Article of the Month « Tech Lab
Differentiated Instruction and Technology
By John Berliner
The Tech Lab affords us some unique and effective opportunities for differentiated instruction.
For example, students whose concerns with penmanship may hinder their writing development can benefit significantly from a keyboard-based approach. One teacher reported that several of her students' compositional skills have been markedly different (and superior) when created on a computer than when written out by hand.
To take another instance, it is quite common to see kids who have not yet developed full confidence in public speaking or presentation displaying a surprisingly rich public voice through movies or slide shows.
In cases like these, technology enables young learners to effectively participate in the academic and social life of the group, and to function within the range of standards and norms for their class, while they continue to improve their developing skills in parallel.
