Multiple Modalities to Boost Student Perception - E120

Rachel: 0:39

In this episode, we are revisiting the Universal Design for Learning framework and beginning to explore the pillar of representation.

Katie: 0:48

Yes. So this week we're going to talk about perception and how to offer different modalities for students in their learning.

Rachel: 0:57

Let's get started. This week Katie and I are revisiting universal design for learning. And so we're gonna start looking at the second pillar, which is all about representation. And specifically we're gonna look at providing options for perception

Katie: 1:20

Yeah. So when we are talking about perception, we're looking at like multimodality, looking at how students can kind of access information. So um, this one I think is. the part of UDL I'm most excited about because I think that this is one that teachers can fairly easily do. And it tends to be extremely effective for all learners, and I am biased, as we all know, particularly English language learners.

Rachel: 1:47

like this pillar in particular, like not just perception, but representation itself tends to lend well to the idea of differentiation, and I think that's why it feels so familiar is because it has that flavor of differentiation. Except udl, what we're doing is. thinking about all of those potential barriers ahead of time and planning for them versus differentiation is more of that in the moment, trying to accommodate for our learners that we have in front of us. So it's, it's a very sort of different kind of feel.

Katie: 2:20

Yes. And so this is kind of planning ahead of time, assuming you're going to have to accommodate for students or assuming you need to make it more accessible, whereas I find differentiations very reactionary,

Rachel: 2:30

that was the word I was looking

Katie: 2:32

Aha. So, yeah. So let's talk briefly about their, I guess, definition or interpretation of multiple means of representation, and then dive into that first. So I like their definitions and once again, we'll always kind of link it in so you can see their, their blurb. But the idea here is that. repre like this multiple means of representation. It, it allows for learners that learn differently. So it's acknowledging the way that they might perceive or comprehend information that we're sharing with them, we're presenting to them. and it's for a variety. It's like a range of students. It's not Joss English language learners. Perhaps there are students with learning challenges or sensory disabilities, cultural differences where. You know, maybe a culture is more pro like, more favoring of um, oral language and oral history. So it's trying to keep in mind all of the students that we might kind of encounter in our classrooms.

Rachel: 3:30

Yeah, there's, there's one particular sentence on that definition of representation that really resonated with me. And they say there is not one means of representation that will be optimal for all learners. So providing those options for representation is absolutely essential for our learners to make sure that all of our students are learning the way that they need to learn. Different concepts and, and information that's presented to them.

Katie: 3:58

and I feel like it, it needs to be repeated because oftentimes we get in our heads that no, this is what they need to do to learn. This is what, but we need to scaffold that. We need to get them prepared for when perhaps they go off to university and are listening to lectures. It, it doesn't have to be like now. where they don't experience success and maybe don't get to go off to this university they want to go to. We can scaffold those skills of being able to learn during a lecture by still providing multiple means at this point.

Rachel: 4:29

There's also some really neat connections here to the book study that we're doing right now with why don't students like school? Because talk about transfer of learning and representation. when you use multiple representations, it allows students to be able to make connect better connections within, as well as between concepts, and that's what we're going for.

Katie: 4:50

Yeah. And we also talk about, in the book, we were talking about background knowledge and taking their strengths and using those to help them apply. Right? Like that transfer, why not? We're like, this is, you know, if you're listening, you're likely an educator in elementary or high school. Like this isn't the be all, end all. This is where we build these skills to help them be successful in.

Rachel: 5:10

So let's get into, well, what is perception itself? Cuz this is just one of the pillars of representation in this framework. so what they talk about here is that it's important to ensure key information is equally perceptible to all learners and they provide a couple ways to be able to do that. So one, like we said, providing that information through different modalities. So thinking about our modalities of what we see, what we hear, what we touch. As well as, uh, providing that information in a format that's gonna allow for adjustability by the user. So when I, when I sort of read that and hear that, I automatically think, well, we have all of these fantastic educational technology tools that can allow us to do both of these things and, and do these things reasonably well so that we. Modify and present information with different modalities without a whole lot of, I guess, work on our end as educators.

Katie: 6:11

Now that being said, I, I think that, you know, just offering a digital copy isn't the same as making sure it can be adjustable by the user and making some information more salient that perhaps wouldn't be so I, I still think that there are, there's some work to be done. But if you start to form these habits now, Like it just becomes second nature. So you just always do it and then it's not that difficult. So I think for some teachers, including myself, there are adjustments that need to be made, but as you make them, they just become proceduralized. They become more of your routine.

Rachel: 6:47

Yeah. I feel like once you have your tools and you, your, your go-to tools, then you've got your toolbox that you're constantly coming back to and. once you've kind of gone through that evaluation phase of, well, is it adjustable for my users? Like, can I take it and can students then enlarge the text if they need to or make it smaller, or can they do stuff with the sound? Can they do text to speech or speech to text and, and all of those different sort of ways to adjust information. I think then once you have those tools in your toolbox, like those are the ones that you're gonna always go back to. And then this will, for the most part be kind of like taken care of then.

Katie: 7:26

So within perception, it's probably worth mentioning the different checkpoints they have. So there's three, and they are offering ways of customizing the display of information, offering alternatives for auditory information. and then offering alternatives for visual information. So we really do have, you know, perception as this focus on multi-modal multid modalities and, and offering options to students and not just sticking with one.

Rachel: 7:52

Yeah. So getting right into the first checkpoint is talking all about offering ways of customizing the display of information. So this is what we were just talking about. We want to, you know, if, if we're gonna offer digital materials, is kind of, for the most part, highly preferred because you can customize and adjust digital things where you can't with pr, with print materials for the most part. But you want to, you know, take a really careful look at what tools you are using and um, kind of play around with them to see how you can adjust and how you can customize that digital inform.

Katie: 8:31

And so it also talks about, you know, if you are providing videos, even so looking at volume rate of speech, can you decrease the speed of a video or increase it as needed? It's, it like, there's some pretty good things to consider and I think even with videos, like can you add captions close ca. and I think that's important because that allows students to kind of see as they're listening.

Rachel: 8:54

I think my favorite tool for that is YouTube. I think YouTube can do it all, and I know that YouTube can be pretty scary, like putting your videos on there and out there for the world. You don't have to set it to public though. You can set it as an unlisted if you don't want others to be able to find your videos. What I love about YouTube and why I think this is such a great tool is you can increase or decrease the play speed. I actually heard my voice in my classroom uh, just before like, like last week where students were playing it, I think at two times. The speed It's so, it's hilarious. Like, why am I hearing A, why am I hearing my voice and B, why is it so fast? I sound ridiculous and they all kind of giggled and stuff like that. But I'm getting, I'm, I'm getting outside of the point. You can also adjust volume. So that's great. And then I really love using it because it, it auto generates the captions for me and some, sometimes it's not great in terms of what it does for, but for the most part it does. And then I love it for my English language learners because I show them at the beginning of the semester how to then take those auto-generated captions and change it to whatever language they want. So, I don't know, I think YouTube does it.

Katie: 10:09

Now you can add closed captions in Screencastify as well. Now you do need a, a, a transcript for it. But um, you can do that. And then they do offer translation as well. So something to consider. So if you're using Screencastify, and that's what you're using to record, like you can still use Screencastify for your captions as

Rachel: 10:27

Yeah. I'll, uh, I'll record my instructional video. Uh, It depends on what I'm doing, and we've talked about this here on the podcast before, but if I wanna annotate a lot, I love explain everything. If I am just doing a screen capture, then Screencastify kind of my go-to tool. And, uh, Screencastify really nice because it's got that button where you can just export it right to YouTube.

Katie: 10:49

Yes.

Rachel: 10:50

So that's often what I end up doing. And that goes really quick. I, I did that actually yesterday. I made a few videos and then, Pop them right onto my YouTube channel. And we have mentioned Screencastify in quite some time on the podcast, which is very unusual for us. So Screencastify, we still love you.

Katie: 11:09

Yes, we still use you.

Rachel: 11:11

I also, I, I think some of the other sort of things that they talk about here, size of text, images, grass tables, et cetera, as well as the contrast between the background and the text. I almost feel like contrast is maybe one of the things that doesn't necessarily get thought about as much.

Katie: 11:30

No, but it should, especially if you have learners that visually needs more contrast to make it visible and easier to access.

Rachel: 11:39

I do often think a lot about contrast myself. I have had learners in my classroom that have had low visual low vision or they have like, or, or they have just some needs in terms of contrast. Like I've had some students who have had red green colorblindness as well. And so when, when you teach students like that or you've, you've taught students like that in the past, you start to then like really think about, okay, well I really gotta consider contrast here. What I really like, and, and this is gonna sound unusual because normally we have a lot of hate for our learning management system, but in Brightspace, which is the system we use, they actually have a contrast checker that whenever you are uploading content in there, you can check and see does it meet the requirements for contrast or not.

Katie: 12:27

There you go.

Rachel: 12:28

There are, I think, other digital tools. I'm, I'm not too familiar with a lot of them though, but there's some really good guidelines and stuff. I would say going with black and white if you can, using color where it makes sense to use color. Thinking about. Well, if you're gonna use color for something, I do often, for example, liked color code things, but then I will also add words to go along with it too, so that if there is an issue with colorblindness or something like that, then text to speech could then read what, what that color is related to as well. So, for example, I color code all my must uses red. But I'll al I'll always say, you know, here's the, here's the thing, and then put it in brackets and must do so they can see the red. They can also see the must do. So hopefully I'm covering most of my bases there.

Katie: 13:16

Okay. Last section here of customizing display of information. And I'm gonna let Rachel lead this because we all know that she loves her fonts.

Rachel: 13:25

about the fonts you use so. You wanna be, you wanna really think about fonts you pick for display on your digital materials versus fonts you use for print materials. And there's some really interesting things here. Like for example, I've noticed and um, it's not just me. It's like many, many people have noticed, for example, the a's with the. Loopy thing at the top. So you know, the as that are not like a print a, but that are a little bit more fancy. There's, there's a word for it. I forget what the word for it is. A lot of students can have difficulty reading that because of that extra little notation in there. So looking for fonts that look like a print A is really good. I have to say Poppins right now is one of my favorite fonts, and everything I do is Poppins because it has the the right kind of a that I'm looking for. You also wanna think about like cursive fonts while they look love. And beautiful. They can be so inaccessible for our students.

Katie: 14:28

do they look lovely and beautiful though?

Rachel: 14:30

Well, they may look lovely and beautiful for the person who's looking at it and who may have grown up with cursive and, and love the look of it. I've seen a lot of educational resources created that have cursive fonts, and a lot of our students can't read

Katie: 14:45

no, and like, it's not even a case of we don't teach it anymore. It's also, if you look at people coming from around the world where they're not learning English, cursive, it's, it's a whole wide range of factors as to why it is not understood. So instead of, you know, What is, what is the phrase in English? Beating a dead horse. Is that the phrase, did I get a phrase

Rachel: 15:09

I think

Katie: 15:10

Oh my gosh. I never get them right these days. I think we need to just, why not use a font that is print versus cursive?

Rachel: 15:18

Yeah. And I love the Sansera fonts. So ones without the little, like, I don't know what you call them, the little flicky things on all the letters because they're, again, they're cleaner and a little bit easier to read. So there's quite a few different considerations you can.

Katie: 15:33

So we're moving on to alternatives for auditory information. And so this one I think is key because we can't just sit at the front of the classroom and lecture and assume that that's enough. And so how can we make learning accessible for that we are presenting orally? Um, And so something like captions. it's great. So if you do wanna present something orally, if you open I, you can even just open and present a Google slide and speak and turn on close captions and it will actually show what you are saying on the screen. And that's creating, you know, that text to sound connection for students.

Rachel: 16:08

that's a good one. when, when I read this one, I, I was like, yes, like the description for it. Because, you know, we, when we think about auditory and, and, and problems with auditory input, we think of our learners who have hearing disabilities, right? Like, that one's kind of the obvious one, but, We also have learners who just need that time to process information or they have memory difficulties. Like if I get too in too much information, even thrown my way, that's auditory, I'm kind of like, what? And, and I shut down and, and I need the visual component to go along with it.

Katie: 16:43

Yeah. And it's even, English language learners because when we are teaching and speaking, and if it's a mainstream class, you're not necessarily simplifying what you're saying and you're not necessarily slowing down. And so the processing speed and you know, if they get hung up by a word. And then lose track of everything else you're saying while they're trying to figure out that one word, they've now lost you for the rest of that lesson. And so there needs to be some sort of visual or textual adaptation or something to help them follow along to be able to actually learn what you're trying to teach them.

Rachel: 17:18

And teaching English language learners and this this class that I've been doing all year. I've taken in so much of that. So even when I'm doing instructions at the beginning of class, I might give them orally, but then I'll write them down on the board or post them to our bright space. And so I try to, include both, because sometimes you can't, you can see that just like that blank look on their faces, you know, they're not like they're, they're either hung up on a word or something's not clicking right. Or they're, they're just not comprehending what you're saying. that's because, and, and even the description for this one says, learning sorry. listening is a complex strategic skill that must be learned. So think about our, our English language learners are taking not only language, right, but then also trying to develop their skill of listening. So, I don't know, It's a lot

Katie: 18:07

Yes, and, and it's not an easy skill and it's not one that is natural, especially in a classroom like I feel like. majority of my students would much rather text over listening. I know that that's not the same in all cultures, in all languages, but yeah, so having that extra option is definitely helpful.

Rachel: 18:27

And so having text, having visuals, lots of visuals to go along with the auditory, whether that's text or whether that's diagrams, charts, whatever. That's going to go along with what you're doing. I also love this like even using emoticons, right. Symbols and stuff like that.

Katie: 18:45

I also really appreciate the written transcripts for videos or auditory clips. I was um, helping the co-op teacher because there's a few English language learners doing co-op this semester and all of the safety videos that students need to complete prior to a placement or in English with no closed captions and no transcript.

Rachel: 19:06

Oh no.

Katie: 19:07

And I was like, what? No, no, this isn't going to work. I was like, you need to make this accessible. You need to find ways to either get the captions from whomever created these, get a transcript, or you need to have your students use some sort of voice to text on their phone as they're listening so they can follow and pause and translate as needed. But yeah, not accessible.

Rachel: 19:31

that's again why I come back and I love. it does it automatically. For me, it, it's very little work on my end, but it, it produces something that's super accessible for students,

Katie: 19:42

Now these were like board created the same as we do as teachers, and so there's, there was no way to kind of put it on YouTube or get it from there, but yeah. but I think that's, that's a bigger conversation because if this is coming from a school board, then let's have a conversation about students who are accessing these videos for a co-op purpose and how we can make them accessible, because I'm sure there are many teachers who would benefit from, those captions or transcripts as well.

Rachel: 20:09

I think one other tool to kind of mention there, if you're leaving short little audio clips, moat's a really great one and we haven't talked about moat for a while either, but if you're leaving that short little auditory comment, say in a Google Doc or something, it does have some of that transcription features as well. So that could be another option.

Katie: 20:27

yes.

Rachel: 20:28

And then I think, uh, one other is uh, read and.

Katie: 20:32

Yeah. Read and writes. Great.

Rachel: 20:33

So if you're taking a lot of that like this might not be for auditory information itself, but you can get that text to speech in there and speech to text. So I think that one works for this checkpoint as well as the next checkpoint, which is about offering alternatives for visual inform.

Katie: 20:50

And I think this one, at first I was like, What kind of visual information then as I was reading on, I was like, well, you're right, because if I just show an image, if there's no context to it, there's so many different distractors when we have visual information whether it be a video or, just a picture itself. and there's no real guidance as to what they should be looking at or, or what it is supposed to mean. So being able to provide an alternative for that so that it makes it easier to understand.

Rachel: 21:17

I love using a lot of visuals when I create instructional videos, and often my slides, at least my templates, will have just the visual. But then when I record it and explain everything I annotate and add the words to it as I'm talking, and I feel like that's a nice mix along with then that auto-generated close captioning in YouTube. Uh, Hopefully that's enough anyway, to kind of take care of all of these

Katie: 21:42

Well, yeah, because you're not only providing the text, you're also doing the spoken for that one image, and I think that's ideal. That's great.

Rachel: 21:49

Yeah. So worth giving a try.

Katie: 21:51

Mm-hmm

Rachel: 21:51

now another one I, I kind of think would be cool, and I started doing this at the beginning of the year, but I didn't follow through because it is a lot of work is I like to create, so the sort of these slide decks for lessons as students are working through each of those sort of components of a lesson. And I was using Moat to record an audio version of the text. That was written on the slide and then plop, plopping those in. I kind of stopped doing that because there is read and write and so if they needed that text to speech, you could just open up that tool and be able to get the same sort of effect. The problem with that and, and using a tool like that is then you miss. Personality of you and the, some of the intonations. Right. And how things are said. Speech to text is just very kind of robotic.

Katie: 22:43

I mean, once it's done, it's done. But it, it's almost one of those things where, you know, slowly don't try to do it all. Try a unit or try a lesson in each unit, and then the next time through, add to it.

Rachel: 22:55

It's one of my, maybe one of my aspire to dos for next year.

Katie: 22:59

That's fair. I like that. You've put it in the aspire to do category. You've removed the pressure of must do, which is good.

Rachel: 23:07

Yes.

Katie: 23:08

there are too many things.

Rachel: 23:09

Now the other thing I, I like about this checkpoint and, and a point they brought up is text is a special case of visual information. It was really, really sort of neat to think about that cuz when we think about visual information, we a like, automatically my brain goes to oh, images, charts, diagrams.

Katie: 23:27

Agreed. But you're right, because it is visual, it is a visual cue, it's something that you have to go ahead and, and access. So I mean, text to speech is a great way around that. Um, And I think that that's probably the most common one that most people think about. but yeah.

Rachel: 23:42

I think then sort of summing up over the three different checkpoints for perception here, like I think in terms of my digital toolbox and what I use the most is Google Slides. And I love Google Slides cuz you can adjust whatever on the slide itself. YouTube is, is another big one. And then read and write as as we kind of go through emote here and.

Katie: 24:06

Yep. And then I also like the simplicity of that online voice recorder, because it is so easy to use. And then getting students to use it too is super easy, no accounts needed, et cetera. so I, I think the biggest takeaway for perception is multi-modality. Offer options. Don't just give. and make sure you're explaining all of your visuals and, and even providing textual clues for audio.

Rachel: 24:30

Yeah, so we'll wrap up our conversation here today, and we'll include any of the links or resources we talked about in our show notes. You can access our show notes for this episode@edugals.com slash one 20. That's edu G a l s.com/one 20.

Katie: 24:47

And if you like what you heard today, then feel free to share it with a colleague or a friend. And don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast app so that you don't miss out on any future content.

Rachel: 24:57

And as always, we'd love to hear from you. So especially if you have recommendations like what are your favorite digital tools that support multiple modalities, you can go onto our flip edu gals.com/flipgrid and leave us a video message. Or you can go onto our website@edgals.com and leave us a written reply.

Katie: 25:18

Thanks for listening and see you next week.