Analogue & Digital Differentiation By Mark Anderson Differentiation can take place in lots of different ways. The old classics are differentiation by outcome and differentiation by task, but these, like many methods, can rely heavily on the teacher’s input. I remember working for hour upon hours to create and adapt work for individual students. But there are many more ways to differentiate learning. Nowadays, I use a variety of more finely tuned methods and I make a use of technology to aid the process. Top and Tail Many teachers aim for the middle ground of a class. However, why not ‘top and tail’ each activity with activities and strategies to support, scaffold and extend students, depending on their abilities. To extend students who finish a task more quickly, why not get them to complete a more difficult extended digital version of the activity. Not only does this stretch them, but it can also provide useful materials to share and even use as part of a starter for the next lesson. For example, in a Geography class you may be researching something and extension activity could be a report to the UN about climate change or whatever the topic is. This would give the children the opportunity to develop literacy and use of technology, which will have wider positive impact for the student. Another favourite of mine is to use Socrative, an online real-time quiz platform. I ask students to log in as a teacher and create their own quiz questions based upon the topic being studied to reinforce their learning from the lesson. I ask them to share the SOC code with me and if time, I use the quiz as part of the lesson plenary. Don’t worry too much if they get the answers to their own questions
wrong - That’s part of the learning process and can easily be correctly by the students or by you if necessary. To scaffold the lesson for those students who might need it, why not have a QR code which links to a page with all of the key words and their definitions or even add the key words to a worksheet page. This will support students with a variety of literacy and language needs. Creating wall displays with the key words, such as the one below, is a simple thing to do with technology.
Try the free App - Moldiv for iOS, which allows you to arrange images and write on them. This example took only five minutes to create.