At the School of the Arts (SOTA), teachers recognise that every student is uniquely and artistically talented. A challenge in such an environment is in responding to each student’s unique learning style and needs. The school has adopted Differentiated Instruction (DI) to help students tackle the rigorous curriculum and encourages the use of ICT to design learning experiences that would engage students for deep learning. In this presentation, participants will appreciate how teachers can facilitate DI through the use of ICT tools such as Nearpod. Such tools can be used to limit distraction and multitasking during a lesson by broadcasting content and interactive learning activities/exercises to individual student devices in real-time.
This approach also allows teachers to provide real-time support and encouragement to boast engagement in individual and group learning. Besides instructional approaches, presenters will also share how DI through technology provides the platform for interactivity such as embedding multiple choice questions, polls, videos, quizzes, open-ended questions and web-links in their presentations. By providing students the flexibility in the way they respond through sketching, scribbling or typing, etc. This approach provided a great way to assess students’ readiness by checking what they already know, make connections and even identify misconceptions and students responded positively as they felt that lessons were more engaging and individualized as they had greater autonomy as a personal voice in the way they responded to their teachers.
