’re just things that people wrote up on the wall just kind of said, hey, it fits under these categories. So you can take a look for them for yourself. But under engagement, we’ve got blicket wakelet. Can some of these might repeat to so sorry, I’m just gonna just gonna look it can wakelet Canva Padlet play posit and Edie puzzle, talking points. Math is fun.com Kim for kids.com. under-representation, the section someone wrote, actually this, I had a good conversation with this guy, he was talking about culturally diverse texts. He was cool. He was like, he had some he was building this whole program. And one of these things was really important to him. So so that really fit in there. Dark reader is, you know, kind of making the strain less dyslexic. And we’re kinda again, I don’t totally know what these are yet, but I’m gonna look into them. And then the last section under expression, people added in Habitica, a run stone Academy, and Ollie for meeting notes. So again, if any of those sound interesting to you, or and again, I don’t totally know if they fit in those categories myself, I’ll have to kind of do a little bit more thinking on him. But But yeah, lots of people were adding ideas and thoughts and trying to kind of get their own heads around these concepts as well. So this is a ton of information and a very brief overview at the same time.

Ixchell Reyes
So if you get anything out of it, is the major concept of what you do is so that we can come back and do a deep, deep dive.

Brent Warner
Yeah, remember, so we’ve just talked for 40 minutes, just, if you remember only the ramp and the stairs, you’re good.

Ixchell Reyes
The ramp, the ramp and the stairs. All right, I am super excited about my fun find today because not only do I love it, but it also fits right into our UDL concept. And Brian, have you heard of Colin note, ce o l, l a like collaborate and then notes. So I’ve been looking for. So first of all, I’m a Notability. User, I love notability and using it for years, but I wanted something I was missing other things. Because again, when you stick to one thing, you may miss out on others. And so I found Collin notes, which is absolutely free. And that’s another thing i i Love. Notability is about $8, which is not a big price to pay for, for a very robust note app. But again, if you’re trying to make things accessible to your students, free without any signup is the way to go. So call a note allows you to open up notebooks, and you simply share the name of the notebook with another user and they can annotate right into that document. You can upload a picture a PDF, you can open a PDF. So let’s say you’re in a lecture, and you’ve got your students who need to, you know, it’s a 200 student class and you’ve got two people can can add their what’s it called? designs or drawings, charts, etc. And so the way I found this was, I was inspired by one of our recent conversations on sketchnoting. So I was trying to find something that if I were to tell my students, hey, use something, and here it is, and it does the job. It’s called notes. So it I think that the notes aren’t stored in a cloud there. So you would have to save them to your own drive. And that’s the only thing I think they’re kept for, like 24 hours. And I think that’s one of the reasons that makes it available for free. But then you can have your endless notebooks, personal notebooks on your own that you can share publicly and they’ve got templates. So it’s a lite version of what I wish notability could do. But again, and you can do it you can do also voice notes. So again, if your need to refer back to the lecture or or a speaker or something and you could simply record on there, so it’s amazing, and it’s free.

Brent Warner
Okay, so mine is something I did in Louisiana. I finally lifelong dream achieved. Found Louisiana. I found just like I found New York, New Orleans. Yes. Let me tell you a little bit about it. No, I did a I was gonna choose New Orleans because it’s so great. But airboat adventures. So this is one of the things you’ve seen with the big fan on the back that go across the marshes? Oh, yes. Oh. And so we went to the bayou. And we did one of these tours. And we I would highly recommend pay the extra for the smaller boat that you can get on like, it was so great. And we were jumping on there. And we had this old Cajun like, you know totally spent his whole life in the bayou just knew everything. I could barely understand him.

Ixchell Reyes
That’s awesome. You practice your French?

Brent Warner
Yeah, but he was but we got all these alligators in this alligators. Like we’re jumping up on the boat. Like they’re like a foot away from me. So like, they were like, they were coming up there all over the place. And it was totally live nature like real. Like, you know, it’s like one of those things. You see these things on videos and you’re like, Oh, whatever. And you’re like, Oh, this is totally wild. Yeah, it was absolutely worth it was just so cool. I’ll try and post up a video too so that like we can have Yeah, notes as well just like of the of the alligator snapping that marshmallows that he was throwing out.

Ixchell Reyes
So alligators like marshmallows?

Brent Warner
They like things, I guess that float on top of the water. So he was saying you can throw donuts out there – like that’s what they recognize

Ixchell Reyes
Oh interesting! Fun fact.

Brent Warner
Yeah, fun fact. But they would come up so he would throw out a marshmallow. And that’s how they didn’t like they were easily distracted by that too. So if they’re getting too close, then he would just like you would like throw it away. And so but it was like, but he’s like he would stop every once in awhile. He’s like, now there’s no joke like you could really, really, really get. And some of these places we were showing up and there would be like six alligators all at the same time. And those things are massive. Oh yes, I’m 14 feet He’s long like they’re they’re big. So anyways, this particular tour I’ll put the direct link to this company because I thought it was a great experience airboat adventures if you ever end up down there in New Orleans it’s it’s worth it.

Ixchell Reyes
Pool Boy Brent moves on to the Bayou.

Brent Warner
Oh no, I did not – I was not able to clean the Bayou (laughter) It was a little bit of a mess for me it was a little too much algae

Ixchell Reyes
All right, you could win a one of a kind DIESOL pin by leaving us a review on Apple podcasts and for other social media shout outs tag us on any platform.

Brent Warner
For the show notes and other episodes you can check out diesel.org/ 65 That’s the number six five and of course you can listen to us at voice Ed Canada. That’s vo ice d.ca We are on Twitter. We are sharing the tweets at diesel pod. So D-I-E-S-O-Lpod and I am at @BrentGWarner.

Ixchell Reyes
pin Ixchell at @Ixy_pixy that’s I X y underscore p i x y. In Ojibway thank you is Midwich. Midwich for tuning in to the DIESOL podcast. Thanks everybody.