Differentiated Instruction is an instructional philosophy that increases learning for ALL students. The concept of differentiated instruction is based on the fact that students come to school with a wide range of experiences and prior knowledge, variances in academic ability, learning styles, and interests. When teachers differentiate instruction, they use a variety of practices and strategies to match learners’ needs with appropriate materials.
There is a myriad of Web 2.0 tools available for the educational setting that embraces differentiated instruction. Check these out…
It is that time of year. Time to dream. Time to wish. Time to hope that our students at Woodland will continue to access technology in a way that prepares them for their future of learning and working in the digital world.
Woodland is fortunate to have a strong PTA that values technology in education; that values our teachers’ efforts to engage students in real life learning.
It is time for our technology team to formulate a wish list of technology devices to support learning at Woodland. Our team is made up of representatives from all seven grade levels. Membership includes our technology integration specialist (me), library media specialist, technology support specialist, technology ESP, principal, and resource manager.
We are a strong team. We are informed and open to possibilities.
It is time to create a prioritized technology wish list. We will give our list to our PTA partners and hope for the best.
Imagine students spending the school day immersed in projects, and then during “homework time” at home settling in at their computer, iPod or other device to watch or listen to on-demand podcasts from their teacher and other experts presenting content.
In an inverted classroom, passive activities such as listening to lectures and content presentations occur outside the school day. During the school day, in the presence of their teacher, students engage in deeper learning through hands-on learning activities. A result of the inverted classroom model is more quality time with the teacher, as opposed to the teacher often in front of the students delivering instruction.
The inverted classroom model is ideal for the university setting, where the in-class experience is currently more lecture oriented, but what could be the implications at the elementary setting? Certainly something worth pondering…
One thing for certain is that there is an expectation that higher education students have off site access to wired technology. But, this can’t be assumed for the elementary or even secondary student. The question arises, “is digital access a right?” Ease of access is critical to a discussion of inverting our classrooms.
iGoogle is your personalized homepage. You can customize the page with its own theme and your choice of a wide variety of gadgets. Gadgets come in lots of different forms and provide access to activities and information from all across the web. Gadgets that I have on my personal iGoogle page include views of my Gmail, Facebook and Twitter accounts. I also have CNN news headlines, local weather information, spotlighted YouTube videos and a notepad for entering my tasks.
If you have a Gmail account, you automatically have iGoogle. Check it out! If you need help getting started with iGoogle, click here.
About Google Image Swirl (this information is from the GIS Help page)
Google Image Swirl organizes image search results based on their visual and semantic similarities and presents them in an intuitive exploratory interface. To learn more about this project, see our Google Research blog post.
How does this work?
Google Image Swirl combines a variety of image similarity features with additional metadata about the images to build a hierarchy of clusters of image search results.
What are the system requirements?
This demo requires Javascript to be enabled and a Flash plugin to be installed in order to work. It has been tested on Linux (Chrome and Firefox), Windows (Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera) and Mac OS/X (Chrome, Safari, Firefox).
Why are there images in clusters which don’t belong?
The clustering algorithm is fully automatic, and far from perfect. In most cases, computer vision cannot tell us what actually present in an image, and without this semantic information, mistakes will happen. We welcome your feedback about cases which work well and which need more work.
Why can’t I type any query I want?
Image Swirl currently works for more than 200,000 queries and we plan to include more queries in the future. Available queries will auto-complete as you start to type in teh search box, similar to Google Suggest.
Our 6th Grade e-Mentoring program with General Mills kicked off this week. What a wonderful opportunity for our students to connect with a business professional/writing mentor. It is terrific for our students to have another caring adult in their lives as well as another audience for their writing.
Each week through March, 6th grade students will exchange weekly emails with their mentors. Students include an assigned paragraph and a personal message. Mentors respond with editing and revision suggestions for the student assignments and also include a personal message.
The General Mills mentors will be coming to Woodland on December 10th for a pizza party. In the spring, students will take a field trip to General Mills.
This program has had great success over the years in improving the quality of student writing at Woodland.
Have you ever wondered how much information Google has collected on you? Organized by product, the Google Dashboard page displays product-specific data that’s associated with your Google Account. Click here and log in to your Google Account to view your Google Dashboard.
You can subscribe to my blog or any other by using a reader or aggregator. There are many readers and aggregators available, including Google, My Yahoo, Netvibes, Odeo, Newsgator and PageFlakes. Below is a quick tutorial for using PageFlakes to stay current with the blogs you are following. The other readers and aggregators work in a similar fashion.
During the past week, third graders in Mrs. Goodrich’s room had multiple opportunities to use iPods to enrich their learning. A cart of 20 iPods are available for check-out through the District Media and Technology Department. Mrs. Goodrich used the iPods with her homeroom and leveled reading class. Math, Reading, and Science applications were synced from Mrs. Goodrich’s school iTunes account. Individually or in pairs, third graders worked through a series of activities that included apps, podcasts, and a science video. Students did some writing about life cycles, comparing their curriculum studies with real life application after viewing the video.
Mrs. Drake’s and Mrs. Provart’s 5th graders will be using the iPod cart for about ten days in January. iPods and learning are a great combination at Woodland!
Google Custom Search is a great tool for directed, intentional, safe web searches for students. With GCS, you can give your students authentic search experiences in a safe environment. You determine the sites that students are searching, and you can also scaffold student learning by adding key word suggestions to the search page. Here are some great resources to aid you in developing your own GCS (Google Custom Search):
