I am extremely impressed with the Google Lit Trips that Brusca designed for her students. She implemented UDL in that she include multiple means of presentation and expression, from the questions students had to answer, to the newspaper that had to design and write. However, there was one essential part to the field trip that happened spontaneously that I think should be examined more closely. When her students decided to develop a school-wide project for the soup kitchen she said, "I had thought of the questions I posed as rhetorical in nature. I didn't expect they would go the extra mile." Unfortunately, I think most teachers, including myself more often than not, don’t expect their students to go the extra mile.
Especially with the opportunities being offered to students with programs like Google Lit Trip, we should not only expect our students to become socially responsible, but urge them to. If social action projects became a main tenant of a lesson and even were used as a form of assessment, students would become some much more engaged in their larger community, and this is much more feasible with technology. Our students enjoy interacting with new people, getting better a certain skills and exploring new worlds. If we knew how to motivate them and provided them with the right skills set and tools, we could create many more interdisciplinary, motivating projects that require higher levels of thinking and problem solving skills for outside of the classroom.
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