Dive Brief:

• Stephanie Shaw, teacher of the year for the Mooresville Intermediate School in North Carolina, uses Google Docs, Sheets and Forms to give kids targeted interventions and let them track their own learning progress.
• Ed Tech Magazine reports the fourth grade teacher uses videos as a tool for remediation, creating them and embedding them in Google Forms quizzes so students get a demonstration about how to accurately solve the problem if they answer incorrectly.
• Shaw’s students update their own spreadsheets, entering results from their skills tests and watching low scores turn red and intermediate scores turn yellow, which creates a visual reminder for each student about where he or she needs help.

Dive Insight:

Teachers have been differentiating instruction for decades as a best practice that addresses the problem of heterogeneous classrooms. Students learn at their own pace and a classroom with even a small number of students is bound to have a range of learning styles with children at different stages of understanding for any given topic. Technology gives teachers far greater power to personalize instruction so every student can get the support he or she needs.

It takes work to learn the skills for such personalization, however, and district administrators need to support professional learning for teachers. Asking all-star teachers to lead workshops explaining their own strategies can give colleagues ideas from which they can pull best practices. Teachers often have few opportunities to observe each other so these collaborative sessions can be eye-opening.