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Friday, January 22, 2016

Using Digital Tools to Individualize Instruction

As part of their Extending the Digital Reach report, Education Week also published an article highlighting how ed-tech tools are changing the ways in which teachers can differentiate their literacy and reading instruction. This report, Digital Tools Aim to Personalize Literacy Instruction, focuses on how new technologies can transform learning by providing individualized instruction. Education Week talked with Graphite, a division of Common Sense Media, and a Pepper partner, to gain insight on some of these new tools.


Graphite specializes in providing teachers and schools with free research-based classroom tools. They provided some suggestions for helping teachers create personalized literacy opportunities for students. Here are some of their recommendations:
  1. Customize Texts to Each Student's Reading Level - Online programs such as Raz-Kids and Newsela provide topical reading at a variety of levels.
  2. Allow Teachers to Target Specific Reading Skills - Apps, such as Lexia Reading Core5, are now available that allow teachers to target reading skills that students need to develop.
  3. Diagnose and Respond to Individual Students' Strengths and Weaknesses - Software, such as Read 180, will analyze a student’s reading and then provide additional texts and vocabulary based on their assessment results.
  4. Encourage Teachers to Offer Customized Supports - “Digital tools and interactive e-readers can also allow teachers to customize the reading experience for students—and make themselves an integral part of each student's reading process.”
  5. Have Students Show What They've Learned in Different Ways - Differentiation. Tools such as, BookBuilder, give students opportunity to write, edit, and publish their own writing and ideas.

Technology can provide support and opportunity for students to experience learning on a level that they understand. It gives teachers an opportunity not to just “teach to the middle”, but to teach each student as they need for learning and understanding.

Pepper Reading Courses are available to help you apply new literacy instruction concepts to your classroom. Also, be sure to check out Graphite in the Pepper Resource Library to find technology tools to meet the needs of individual students.

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

More About OER

Last week we introduced the topic of OER, Open Education Resources, based on Education Week’s report, Extending the Digital Reach. The online education resource, Edutopia provides an “OER Resource Roundup” to help us navigate through this maze of technological information. OER is part of a global movement to make content - teaching, learning, and research resources - available under open licenses. This means the content would be free for people to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. This allows educators to legally harness the full power the Internet has to offer for our students and classrooms.


Watch this short video that explains “Why Open Education Matters”.

OER, and the open sharing of these resources, has great potential to give teachers support, encouragement, enable collaboration, and promote best practices.


OER Commons, is a nonprofit designed to support and build a knowledge base for teachers as they use Open Education Resources. The OER Commons website offers resources for curriculum alignment, quality evaluation, social bookmarking, tagging, rating, and reviewing.


What are some example of OER?


Edutopia’s Resource Roundup also provides a great “jumping off” point for teachers to begin looking for OER materials. This site provides a variety of links categorized for easy searching. And, of course, don’t forget to check out the resources located in your Pepper Resource Library. If you are looking for OER, or just interested in finding out more, chances are other Pepper teachers are too. Reach out to your Pepper Learning Community to find out how other educators are using OER.