ABOUT CAST

The following information was provided by the Center for Applied Special Technology and is used with permission.

Since its founding in 1984, CAST (the not-for-profit Center for Applied Special Technology in Peabody, Massachusetts) has developed a unique blend of expertise in education and technology. Combining the latest neuroscience research with innovative uses of emerging technologies, CAST educators have devoted themselves to expanding educational opportunities for all students, especially those with disabilities.

Early on, CAST's founders and co-executive directors, David Rose, Ed.D., and Anne Meyer, Ed.D., became convinced that new technologies offer significant learning opportunities for students with a range of abilities and disabilities. By focusing on the challenges faced by learners who are "in the margins" - those for whom ordinary print-based curricular materials and approaches do not work well - CAST developed Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a new educational paradigm that capitalizes on the adaptability of new technologies to maximize learning opportunities for all students (see www.cast.org for further information about UDL).

In recognition of the potential of Universal Design for Learning, in late 1999, the U.S. Department of Education selected CAST to lead the National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum (www.cast.org/ncac). CAST and its National Center partners, Harvard Children's Initiative/Harvard Law School, Boston College School of Education, the Council for Exceptional Children, and the Parents Advocacy Coalition for Educational Rights (PACER) are charged with providing leadership to key stakeholders on improving achievement within the general education curriculum for students with disabilities.

CAST's expertise in the universal design of educational technology has resulted in several commercially successful products that support access to the general curriculum. With Scholastic Inc., CAST developed WiggleWorks® the first universally designed mainstream literacy series that uses electronic media to make curricula accessible to a wide variety of learners. The CAST eReader®, a text-to-speech supported software tool, is widely distributed to public schools, adult and family literacy programs, libraries, community colleges, and job training programs. In partnership with Houghton Mifflin, CAST has customized eReader to create accessible electronic textbooks for statewide adoption in California. CAST is widely known for its development of Bobby (www.cast.org/bobby), the premier Internet-based tool that checks web sites for accessibility to individuals with disabilities and provides recommendations to correct access barriers.

CAST's commitment to harnessing the power inherent in accessible, digital learning materials is inspiring growing numbers of educators, publishers, and policymakers. In July 2001, CAST testified before the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee on the future of technology in education. In April 2002, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), published Rose and Meyers' foundational book, Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age: Universal Design for Learning. With the potential of reaching 165,000 educators through ASCD's membership base alone, CAST intends the book and its accompanying web site (www.cast.org/teachingeverystudent) to be practical resources for teachers across the nation to use in implementing UDL approaches (including accessible digital text) in their classrooms.

Current CAST initiatives focus both on making accessible digital educational materials widely available and creating Universal Learning Editions - digital versions of core curricular materials that contain embedded supports for learning and assessment.

The Universal Learning Center

The Universal Learning Center (ULC) is a new web-based service that provides teachers with immediate access to accessible digital curriculum materials to support learning in K-12 students with disabilities. This groundbreaking service addresses a critical challenge that public schools throughout the nation face - to ensure that all students, including those with disabilities, have access to the resources that will enable them to achieve high educational standards in general education classrooms.

CAST is piloting the ULC in 15 high schools across the country and will soon pilot the service in key leadership states, including California. The ULC is comprised of a library of digital content and a resource center to support educators in integrating digital materials into their classrooms. Registered users will be able to locate accessible digital curricular materials and download them according to applicable copyright laws and under business rules established by the owners of the content. The ULC will serve only those eligible under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) who have Individualized Education Programs (IEP's).

Universal Learning Editions

Currently, CAST is involved in a multi-million dollar effort to develop Universal Learning Editions (ULE's), web- and CD-ROM-based versions of widely used literature, textbooks, and other curricular materials. ULE's combine digital text, multimedia, and embedded learning supports in innovative ways to support the acquisition of reading skills in a variety of learners. These flexible learning environments incorporate the following key characteristics:

• ULE's are built on a strong theoretical and research base, incorporating current research in how the brain learns, promising practices in electronic literacies, and CAST's Universal Design for Learning theory.
• ULE's offer a variety of accessibility features, such as multiple ways of representing material (text, video, graphics, audio, animation), text-to-speech, decoding supports, and keyboard equivalents for mouse commands for students with physical challenges.
• ULE's provide an interactive learning experience that includes embedded goal setting, learning supports that can be reduced or removed as the student progresses, and embedded continuous assessment.
• ULE's help students to acquire not only content knowledge but also the higher-level comprehension skills necessary to become engaged, self-aware learners.
• ULE's extend the ability of teachers in inclusive classrooms to set learning goals that are achievable by every student in the class.

CAST is developing prototypes and researching the effectiveness of ULE's in a variety of genres, subjects, ages, and with diverse populations. For example, in its Strategic Learning Editions project funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs, CAST is investigating the effectiveness of ULE's in supporting reading comprehension strategies in middle school students with learning disabilities (see accompanying article for an example of CAST's ULE work).