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Differentiation
As a teacher of elective courses, I have always use differentiated
instruction. Unlike core courses which may be grouped based upon a
student's ability level, my courses are all heterogeneously grouped. I
find out getting to know my students is the most important thing to do first so
I can gauge their ability levels and motivation. As a technology and
career instructor, most of my assessments are project based which lend
themselves easily to differentiated instruction. For example, in my Career and College Explorations
classes, I just had the students do an online learning styles assessment and
gave them a choice of three projects to demonstrate their understanding of
their own results. Students were given detailed instructions for
three project choices. 1. A
typed essay 2. A Google
Slides or PowerPoint Presentation 3. An iMovie project.
The requirements for each of the projects were identical but gave students the
flexibility based on their own interests.
For some students, I differentiate based upon their IEP or
504 plan such as reducing the number or complexity of an assignment.
Differentiated instruction is mandated at my school which may come in many
formats depending on the course. Extended deadlines is something we
frequently do as instructors. It's important for students to remember
that although they have an extended deadline, it doesn't always mean they should
continue to work on a project that is past due while others in the class are
moving forward onto the next unit of instruction. Doing so would only put
them further behind, missing out on instruction. Instead, I encourage
students needing extra time to come in before or after school or during a
workshop. Others I may refer to our Core Lab where they are pulled from a
traditional workshop (study hall) and placed with a core teacher to work on
completing assessments. An additional option is Credit Recovery where
students make up work after the course is completed.
I feel that as teachers, we are responsible for
demonstrating a thorough understanding of the diverse ways in which our
students learn and provide appropriate provisions and adaptations for
individual students who have particular learning differences or needs.
Skilled teachers also recognize the individual differences our students have
and adjust their instructional methodology to assist students to meet high
standards of proficiency. Part of South Portland's teacher evaluation
system includes observations made by administrators on how we differentiate our
instruction to help students meet or exceed standards. Looking through some of the career planning
materials I have found on iTU has given me some fresh ideas on how to deliver
information to my students. In addition,
I teach the CCE course during our Summer Academy as well. Running the course as a hybrid with partial
content delivered through iTU and other portions using face-to-face instruction
may be a positive approach to try this summer.
Curation
What is your method of curating your learning
resources? For the past several years, I have used a combination of my
course websites and Google Drive to place learning resources for students
access online. I have experimented with each student creating a
unique Google folder for my courses and then upload their assignments for me to
then grade and make comments on. I thought all was good until I
then realized that when I would go through and delete items that had been
shared with me after I had graded them, it was also deleting it from the
student's own folder that they had shared with me. I never knew
that this was going to happen so a few months ago I started requesting that
students email their assignments to me instead. Once I have graded
the assignment and returned feedback to them, I then place the graded work into
a folder within my Gmail account. When I finally return to school this
coming week I am going to experiment using the Google Docs app to finally wrap
my mind around how Drive and Docs behave differently and which is best to use
in which situation.
A little over a year ago I had gone through a half day of
e-backpack training, however, it was done off site and the City would not share
the wi-fi password with us for several hours so it ended up having all of the
activities we went through to learn the app crammed into a short period of
time. We would also receive email messages from our IT Director and
Technology Integrator throughout the year telling staff that the e-backpack's
servers were experiencing issues and sometimes were offline so I opted to stick
with what worked most of the time as long as the wi-fi signal at school worked
(Google Drive). After reading Tania's blog for this topic and seeing that
she has been using e-backpack, I am interested in sitting with her to see how
she uses it.
I have never used iTU other than to browse resources for a
few minutes a year or so ago and then added some Common Sense Media to
it. When I just signed into iTU now, I immediately see Mia's posts and
assignments from one of her courses (dates shown are January 2013). I was
not aware that teachers could post information and assignments which opens up
lots of possible ideas for me to explore.
I searched for my school name
and found nothing so I typed in the term "career" and see a long list
of items. I quickly reviewed some of the entries and found an interesting
item "Career Advice - Gordon Ramsay" with 6 lessons included.
This could be a perfect fit for my students as they do career research as his
lesson includes advice for students. I'm sure other careers that my
students may be interested in may have similar content. Another aspect of
iTU that I like is how course information may be shared out in a variety of
methods -- providing social networking possibilities for projects.
Curriculum
I teach within the Career Prep Department (Business,
Computers, Family & Consumer Science, JMG, Industrial Technology). Teachers
in the department who teach the same course meet together to decide which
topics should be taught within the course and the order in which they are
taught in. There is some flexibility in some of this, however
common assessments have the same measured outcomes. The pace has been
worked out by teachers planning the units and common assessments along with
approximately when during the quarter it should be taught. This enables
us to share resources such as textbooks since for one book we have dealing with
employment, we have fewer than 30 copies while we have approximately 120+
students taking the course during the 5-6 sections offered each semester.
Information regarding the curriculum is shared with other teachers within my
department, our school and district administrators, and our curriculum
coordinator.
We are fortunate at SPHS to have a "Department
Prep" which gives us common planning time every other day.
This allows teachers to review assessments, create or refine existing ones, and
to decide, as needed, when new content should be added (such as adding 21st
Century Skills this year).
I can really relate to students not "getting" the
material this semester. I have been home from school for almost two
months recovering from ankle reconstruction surgery. I have an excellent
long-term sub but software is not her area of expertise and since many of my
courses use a variety of software as part of the course content, it's been a
struggle. Between email tag explaining directions to students in a
variety of ways, doing screencasts and marking up screenshots of their projects
to point out areas needing to be changed, it has been a lot of work. I
have found myself putting in more hours here at home each day just trying to
keep up with all of the questions and trying to reteach content to students who
are struggling from my home. For some, students have been lazy figuring
they shouldn't need to do work for a sub or they didn't feel comfortable asking
others for help. Some of my students genuinely need the extra support I
am able to provide when I'm there with them in class, before and after school,
or as well as when they had a workshop. I am so happy that I will
finally be returning to school on March 23. In the meantime, some of my
students were able to move forward based on the extra support and instructions
or clarification I would send them from home. I will have a lot of work
to do during the remaining two weeks of this quarter to get as many of those
that have fallen behind caught up. Had I looked more closely at iTU
earlier, I am sure that some of the content they were struggling with could
have been eased through materials on iTU.
Being a teacher of electives means I have a tremendous amount
of preps for courses each semester (this semester CCE, Photoshop, Web Page
Design, Accounting, and the Senior Internship program). I think it
may be wisest for me to experiment trying to use iTU with just one of those
courses to get my feet wet ... such as the CCE course for Summer Academy.
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