Victoria’s Digital Bag Redesign: MadLib
For me, redesign is synonymous with Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Principles of UDL help educators to provide diverse learners with multiple ways of engagement, representation, and expressions of learning (Flanagan & Morgan, 2021). This requires teachers to take lessons, assignments, assessments, and material, and redesign how they expect students to interact, respond, and engage with the materials. I think it’s very important to think about how we can redesign things to make them more accessible to everyone.
The original task that I created was an auditory and visual video describing the apps on my digital, mobile device. I redesigned this task to be completely text-based, with interactive and fun elements, which takes the user into a different type of informal and interpersonal discourse with me (The New London Group, 1996).
The live session on Saturday with our professor, Ernesto, really helped me think outside the box for this task. He suggested playing around and possibly creating a novel or even dialogue between items, which got me thinking about how I could engage my audience in a more personal way. I initially thought about taking the screen shot of my device’s home screen and creating an interactive poster that had clickable elements for all of the apps with descriptions and hyperlinks for the user to explore on their own. I chose not to go this route because it still included the visual element of my home screen, and I felt like it wasn’t quite mode-changing enough. I wanted to create something that was the completely different from visuals and voice.
I took the video that I initially recorded describing my home screen, uploaded it to Microsoft Word’s online transcription tool, and thought about how I could change the transcribed text to an interactive mode for my audience. I used a website called Flippity.net which uses Google Sheets to create simple online interactive tools, and that is where I settled on a MadLib. I had to redesign my original text to make it flow more like a story, but the overall process was simple and fun. I loved doing MadLibs as a kid, and I love that my task now has funny and lighthearted elements that shows the audience a bit of my quirky side. This redesign of my task also allows for an easy way to start a conversation with others by bringing up some of the hilarious sentences of their own personal story about me and my digital device.
References
Flanagan, S., & Morgan, J. J. (2021). Ensuring Access to Online Learning for All Students Through Universal Design for Learning. TEACHING Exceptional Children, 53(6), 459–462. https://doi.org/10.1177/00400599211010174
The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.