Differentiation: Technology levels a playing field

This week I had the opportunity to team teach with a colleague. It is so rare in the middle school world to be able to teach with another adult in your classroom. Sure, people come and observe, you may be able to catch a lesson or two on your prep period, but it isn't the same as collaborating all day with someone.
This past week over half our students went to sixth grade camp. Holly French and I decided to put our classes together and experiment with a new program using the iPods called Storykit. Our students created Haiku poems, downloaded images to match their work, and then created a 6 page book highlighting themselves as authors, and the poetry they had written. I would put a sample here but I haven't quite figured out how to download and share it yet. That will happen later in the week and I will post some student work.

The project itself is pretty great. Next week students will read their work, building an oral component into the lesson and we will once again use our fluency scoring guide to monitor our progress as performance readers.

But I think the greatest lesson of all this week, was that using technology as a tool levels the playing field. I had my intervention class and my honors class working together on this project. I would defy anyone observing the students working together to declare who was honors, and who needed extra help. In fact, it would have been impossible. All the students were engaged, coaching each other on what they learned about the program as they produced their books, and no one waited for someone to do it for them. By the end of the day, one of my students wrote a ten step list on how to use Storykit so when our classes return they too will be able to use the application quickly.

I read an article this weekend that I have attached to this post. It is called
"Are You Making These Four Differentiation Mistakes?" by Robyn Jackson at ACSD.

Here is a quote describing one of these mistakes:
"Differentiating by achievement level rather than by students' current learning level. Some will tell you that there are three kinds of students - high, medium, and low. But this distinction is not very useful. There are times when a student you consider to be in your high group will struggle with the content. Other time, students in your low group will sail through an activity, outperforming the students in your high group. Because students bring a variety of skills and experiences to the classroom, classifying them as high, medium, and low doesn't really help you adjust your instruction effectively to meet their complex needs. These static groupings also limit students. Once you start thinking about students in these ways, it is difficult to see them any other way. Differentiating by achievement level often results in lowered expectations for struggling students and extra work for advanced students. Lowering the target for some students while raising the learning target for others is not differentiation - it's tracking. Real differentiation takes into account where students are at a particular point in time. It doesn't label kids "low", "average," and "advanced"; it groups students by their current understanding of the content and processes involved in a particular learning activity and then provides students with the targeted supports they need to successfully master that activity."

Are You Making these Four Differentiated Instruction Mistakes? - Washington, DC, United States, ASCD EDge Blog post

This is something that I have always believed, and in grouping our students randomly this week, this was action research proving that exact point. As we look to using technology in our classes, it shouldn't be about replacing core learning, it should be about offering a variety of options for students to use to display what they have learned, and more importantly, how they learn it.

Something interesting to consider til we post next week.

P.S. Check out some of the blogs I am following, and please feel free to suggest some other sites out there that would be helpful as we move forward.

Teaching Screenagers

 This is my new term of the month:

screenagers                        

A term that combines two words to describe "teenagers who are online" and who are "always looking at the screen."
Also defined as: "wired teens or the much sought after marketing demographic of 18-24 year olds who grew up in front of a TV/computer screen."

See also : generation Y  mouse potato  

The cover of Educational Leadership 

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership.aspxboasts  dedicates a full issue of their magazine dedicated to this concept. As I become more and more engrossed in this iPod adventure, I am quickly coming to realize these are difficult waters to navigate. Each day I evaluate not only who I am teaching, what I am asking them to accomplish, but how will technology enhance or deviate from my objectives for the day?

Daily I am inundated with articles about technology in the classroom. Here are links to just a few of the articles that appeared in my inbox this week.

Does Facebook inspire us or stress us?  Read each of these and decide for yourself.


Stressed out by Facebook? Study shows some users experience anxiety

 How schools should use social media to communicate

Is technology expanding or lacking in our countries rural areas?

Digital divide persists as Obama reaches out to tech leaders on innovation, education

Rural districts use technology to expand distance learning

• Rural districts use technology to expand distance learning
• Rural districts use technology to expand distance learning

Do we push forward in technology creating 1 to 1 schools or do budget restraints make that impossible?

Report sounds warning bell on implementing education reforms
An iPad for Every Student; Now What?

  What is our role as teachers of social justice and digital citizens? Oh, and by the way while we are at it, lets make sure we cover every standard emphasized on the California STAR assessment. Keep on pace, but innovate, that is the message of the day. And most days I think we do that pretty well.

As the CST looms over the next few months, I am coming to realize more and more that the children I teach and interact with each day are so much more than a single test score. Being part of this project has forced me to put my lessons under an entirely new lens. So the next obvious step, is when will the assessment we use to judge the success of our students match this innovation in instruction? If we put the world in their hands as a resource, and take it all away when we assess on paper and pencil, is that really an accurate reflection on what we have learned together this year?

So one answer is to have multiple assessments. Not wanting to wait for the next big thing to be created, our class has decided to create our own reflection/evaluation.
Each student will still take the  California STAR assessment, however, they will also create a digital portfolio, highlighting some of their best creative work this year. What that looks like remains to be seen, but I am sure I can find some ideas on line! 

Another interesting article and website

Closing the Achievement Gap Without Widening a Racial One - California Teachers Association

http://sdawp.ucsd.edu/  San Diego Area Writing Project

What is a Digital Footprint?

Working with students in technology is a joy and a challenge. What I have discovered about our journey is that my students don't truly understand the idea of "Digital Footprint" or that your life on line stays with you. This week some students attempted to go to some sites that were not appropriate, and others just wasted time looking up images or information off the topic. I took the opportunity this week to teach a lesson on Digital Dossier. Take a look at this video, it was a great discussion point for our class.

After we viewed this video we discussed our roles and responsibilities we have as Digital Citizens. I find it fascinating that our kids are so immersed in technology, yet they don't know that what they put out there stays out there. Food for thought as we move forward.

Fundamental Changes take time... but not as long as I thought

It is important to note that when I began this project I had little to no experience with iPods or apps or even downloading music. What I now know to be true is that it doesn't matter, our kids do.  This has been an incredible adventure. My students use these tools as if they had been in our classroom always. I continually find new ways to enhance instruction using these tools. For example, when we were reading an article on Ancient Egypt, students stopped, pulled up their iPods looked up areas of Egypt on Google maps. Suddenly, those pyramids of long ago were alive and well in the palm of our hands.
When students need to know the meaning of a word as they read, they pull out their iPods and use dictionary.com to look it up then and there. They are tools, not toys and enhance rather than replace what is going on in our instruction. I didn't realize they would be entrenched in our work so quickly.

As I sit here on a Sunday night to plan, my iPod sits beside me so I can test an app, look up something the way my students might, and plan differently, with the goal of bringing technology into the lessons. For example, this next week my honors students are writing for a debate. Tomorrow not only will they read articles and structure their support for cell phone use on campus, they will use the iPods to look up research both for and against cell phones on campus to enhance the work that has already been done in their outlines. It will be quick, and will lead to the next discussion, which is what is credible evidence and how do you know? One important discussion will have to be how to evaluate articles and "facts" we find on the web.

Another cool thing to note, we took our Chapter 6 test in English this past week, and all classes improved in reading comprehension yet again. My classes used to range from 20 percent to 75 percent in this area, and last week the the range went from 68 to 100 percent. I think we are beginning to gather the data that supports students recording themselves and listening and scoring their prosody on a rubric. It seems to be making a significant difference both in their confidence as readers and their comprehension.

Is everything wonderful in iPodland? That would be a "nope". We still have difficulty downloading the student voices, a few students have discovered the camera and have saved pictures that need to be deleted and we still can't get videos on the iPods without some serious tech support intervention, but I am confident by the end of February that will be solved.

Looking forward to creating Egypt mini reports using Storybooklite and to continue to record our voices reading text, this time with a focus on non-fiction. Stay tuned to what will happen next!!

iPods: Making a Difference in Reading Comprehension

The use of iPods has become somewhat routine in our classroom now. Students use the iPods routinely, at least 3 to 4 times per week. We use them as responders by writing our answers on the iPod and sharing with the group. A favorite app is dictionary.com that we use at least twice a week to work on vocabulary development. We have just started creating flashcards using the free app iFlashcards to review key vocabulary and content in history. Just last week, we began to use video. Students partnered up and took a video of each other reading their goal sentences. We read and excerpt from David Pink's book Drive called "What's your sentence?". Students then developed their own sentence defining their goal for a decade from now. We plan on combining this work into an iMovie in our afterschool computer writing group, "Writing for Change." The motivation and innovation continues six weeks into this project.

One of my key questions for this year is "Will increased prosody "fluency" improve student reading comprehension?" Rather than leveling the fluency reading practice to individualized reading levels and completing a quick daily fluency practice, we are looking at something a little different. Students are exposed to the grade level material at least twice through the iPod during the week we explore a text. Here are some notes from the past two selections in Holt Chapter 6, grade level 6.

In two of our periods, students use the iPods to listen to the class story once, then the second time, read along with the iPod to improve their prosody. Students reported that it was helpful to read along with the story, and with everyone wearing headphones, there wasn't any stigma as students explored intonation and pacing or volume. I was able to walk around and take notes on my target kids or pull a student or two to record their voice using the voice recorder. Students have also reported that they like the opportunity to pause the story and repeat a section to clarify something or highlight and answer from the text.

Students then record a selection from the story, this week from the realistic fiction piece Eleven by Sandra Cisneros. They read a short passage from the story and scored it on our Prosody scoring guide to reflect on strengths and weaknesses. I will then pull the student recordings and the student scored guide and give me own feedback. 

Students take a selection test at the end of each story. Students do not use the iPod for this test, as we want to measure what students will do independently. Here is something interesting I am tracking, and that is the reading comprehension scores on these tests.


In one period, most students in the class tested FBB or BB on the STAR assessment last Spring. Students have been using grade level curriculum with support strategies including repeated reading and choral reading. In the past two assessments, students in the class went from a class average of 66 % before iPods to our most recent score of 85.7 percent. A growth of over 20 percent!

In another period, all students scored Advanced on the STAR assessment last Spring. Since using the iPods in class, we have noticed students continue to average 90 percent or better on selection tests.

In my third period, students range from Basic to Proficient on their STAR assessment last Spring. In the past two assessment, students in this class went from a class average of 75 percent to 86 percent, again significant growth of 10 percent.

It will be interesting to study how students will perform on the Chapter tests given every 4 to 6 weeks. We have used iPods this entire chapter so I am hopeful that this progress will cross into that assessment as well.

Reading on an iPod, love it and hate it.

So this week my period 6 students read A Christmas Carol using the iPods with a program called iFlowReader. The kids took to it right away, took us less than 5 minutes to get set up with our readers. It is really cool that the program remembers where they left off from the previous read. The kids could change the background and the font to make it easier for them to read. What was interesting this week is to watch them be so engaged. We have had many visitors come to class and my kids don't really notice them come and go because they are busy reading. What I find a challenge at this point is to figure out the pacing. We have a lot to read in a short amount of time and the students are spending entire periods engrossed in the text. Nothing wrong with that, but it is difficult to access what we need to do as a support them when all they do is silent read and generate a few notes. So this weekend I have sent home copies of two chapters so we can respond in class as well as in notes or on Edmodo.

I think the greatest change for me over these past few weeks is how I address my planning. How can I use technology to enhance not supplant good instruction.

Week 1, Learning how to record

Today students learned how to use the iTalklite app. What fun we had last week learning how to record and discuss that new word of the week, prosody. We are looking to continue our work with fluency this week. My classes are doing a great job learning how to record and save their work and create files on the iPod. It is a little hectic with 3 periods using the tools per day, learning how to create files and respecting the space of others.
It was suggested we pilot with just one class, but honestly, which class would I choose when they all have something to bring to the table.

This past week we took our assessment using the iPod. We recorded ourselves reading the selection, then students could go back and listen to the piece, stop when they needed to and used it as a tool to help them better understand the story. Although we are still tallying the scores, classes are definitely improving in the area of reading comprehension. One class showed a reading comprehension score improvement of over 30 percent. The implications of the additional vocal practice is promising.

This week one class will read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens on the iPod. How amazing that a 19th century piece will be read and studied using 21st century tools.

My other two classes will continue with reading text in class, but also writing their own version of "The Night Before Christmas" and recording it using iTalk. Eventually we will create movies but not just yet.