Integrating Web 2.0 and Mobile Technologies to Promote Accessbility and Universal Design for Learning in a STEM Course: Lessons Learned

This presentation will outline the lessons learned and formative evaluation findings from a technology integration effort in a STEM class in a large Pacific university. The STEM class is co-taught by five instructors with expertise in mathematics, science, art, special education, and educational technology. The activity that will be discussed in this presentation is an eight-week moon investigation lesson that has been designed to provide students with the opportunity to engage in realistic and meaningful scientific inquiry. The activity is being piloted and evaluated in Spring 2014. Research-based strategies of effective practice for culturally and linguistically diverse students are being integrated into the course, and technology integration is being modeled explicitly and implicitly through online and in-class examples.

For the moon investigation activity, students are building their own websites, contributing to blogs, and using iPad Minis to collect and digitize data over the course of the activity. The multimedia artifacts they create over the course of the assignment will be used to create a final multimedia report as a representation of their learning. Using a constructivist framework, the activity requires that students perform observations of the moon, think critically about the observations they are making, reflect on what they are learning, and share their learning with others. Building on this, students receive direct instruction on how they can use similar processes and procedures to explore complex scientific concepts with elementary school students.

• Matthew Schmidt, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, USA
• Lori Fulton, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, USA