Inquiry Group: #diydifferentiation (Week 8 Tuesday)

I have become addicted to read about differentiated instruction since I started reading about it. I was especially interested in reading about DI strategies in higher education since that’s my field of work and I came across this great research article Examining differentiated instruction: Teachers respond by Brenda Logan that shed light on some great strategies. One of the principles of DI she mentions is that “Learners in a classroom have common needs, distinct needs, and individual needs” (p.2). I can relate to this statement when examining my own classroom. It really is fascinating to see how students learn. They do build up a cohort strategy in learning with peers that are unique to each class. They all have distinct and individual needs on top of those common needs. I think technology can really help us to accommodate these diverse needs. Just plain old strategy of talking in front of PP slide does not really provide accommodations and results in exclusion of some kids. By allowing students access to learn using multiple platforms gives them a choice to learn different concepts using a method they prefer. This minimizes the limitations we put on our students.

I came across this google doc on the internet that listed around 86 interactive online tolls that we could use in our classrooms to provide DI. Here is the List of DI Tools for you reference. Some of these tools we have already looked at through our speed geeking but there are lot more that we could use. I really like the infographic tools they mention like pictochart, thinglink and others because students could use them to present their learnings in a report format and be very creative. I use a lot of reports in my own classroom and that’s why I was drawn to these but there are a lot more options to explore.