Our class of 30 spans across 5 grades. Planning is not as easy as planning 5 separate activities for each grade. We have to take into consideration 30 different sets of interests, 30 learning styles, 30 different backgrounds and consider our 3 students with Autism and 2 with an Intellectual Impairment. . Us teachers, call this differentiation. Melinda Good (2006) states that this does not mean providing separate, unrelated activities for each student. It means providing interrelated activities that are based on student needs for the purpose of ensuring that all students come to a similar grasp. See how effective this is with ICT's.
We're currently trialing this process with our history unit on the First Fleet. Many of our boys find traditional projects like a written composition dull and have trouble transferring their ideas from pen to paper. As a result they put in little effort and this reflects in their marks. However since I suggested they study farming practices of the settlers by creating video diaries using an iPad app I've had them knocking at the staff room door each lunch asking to work on their assessment. It's so refreshing to see the boys taking ownership over the task.
GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE...
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Here's a description of a normal school lesson in this classroom-
In one corner of the classroom on a winter morning, four students are at the Tech Zone, typing in their entries to the class blog on fantasy writing; four are reading books; one is listening to a book on tape; one is taking a Scholastic Reading Counts quiz on a laptop; and five are studying number prefixes on the interactive whiteboard with a teaching intern from the University of South Carolina. Check out how it's benefiting them! For the full article. Check out this link. By enabling success, you create in the student the appetite to succeed again. |