Congratulations Frontier Elementary School! Last Friday morning I visited Brookston, Indiana. Frontier Elementary is the school I taught at and helped to plant the Universal Design for Learning seed prior to working with the PATINS-Project. Having successfully completed the 3-year UDL Pilot Project with PATINS, the dedicated Frontier Elementary staff enlisted the help of the community of Brookston in order to continue funding technology (mainly SMART-Boards) to continue making the instructional environment of FES more universally accessible to students. Friday morning, FES hosted a special ceremony to express their gratitude to all the donors and to the staff who put in a lot of extra work to make possible the purchase of 13 additional SMART-Boards at around $42,000!!! It was an honor to return to Frontier on Friday and to be a part of the ceremony. I’m certainly proud to be able to say I taught at FES and proud to be able to recommend FES to other schools looking for a model of how to scale up the UDL efforts in their buildings. The dedication, hard work and teamwork of FES teachers and administration demonstrates that even in the current economic situation, funds do exist! Check out the News Channel 18 (WLFI) coverage: www.wlfi.com/dpp/news/local_wlfi_smartboards_01092008
Welcome New UDL Teams! Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, the 8 new schools selected this past October to particpate in the PATINS UDL Pilot Program met in Indianapolis for two intense days of training with Dave Edyburn and the PATINS staff. Check out photos from the training here: www.patinsproject.com/PhotoGalleries/UDLTeamTrain2009
NIMAS Sample Contract Language: As many districts begin planning for textbooks and are talking with publishers, it’s important to remember to include language in your textbook contracts regarding the deposit of the NIMAS File Sets into the NIMAC. PATINS and the ICAM have some sample contract language you can use here: www.icam.k12.in.us/generalinfo.php
MOBCASTING CONTINUED: So, hopefully last week you were able to set up your mobcast. If you missed it, check out the easy step-by-step instructions.
Once you do have your free account set up and at least one episode recorded, you can login to your gabcast account (www.gabcast.com) to listen to your recordings online, download them individually OR you might consider submitting your gabcast mobcast to iTunes as a podcast (if you don’t mind it being public) OR you can simply share your mobcast RSS feed with the people you’d like to have access to the audio.
1. Login to you gabcast account
2. Click on the My Channels Tab:
3. Click on the Title of your Channel:
4. Click the “CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE” orange button:
5. Click the RSS icon as the very first option on the page:
6. Copy (ctrl+C) the url in the address bar of the browser that opens up.
7. Open iTunes and go to the iTunes Store. Once there, click on “Podcasts” in the upper left area of the iTunes Store. You should then see an icon right in the middle of the store that looks like this:
8. When you click that “Submit a Podcast” button, you have the opportunity to Paste (ctrl+V) the address of your mobcast’s RSS Feed (from step 6 above). This submits your mobcast to the iTunes Podcast directory for review. It might take 2-4 days for iTunes staff to approve your podcast (verify that it contains what you state that it contains) before it will be public.
…AND THAT’S ALL THERE IS TO IT! 
