 If you have all these options, you can make everything talk itself, make every the vocabulary come alive. You can make literary devices be highlighted. You can do millions of things in this way. Those are great options. But the question, the pedagogical question, is when would you use them? And most importantly, when would you not use them? Because it's a terrible idea. And this goes back to Jeff. I saw Jeff, did he? He's sitting on the corner. On the corner? Oh. On the floor. Is he back? Is his motorcycle with him? Is that what's going on? No, I forgot who I was going to use, Jeff, as the story. But anyway, it'll come back. Oh, yeah, that it's not the technology and it's not the things we've embedded per se that are the important thing. The question is, can we turn those into good pedagogy? And that's going to require things that Grace will talk a little bit about in a few moments, which is to understand what is the goal of what we're doing here. And you can make just as big a mistake by putting a lot of technology in front of a kid. And it can be just a huge distraction and doesn't do any good. So it's very important to do your planning well to say, here's my goal. And here's how, on Jeff's slide, the flexible methods and materials I get out of technology can help me reach that goal. But you've got to know what your goal is. So the question I just want to, I'll show you where to go to get some resources that would help you. But if you'll just spend a moment with me to think, when would you not want to have, let's say, text-to-speech on? Text-to-speech means, as you've seen here, any word I can click on it and have it decoded for me. Or I can have the whole passage be read to me. Or I can have just a sentence be read to me. All of those things are a multiple representation. When would you not want to have it on? These are pedagogical decisions. They're not technical decisions. We can do it. We can have every gosh darn word read itself aloud. And with Google stuff, you can make every word read itself aloud in 40 languages. It's incredible. When would you not want that to happen as a teacher? When would you say, I need to turn that off? Great. Assessment would be a good example that actually, oh wait. I'm not sure I like the end of your sentence. But absolutely, if you wanted to assess how good is this kid at decoding, the worst thing is to turn that on. Because you don't have any idea how good can the kid decode independently. So in assessment, it really raises the question of what we'll see in just the next slide. What's construct relevant? So we need to know, what's our goal that we're trying to teach the kid? If we're teaching them decoding, then it's not a good idea to have every word decode itself. They're not going to learn to decode as well. The only thing I want to caution is, the last part of your sentence was, if you wanted to test reading comprehension, this is the central question in assessment in the US right now. If you wanted to test reading comprehension, is it OK to turn decoding supports on? And it goes very much to the heart of what is reading? Is decoding reading, or is it just a subpart? But what you want to be measuring is, can the kid understand? Can the kid apply strategies? Can the kid be a high-level reader? And decoding can be treated just like vision, say, OK. Because you can. Notice how you can say, well, you can't make the, you could in the old days, say, well, you can't make the text bigger. Well, that wouldn't be right. If you want to see how they read, you've got to see, can they see it? So we have a culture that said, wait a minute. No, that's crazy. That doesn't feel like reading. So no, they ought to be able to make the text big, and they ought to be able to have the words, OK, we get that. But decoding is trickier. And people are like, oh, we can have every word decoded. That does not mean the kid will understand it. You can decode every single word, and you test the kid, and they don't understand it. So it goes to the very heart of how much, what is it that we call reading? I'm not going to try to answer that for you. I have an opinion. And if we get pushed, we'll talk about it tomorrow. But it's a vibrant discussion. And so some people would say, if I want to measure comprehension, yes, they can vary the text size. They can do all those things. And they can have decoding supports. Because what I'm going to measure is can they understand what they read? But for a lot of people, reading is changing. The computer can always decode now. And by the way, it used to be thought, well, you've got to learn to decode. Because what about when you're in the woods? And there's no computer around. And in the same way that, by the way, this used to be said about vision. Well, what are we going to do? You can't give people glasses and have them depend on glasses. Because what about if they lose their glasses? And everybody went, for a little while, if you want. Wait a minute, this is crazy. But it used to be a really big concern that what happens when you're in the woods? Well, as you probably have heard, there's now you can take your little cell phone and you can take a picture of the sign on the Appalachian trail and say, read that to me. It just takes a picture and it reads it to you. It decodes it. Sorry. Now to get to your thing, it decodes it. It does not read it. The great thing is your phone does not understand what the sign says. Your phone does not realize it's saying, this is an expert slope. It just will decode it and say, this is an expert slope. That's all it can do. You still have to understand it. But it's changing the landscape. So anyway, that's the perfect kind of test case. And I will say that the US seems to be moving toward if you're doing reading comprehension as your test, don't put decoding supports on. But if you're doing history or science or geography, turn on the decoding supports. Because what we're not measuring there is reading fluency. That's not fair. What we want to measure is can they do science, geography, history? And then you have the stories of the people who are fabulous at those but who did poorly because they're poor readers. And then we're not testing them accurately. So thank you for saying that because it's right on the edge which way is it going to go? Don't know yet. What about vocabulary? When would you not have embedded vocabulary supports? You can just click on the word. When would you not want to have that? I just want to say that all of these are options. So when would you not want to? This is much harder. When would you say, no, I'm not going to do that. Turn that off. Anybody have thought? Vocabulary test? Oh, great. In an assessment. Absolutely perfect. In an assessment. And by the way, if it's a biology test and where the vocabulary is critical, you want to know that they know the specific biology vocabulary. Then turn the vocabulary supports off. You'd have to because you want to know what they know. That's your goal. I want them to know those biological words. So turn the vocabulary support off. Great. On a testing. What about not on testing? Is there a time when you would say, I'm going to turn the automatic vocabulary supports off when it's not a testing situation? Can I even think of any place where you'd want to say, turn it off? Any thoughts? Yeah? When you're teaching other strategies. Great. If what you want is kids to become independent in strategies for building vocabulary, then in fact, you don't want them to just click. You want them to look at context. You want them to be able to do these things. You might even want to use a dictionary because that might be what you want to teach. But you would want them to be actively doing a vocabulary building. So there's sometimes when you'd say, I'm going to turn it off for you, Billy, because your job is to figure out, how are you going to build your vocabulary? And just clicking on the things is too easy. And we've done some experiments and some research on what is the best way to build vocabulary. And it involves getting kids much more actively involved than just clicking. So all of the things we've shown, by the way, just to prove a point, when would you have some text and not have any, it doesn't talk itself aloud, it doesn't get bigger, it doesn't do any of those things. When would you do that? No options. This is crazy. In your eye test. Because you could go into your doctor for your eye vision stuff and say, and he says, OK, now read these letters. And you go, OK, wait a minute, and you just blow it up. OK, and make it bigger. Or say, wait a minute, I got my little app. And you just read it and say, wait a minute, I don't think we're getting at the right thing. Because in that case, you're looking at vision. So vision is the goal. I want to know how good your vision is. In that case, we don't blow up the screen and we don't talk it aloud and we don't take a picture of it. So these options are there to empower you to make sure that you are teaching the kids the things you want to teach. And alternatively, you need to be a good teacher to say, that would get in my way. My kid would not learn vocabulary well enough if I did that. My kid would not learn to decode if I did that. And I'm going to need to be smart about this. Because everybody with me on that is that sounding reasonable? So sometimes people think when they see all these options that it means that they're just there all the time. The key thing is that they're options for you and the student. The student needs the options, but you as a teacher needs to have options. And that means sometimes saying, you know what? In fact, the best analogy for me is think of getting weight training at your gym. And the whole point there is that you have a lot of resistance. And it's very carefully scaffolded to get you. So it's just right for you, just heavy enough. If it's too heavy, it's no good. If it's too light, it's no good. Just heavy enough. But you could, in fact, have an assistive technology, which made it completely pointless. And you can see, I'd love to make a film of this. Some rich kid comes in with a forklift truck. And he puts the heaviest weights on possible. And he just sets the truck lift them 10 or 12 times. Which is sometimes what happens with our assistive technologies and our UDL, where you, in fact, take all of the learning out of it. Doesn't increase anybody's muscle size or anything. It just lifts the weight. And sometimes we do that when we just do things for kids that they don't need done for them. This is a slide to say the same thing, that you'd look at from an instructional point of view what options are OK, what are not OK. And the word you'll hear is construct relevance. And that is, what's the purpose I have here? I'm teaching vocabulary, and that makes a difference. I'm teaching reading comprehension strategies. If I'm teaching reading comprehension strategies, I turn decoding support on. If I'm teaching decoding, I turn decoding support off. And if I'm checking your eyes in the optometrist's office, I turn off visual supports. I'm not going to go through them, but I just wanted to show you there's some resources. And these will all be up where people can get them right. There's a, how do you make good choices for your students? There's two resources I want to recommend. There's an accessible instructional media. How do you choose the right instructional media for your students? And there's a site there that you can click through that really helps and talks you through, making good decisions for your students. And then you can even try it out with this called the Aim Explorer. If you click there, it assimilates for your student. You sit down with a student and you say, well, let's try out the various options. And it literally says, what works for you? And it's things like highlighting, things like text-to-speech, things that says, try it out, simulate it. And then it has you read something and say, does that work for you or not? So Aim Explorer is a really nice thing to try. You have to download it. It takes a little while to download, but once it's on your screen, then you're fine. And then you can sit down with any kid you want to and say, let's look at what would be a good supportive environment for you.