Thing 6-Differentiation

Elements of differentiated instruction I use in my classroom:

• Flexible grouping in reading and math, where the students break into small groups to learn or practice.
• Kagan Cooperative learning to address classroom management.
• Pre, during, and post assessment using A-Z Reading to benchmark, Dibels, Phonics for Reading, and Delta Math.
• Formative assessment during lessons using powerpoint to pose questions and ABCD cards that students hold up to answer the questions.
• I address recognition learning by using websites, powerpoints, youtube, document camera, virtual manipulatives, manipulatives, picture books, and traditional written examples.
• I use Kagan Cooperative learning strategies to engage all learners, which also allows me to use multiple learning structures in a lesson to learn and practice their skills

The Talking Text feature would be very useful for some of my struggling readers and writers in my 3rd grade class.  The talking text feature will read individual words or the whole section of text to the student.  Another valuable part of this feature is that it will highlight the word as the computer reads the text.  This feature could really be helpful to ELL learners and struggling readers because they could listen to the text or specific words and then go back and try reading it on their own to practice becoming a better reader.  It could also be used in writing because the kids can type in their paper and then have it read back to them so they can hear if their writing make sense or if they have grammatical mistakes.

Content area reflection:  Reading/Literacy Support- This resource is about using technology to support all students in learning to read.  It discusses using audio formats such as CD players, MP3 players, and playaways that you can gain access to materials for them from the local library, remc, and from the text book publishers.  This resource also offers a downloadable pdf to find online storybooks for teachers and many of the sites are free.  Finally, it gives links for free downloads of text to speech applications.

I think this could be really useful in coordination with Prezi presentations.  For example, the phases of the moon Prezi I made has some challenging words in it.  This could help struggling readers so that they wouldn't need to read the words, instead they could listen to it.