In a follow-up to his May 11 Education Week piece, “How to Improve Teacher Quality? Treat Teachers Like Individuals,” Greg Gunn, a venture partner at City Light Capital, wrote about the intersection between technology and differentiated instruction on Education Week’s Futures of School Reform blog. One statement in the post shocked us as much as it had Mr. Gunn. Gunn quotes a prominent educator who says that “teaching and learning is a human process, and there is no place for technology in it.”
In some ways, this educator’s got it right; technology can’t replace or even mirror the human touch of an experienced and dedicated classroom teacher who has the unmatched compassion, discipline, adaptability, and wisdom to customize her curriculum to meet the needs of her students.
However, there is no question that technology is a tool that can help even the most exceptional teachers to support and improve classroom lessons. Every day, we see firsthand and hear about teachers using computers, interactive whiteboards, iPads, podcasts and more to illuminate and build on classroom instruction.
Let’s take differentiated instruction, the subject of the Ed Week article. The job of a teacher (already hard) has become even harder as teachers are asked to take each learning objective and customize it to the needs of every child in the classroom. Our best 21st century technologies do just that, offering diverse paths to learning, from something simple like a change in font or voice to something more complex like progressively more sophisticated activities and lessons.
What are your thoughts? What was your best teaching moment using technology?
Reading and re-reading are necessary steps to improve fluency and comprehension, however, it can be challenging to find innovative, authentic ways to encourage students to read the same work over and over again.
As many of you know from experience, Reader’s Theater asks students to reproduce written work using voice alone (no props, sets, and costumes), providing a legitimate rationale for re-reading. In the process of using the scripts and performing, students demonstrate marked gains in literacy including, but not limited to, a more complete understanding of how to read expressively by achieving the right volume, pitch, tone and timing.
A interesting study by Sheri Vasinda and Julie McLeod (conducted and published earlier this year in The Reading Teacher) points out that by thoughtfully pairing technologies with literacy strategies, teachers can reinvent and reinforce tried and true classroom techniques like Reader’s Theater.
In their study, Vasinda and McLeod seek to incorporate 21st century technology – in the form of podcasts – to further enhance the impact of the Reader’s Theater experience. The study followed six classes (100 students in total) for 10 weeks. Each week, the students chose a new script to practice and perform by week’s end, then recorded the scripts on existing classroom computers using external microphones and free software (about $10 worth of technology).
Even though technology can occasionally detract or complicate the goals of a classroom, the findings from this study demonstrate that the use of podcasting actually complements and reinforces the benefits of Reader’s Theater. The results show that in this case technology offers students:
- A wider audience for their work, further reinforcing the significance of the overall exercise
- A more permanent illustration of their work, allowing for review and self-evaluation to make changes for the next time
- An inexpensive and easy way of capturing the student voice, while maintaining the integrity of the Reader’s Theater experience
- A relatively concealed method for the students to express themselves anonymously, allowing the students to read and be in character without feeling overly self-conscious
Have you ever captured a Reader’s Theater performance either aurally or on video? If so, please share your experiences… we would love to hear (and learn) from you!
