Not so final thoughts about technology in the classroom

One thing that I've taken away from this quarter through my classes and working in classrooms with students is that differentiation isn't just about ability level.  Differentiation can be about individual interests, cultural backgrounds or learning styles too.  Either way, the goal is to help all students learn.  Technology is one way we can do this.  With the use of technology, students have many more avenues through which they can be reached.  While I was not able to take full advantage of having the ipod touch in my classroom,   I am starting to see more and more how it can help differentiate instruction.

The most relevant way that I believe it could help students is to differentiate instruction for students with different learning styles.  Whether they are learning Math, Science, Reading, Writing or Social Studies, there are apps on the ipod that allow students to access those subjects in ways other than those that may have been taught in the classroom.  In Math, students can use the technology to practice facts they've been struggling with or to enrich instruct and go further into concepts they're learning.  They can also use it as a way to see different ways of attacking the same type of problem, differentiating instruction by ability level and learning style.

In reading instruction, students can use ipod touch technology to improve their reading fluency, read a variety of texts and learn about various strategies for decoding.  Using it to enrich a social studies curriculum can allow them to access the internet from right where they are and have access to information on topics that interest them.  These strategies allow for differentiation by ability level, learning style and student interests.  Additionally, there are many apps for translation in a variety of languages, helping some students to overcome a language barrier in their classroom.

This may be some middle of winter quarter "optimism".....

While I love the idea of having so many opportunities to use technology in my classroom, I’m having a hard time reconciling those opportunities to the amount of time I realistically have to use them.  Aside from being able to use my Ipod Touch for Literacy, I have not had many opportunities to use it in the classroom.  Maybe this will change when I take over my 4^th grade classroom in April, but for now, it's difficult to find the time to use it.  I feel like I can see use in the bigger picture, but when I'm co-teaching and/or only teaching a couple of lessons a day, there's not too much time to teach the kids what they need to know about the technology for it to be successful.  

I can see using the touches for my own purposes in terms of recording running record assessments or recording student interviews, but in terms of differentiating instruction, I'm not sure how it can work logistically with just one ipod touch. I feel like those that get to use it will be a distraction to the ones that don't and it may hurt more than it helps, having only one.   

Technology in the Classroom

After spending the last couple of weeks getting acquainted with my Ipod Touch (and reacquainted with the students in my main placement), I'm noticing more and more ways in which the Ipod Touch can help differentiate instruction. There are quite a few "endearing quirks" that would benefit from different resources that some of these apps have to offer.

While I'm not a huge fan of learning math through repetitious drill exercises, there are 1 or 2 students for whom their lack of speed with basic multiplication, division, addition and subtraction facts is significantly holding them back in learning new math concepts. The "Basic Math" app drills students on all basic math operations and could help these students improve on their accuracy and speed so that the rest of their work was hindered. This would be something they could work on while the class is finishing up on morning routines. The extra 10 or so minutes per day would help keep these facts fresh in their head.

I also have a student who is working on, in reading, reading fluently to help the text make more sense. When she reads aloud, she tends to plow through text with little attention to punctuation. The ability to read aloud, record herself and listen to those recordings could help her notice points in the text where she needs to speed up or slow down, hopefully improving her comprehension.

One student in my main placement struggles a lot with learning disabilities that affect her writing and especially her reading. She is constantly frustrated because her reading level is not near that of the rest of her classmates. She does, however, love writing and she and I have talked quite a bit about how she would much rather read books she writes herself. Her learning disability causes some difficulties with writing as well, but she loves to write and tell stories. Lately, I've been trying to think of a way to use her love of writing to help her reading as well. Using the Writer's Studio App, she would be able to create her own stories with pictures and then read them aloud as well.