One of the things I learned a lot about from Lesson one was about UDL also known as Universal Design for Learning. One of the things that helped me the most was the video we watched about UDL. I learned that UDL was a huge breakthrough for the Education community. UDL designs a variety of flexible technology, and architectural elements that include various types of accommodations to include a wide variety of people, that allows all learners to be included regardless of ability. Today, our classrooms are more diverse than ever, and teachers need to rethink their methods, materials and goals to accommodate these learners; and UDL makes this possible. Because each student is unique, we as teachers need to be able to respond to our students' individual differences. UDL gives teachers the opportunity to use alternative methods to teach all of their students so that they can succeed in the classroom. I've heard of UDL before this class but didn't really know what it was or how it was used. I think this is something that all special education teachers should be familiar with because this is essentially what we are expected to do for our students as this is just an extension on how we can differentiate their instruction.

One of the websites that I found to be very interesting was the website talking about how our three brains worked. I thought it was really cool how it was an interactive activity and I actually learned a lot from it. I thought it was really cool how when we view an image, all three of our brain networks are working at once. According to the website "Your recognition network rapidly identifies objects and discerns the overall context. Your strategic network determines how you examine the image and what information you will gain from it. And your affective network determines how long and how carefully you look." All three of these networks work together to determine what you are actually seeing. One of the things that I found most fascinating within the activity was the part where we were told to examine the pictures with a different purpose in mind. It was really cool to see how I began to look at the image differently based on the purpose I was asked to identify. The reflecting on strategy page was really cool as it had a picture with a bunch of dots on it representing where a person was looking at the same image. The viewer was asked to inspect the image with different goals/purposes each time and the pictures shown represented the persons patterns of eye movement when inspecting the image. As I was looking at the pictures I realized that my pattern of eye movement when I was looking at the image was similar to that of the example. It was interesting to see what elements I tended to focus on more based on the questions that I was being asked.