Differentiating Instruction with Technology

More important, however, was another result: Students in the diverse teaching condition outperformed the other students even on the multiple-choice memory tests. In other words, even if our goal is just to maximize students' retention of information, teaching for diverse styles of learning still produces superior results. This approach apparently enables students to capitalize on their strengths and to correct or to compensate for their weaknesses, encoding material in a variety of interesting ways.

The studies described here, conducted in diverse locations and with diverse groups of students, suggest that many students have strengths that are unrecognized and neglected in traditional schooling. By becoming aware of those strengths and incorporating them into instruction, educators can boost student achievement. Whether we are talking about students whose cultural background differs from the mainstream or about students whose cognitive strengths diverge from the model commonly emphasized in schools, the same principle applies: Teaching to strengths works.

curriculum content

instructional strategies

Educators develop and use a comprehensive and sequenced core curriculum that is aligned with local, state, and national standards, then differentiate and expand it.

What is Creativity? Eastern Perspective: A state of personal fulfillment, the expression of an inner essence of ultimate reality (Chu, 1970; Kuo, 1996; Mathur, 1982).

how can we encourage children to be creative?   Provide a psychologically safe environment, which allows for disagreement and a degree of controversy. Shift focus of learning to the children; allow choice; engage them as a partner. Set clear, simple, and reseasonable limits; allow choice and flexibility within these limits. Allow for movement and reasonable noise. Acknowledge humor; provide time and outlet for humor. Encourage sampling. browsing, and exploring varied topics; allow for questioning and probing; provide hands-on activities. Employ integrated and broad thematic approaches to curriculum development; approach problems as opportunities for novel solutions; incorporate metaphor and analogies in instructional practices. Provide situations/activities that are open-ended, provocative, and multidisciplinary. Allow multimedia approaches to assignments; provide materials for artistic expression in all content areas. Allow individual work time and provide a space and time for queit thinking and reflection. Discuss multiple perspectives and encourage sensorial exploration of materials; accept emotions and explore affective responses. Provide for individualization and differentiation in curriculum and materials; include opportunities for the use of imagery in educational activities. Susan Daniels, 1997, in "Handbook of Gifted Education"

a national survey on college and career readiness and the challenges facing U.S. teachers reveals that educators consider the ability to differentiate instruction for their students as essential for students’ success—and more access to technology will help them do this, they say.

Given limited resources, teachers say opportunities for collaborative teaching (65 percent), access to online and technology resources (64 percent), better tools for understanding students’ learning strengths and needs (63 percent), and instructional strategies for teaching English language learners (62 percent) would have a major impact on their ability to address the different learning needs of individual students.

A significant majority of middle and high school teachers (61 percent) say they are able to differentiate instruction “a great deal” to meet the varying learning needs of students in their classrooms. Their confidence in this ability to effectively customize their teaching for each student, however, varies by subject. Math teachers are the least likely (46 percent) to say they are able to differentiate instruction a great deal to help their students, compared with higher numbers of English teachers (60 percent) and teachers of other non-math and English subjects (65 percent).

Learning analytics is the use of intelligent data, learner-produced data, and analysis models to discover information and social connections, and to predict and advise on learning

I’m interested in how learning analytics can restructure the process of teaching, learning, and administration.

LA relies on some of the concepts employed in web analysis, through tools like Google Analytics, as well as those involved in data mining (see educational data mining).

At least in the digital world, there is an evolution from scarcity to abundance in many domains. This evolution creates important new opportunities and challenges for (higher) education and strongly influences the expectations of students and, increasingly, of teachers. In the media in general and music in particular, this trend is clear. The average young person in the 70s had a collection of maybe 20 LP's, which were heard at home. The average young person now has virtually all music ever recorded at her disposal, and can listen to it anywhere and anytime, via an iPod and other devices. She can share her music with friends - legally or not. Because of this great abundance of material and its availability anytime and anywhere, it is no longer meaningful to deal with music in the traditional way. One can manually manage the music on 20 physical carriers. This approach no longer works with 3,000,000 songs. A first workaround is to provide sophisticated search, so you can create playlists of songs by title, artist, etc. Then the playlist can be played without further intervention by the listener. That is roughly the original model of iTunes. It is also roughly the model of the teacher who searches for relevant learning resources, modifies and packages them and expects the student to work through the material in a more or less controlled way.

But this approach is now passé, because there is too much overhead in searching for music and creating playlists, and because it is often not at all evident to search for music that you do not know. Indeed, users now exchange playlists as well as songs. Newer applications such as last.fm, pandora, finetune, jango and seeqpod follow a different approach: they support personalized recommendations and generate playlists themselves, on the basis of user interactions. The effect is that of a radio station which is specifically tailored to the needs and characteristics of one listener. It is interesting to note that these applications rely on very different technologies to achieve this effect: last.fm is based on "social recommending", while pandora relies on a very extensive set of metadata developed in the "music genome project".

In "social networking" applications such as facebook, this evolution is taken one step further: the user can follow what his "friends" are doing and be guided in this way to interesting material, relevant applications or even face-to-face events. Such an approach could certainly prove useful in education, where social networks can facilitate "community based learning": learners can refer one another to relevant resources in much the same way that such resources spread virally on social networking sites. Note that resources in this context include teachers or other learners, as well as applications, besides content!