One of the ideas that we discussed here in the past few months was the concept of modifying or designing courseware tools to support differentiated instruction. The faculty recognize that there are learners in every classroom with different accessibility requirements or preferences as well as different learning styles. They have incorporated this idead into the goals of the college to ensure that each teacher candidate in the School of Education:
- Plans & implements lessons to meaningfully engage all learners (Proficiency 3.2)
- Makes effective use of assessment data to plan for and adapt instruction for individuals and groups (Proficiency 4.3)
When we look at the current offering of tools and systems available to support these goals, we don’t find much. Many courseware systems take a very traditional approach toward student work. An examination of the assignment services in Sakai, Blackboard and WebCT and even our own current homegrown system (Dialogue) provide little or nothing that would allow a teacher to assign an assignment to just one student or group in the class. Imagine a teacher who might be trying to teach her class about the US Constitution. Her class consists of:
- a majority of students who have been able to read and understand the textbook in the past
- a few students who have learned previous lessons better when they watched a movie and discussed it together
- a few students who have done well after performing a web quest activity on the internet
How would that teacher break the class up and use these different techniques in a courseware management system? Would a courseware management system be able to suggest different lesson ideas to this teacher that might satisfy these different learner profiles? Should it? Library resource integration into courseware is upon us.
Twin Peaks is a library resource querying tool that is being integrated into Sakai now. It strikes me that the ability to query learning object repositories with tools like Twin Peaks to support differentiated instruction and suggest a variety of resources that a teacher might use to satisfy her lesson goals would be in line with some core ideas here at Syracuse.
