I began thinking about this assignment in terms of what I wanted to improve in the classroom before deciding on a technology to use. I didn't want to identify a specific "problem" but rather an area that needs improvement.
Last school year I taught 2nd grade as my student teaching internship. A topic of conversation that constantly came up between my mentor teacher and I was the discussion of differentiating instruction. We had a very challenging classroom with students ranging from a kindergarten to a 4th grade reading level. We also had all the resource students in the 2nd grade packed into our classroom. I had one autistic, one emotionally impaired, and one dyslexic/learning disabled. We also had a handful of students who qualified to see the reading and math specialist, speech pathologist, and school social worker. With that being said, I was very challenged as an intern to differentiate my lessons to fit the needs of ALL of my students. I believe that every student in my classroom had the right to an equal chance of succeeding in my classroom (and I would assume most teachers have this same belief). I was constantly searching and creating lesson plans and accommodating to make sure I was reaching and engaging every learner in my classroom.
My hope is that my technology plan will greatly aid in differentiating instruction and making sure that all students are achieving at their very own highest level possible.
Nicole, (this is Carolyn your instructor) - this looks like a great problem to tackle. Do some brainstorming around different potential solutions before settling on one. You could use your blog her to do that, or do one in a graphic organizer which you could link to (bubbl.us, gliffy, even Prezi). Some things that come to mind if you have a center that has a computer at it - creating resources (perhaps on a blog, in a bookmarking site, ...) around your lessons that would be differentiated by reading level - like NetTrekker provides (free through LearnPort to all MI teachers). You might create some assignments electronically where students would click on specific ones which are assigned, you might identify online media resources which support different skill areas which are interactive. Then there's the assessment and data part - You could focus your problem on learning to query and manipulate the data available to make it easier to identify and then focus on individual student needs - eg. learning to use Excel and functions such as filtering, sorting, ... You might focus in on learning in more depth about the electronic assessment resources available to you and how to use them to target instruction. Just some thoughts.
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