CAST - Teaching Every Student

I had never heard of CAST the Center for Applied Special Technology prior to our classroom lecture and was impressed at the good work that they do for special education.

CAST's beginnings in 1984 in Salem, MA were rather humble and came as a result of five clinicians who banded together to explore how computer technology could be utilized to enhance special education learning. Now 29 years later, CAST is still going strong and still at the forefront of merging technology with special education.

The amount of helpful information on the website is daunting. Sometimes it may overwhelm new teachers at the amount of help that is available. That is not a bad thing, but when it comes to internet data, we teach our students that just because there is a great amount of data available, they need to know how to find the right data. That applies to teachers as well. But I am confident that the data on this website is of a very high quality.

Some of the great things that I found on CAST's website include an UDL Exchange http://udlexchange.cast.org/home. This website is exactly as it sounds like, it is a place where teachers can exchange UDL resources, lessons and collections. If you want to know what works, then you definitely need to go here.  

My favorite tool was the CAST UDL Book Builder which allows you to find UDL books created by teachers. It also lets you build your own UDL book. And they include other languages!  One such book was called Buscando a los Jaguares, Looking for the Jaguars. Not only was this book nicely written and illustrated, each page had a sound file that you clicked on to hear the book read to you!

Again, the abundance of knowledge contained on this CAST.org, could have you exploring for hours.