"Customizing your teaching to suit each child makes eminent sense. Kids are different, they learn differently, so we should teach them differently, right? But when you're staring out at 20 or 30 students as individual as snowflakes, you may find yourself asking that ever-daunting question: "How?"
The short answer is: one step at a time. Teachers at Forest Lake Elementary School in Columbia, South Carolina, have made it their mission for the past decade to differentiate instruction for their diverse students. They started small, and they've grown and honed their strategies each year.
Here are their tips -- combined with some advice from Edutopia bloggers and members of the Edutopia community -- on how you can get started. And please use the comments field below to ask questions and add your own suggestions! "
"It is essential that educators be supported in their time of need. We have created the Help Desk website to provide more support and materials to help you be successful as you utilize the SAS Portal. Here you will find system requirements, answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs), directions for uploading videos to your website, and documents that highlight SAS and our tools for teachers."
The school year is either over or almost over for the majority of readers of Free Technology for Teachers. The summer is a good time to explore and experiment with new things that you might use in the fall. In the PDF below I've compiled 77 resources that you might want try out over the next couple of months. Even if there's nothing new to you in it, please consider passing it along to a colleague that could discover a few new things from it.
Free Classroom Guides and Educational Downloads for 2011
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The International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education (IJMCE) publishes cutting edge research and substantial in-process reports and theoretical accounts of mentoring and coaching in educational contexts, including schools, colleges and universities. IJMCE provides overviews of how mentoring and coaching are evolving as well as circulating critical engagement with theoretical and practical issues. It enables insights into variations in mentoring and coaching on a global platform, evidencing their situated nature and generic characteristics as well as reporting on emerging issues in mentoring and coaching theory and practice. This unique journal highlights what is recognised as effective practice in specific contexts, as well as evidencing why this is so and discussing possible transferability to other contexts. IJMCE regularly features informed reviews of mentoring and coaching publications and provides conference reports from events that have global significance.