This document discusses how technology and differentiated instruction can be used together through project-based learning and challenge-based learning to maximize learning impact. It provides examples of digital tools that can be used to construct meaning, demonstrate understanding, and appeal to multiple intelligences. These include audio, video, photo, and drawing tools. It also outlines characteristics of effective performance tasks and how project-based learning and challenge-based learning align with 21st century skills. The document challenges the reader to develop a project-based or challenge-based learning unit that leverages technology and differentiated strategies.
3. Maximum Impact
• Creative Digital Media Tools
• Constructing meaning
• Demonstrating understanding
• Tapping multiple intelligences and modalities
• Developing personalized mnemonic devices
8. Characteristics of
Performance Tasks
Realistically contextualized
Requires judgment and innovation
Student must “do” the subject
Replicates situations that “test” adults
Negotiating a complex, multi-stage task
Opportunities to rehearse & get feedback
–from UbD, 2nd ed., pp. 153-155
10. Challenge
• Develop or Enhance a PBL or CBL Unit or
Professional Learning Experience
• Make sure technology and DI strategies
work together to maximize learning impact
• Share your plans on the Tech4DI wiki
Notes de l'éditeur
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Technology tools can enhance what we already do in education. It can automate, accelerate, and facilitate. Of course, it can also frustrate and obfuscate when it doesn't work or when it is used gratuitously. But technology can also transform teaching and learning. It can connect students across the town or around the globe, publish student work, and challenge student thinking in ways never before possible. This is where it can have its maximum impact.\n\nCurrent influences that are having transformative effects include Web 2.0 tools, the growing adoption of mobile devices, and flipped classrooms. Web 2.0 tools offer unprecedented tools and many are free. See the directories on the wiki, but be aware that some may not be available on your school network. Desktop computers have given way to laptops which are now being challenged by smart phones and tablets, but there are important reasons for using all of these devices. Mobile devices, however, are easier to carry and quicker to make use of in almost any location. Flipped classrooms means preparing and delivering new content to students using self-made or available videos or other media outside of class time so more teacher student interaction can focus on supporting student learning and so students can easily review, replay, and stop/pause delivery according to their own pace.\n
One of the International Society for Technology in Education's National Technology Standards for Students is Creativity & Innovation. Technology continues to offer an incredible array of tools to help students express their creativity in a wide variety of media. High quality products are now within the reach of all students regardless of how they learn or can express themselves otherwise.\n\nI’ve included the link to the NETS standards for students, and PBL and CBL certainly address all these standards. However, the standard of Creativity and Innovation, in particular, is not and probably cannot be assessed on standardized tests. PBL and CBL offers the opportunity to do that through performance assessment.\n
These are just a few examples of technology tools that may be available to teachers and students. On the wiki are links to lists of these and other tools. Others not listed here include Sketch Up where students can create 3-D modeling and even associate it with locations in Google Earth. The most powerful uses of these creative tools, however, is done in collaborative efforts and in the context of PBL or CBL where students are challenged to make real world applications of their learning.\n\nExplore the rest of this wiki for many more examples of how technology and differentiated instruction can be combined for powerful was to engage and inspire student learning. There are additional resources at the bottom of the presentation page on the wiki as well as the rest of the wiki to explore on your own. And don’t forget, this is a public wiki -- you can contribute to it also!\n
Differentiated Instruction is an instructional framework. Understanding by Design is a curriculum development framework. Both are guided by and informed by Curriculum Standards and the desire to prepare our students for the 21st Century. There are a set of specific instructional strategies that have been clearly shown by research to be effective, and robust and rigorous formative and performance assessment provides actual evidence of real learning. \n\nAt the nexus of these frameworks and attributes of good educational practice, Project Based Learning and Challenge Based Learning offers the best possible means of pulling all of these together in a meaningful manner. Not only are students more engaged, but they are challenged to do more rigorous work, and they have the opportunity to draw on their own interests and skills to contribute to a group product not typically feasible through individual effort.\n
PBL or CBL provides for ample opportunities to differentiate learning as well as to acknowledge and allow student differences to be assets rather than obstacles to be overcome or “fixed.”\n
Apple’s CBL is a framework that builds on the principles of PBL and emphasizes student ownership, authentic challenges that lead to action-based solutions, and transformative use of technology throughout.\n
Assessment of CBL is necessarily performance-based. It is real, it has authentic audiences, and it demonstrates understanding. And students are involved in self-evaluation and reflection.\n
Differentiated Instruction does not change or diminish accountability for ensuring students learn and achieve critical understanding of learning standards and benchmarks. With the disaggregated data now available from standardized testing, more detailed information about individual student progress is and should be available to classroom teachers to inform their instructional planning. Technology can and should facilitate this process, and it can also make the curriculum development and implementation process far more functional and practical.\n\nThe wiki has a link to an article about choosing a student information system as well as a link to PowerSchool which I am familiar with, but there are many student information systems available.\n\nI also have embedded a video of Heidi Hayes Jacobs about what curriculum mapping is along with a link to Curricuplan, an online\n