Thing 5 -

Differnetiated Learning - Many of the key elements in the guide for differentiation are already incorporated into most of the activities that we do in the media center at varying levels.  The teachers I work with and myself are always trying to improve the lessons and increase student involvement and choices, some topics are easier to do this with than others.  We use a variety of methods to introduce and explain topics, our lessons are align with our learning goals, we group students differently for different activities and try to allow choice whenever possible.  We spend time explain key concepts as class and to individuals, we encourage students to explain to each other and offer different views and ideas. We assess and adjust assignments while we are working on them, offering more directions or clarifying if needed and changing end products when that is needed. 
I would list the following as commonly used elements that we continue to try to improve on:

·         Several elements and materials are used to support instructional content.

·         Align tasks and objectives to learning goals.

·         Instruction is concept-focused and principle-driven.

·         Flexible grouping is consistently used.

·         Clarify key concepts and generalizations.

·         Initial and on-going assessment of student readiness and growth are essential.

·         Vary expectations and requirements for student responses.

Some key elements are often incorporated are but are more difficult to include, activities that  would make these more common have been eliminated due to time constraint on trimesters.  Often time I feel we have cut out the activities that would allow students to evaluate themselves and take time to learn skills from the activity and not just the required information.  Getting students to take an active role in their education and engaging students in all the lessons can be difficult on a time line.  Adapting ways to quickly include these in lessons is an ongoing goal.

·         Use assessment as a teaching tool to extend rather than merely measure instruction.

·         Emphasize critical and creative thinking as a goal in lesson design.

·         Students are active and responsible explorers.

Diverse Learning - Several sections highlight ideas that can easily be used with any student to improve the students’ experience.  Improving digital text and the audio sections suggest ways for students with visual and learning disabilities to easily use technology.  Simple steps such as making the text larger, the ability to highlight, and text to voice help reading and writing.  The webpages with links to digital books, audio books, and tools for enhancing text .  The great thing is that these tools can be used to help any of our learners not just students that qualify for the extra help.  These tools can help be shown to students as resources, simply showing a class how to enlarge the text on a webpage or digital document will help many of our visually impaired students quickly without singling them out.  Teaching students to highlight text will benefit all of our students.  Audio books work for struggling readers, visually impaired, and English as a second language.  

UDL - NetTrekker

Nettrekker makes it easy to find reviewed resources that include summaries and reading levels so that I can sort through and find the most appropriate sources quickly.  I like being able to see a reading level.   When I put sources together for students, I like to include a variety of sources to make sure I cover the information the students need and have the information in a format that they can use.  I like to include different reading levels and visual tools.

I wish I could have students log in to Nettrekker so they could use it to search and so that they could use the Read Aloud tool. 

Text-to-Audio Conversion Assignment

 Very Cool.  I think I will start including a link to this tool on all of my web pages.  I post my notes and handouts on the webpages with the resources for projects.  If I had a link to Vozme, students will be able to highlight and have directions read to them and have sections of the webpages read.  While we always go over directions as a class, many students need to review the directions as they are working, this could help many of the students that need extra help and time to understand the directions.  By putting a link on my library pages students could also have easy access to the webpage for other assignments.  Many students need to “chunk” the directions, this would enable them to do that without asking for the directions to be read again.  I also like the idea that the file could be saved.  This does give me the idea though that maybe I should include an audio of the directions right on the webpage to begin with.