In my teaching experience during these two and a half years, most of the classes were consisted of different levels of students in the same class, and that was really a gap. Some students were intellectually prepared for the respective levels of English and some not. So, there was no "balance" between them. After identifying this problem, I did some search on the web (books.google.com )about this problem and I found a great answer "Differentiation." According to Diane Heacox's book "Differentiating Instruction in the Regular Classroom", differentiation means to "adapt or modify" the teaching material according to the student's need, and it's a two - step process :
1. Analyze the degree of challenge and variety in your current instructional plans.
2. Modify, adapt, or design new approaches to instruction in response to students' needs, interests and learning preferences. (Heacox, Diane, "Differentiating Instruction in the Regular Classroom", Free Spirit Publishing).
I started to adapt or modify the material I teach (also with the help of some teacher trainings) according to my students needs and it had some good results, at least there was created a balance between the strong and week students. Both, the strong and "weaker" students were able to finish the same tasks, and this was because the task was adapted according to their level of English. To be more specific, I mostly applied this method with a class of 11th grade students, where 60% of them weren't intellectually prepared for Pre-Intermediate English.
After reading in detail the learning objectives, especially "Bloom's Taxonomy", I think that differentiation can be applied even better.
But, now I would like very much to be able to apply differentiation with these different levels of students also through the web.
I was searching about "Teaching different levels of students through the web", and I used "Noodle tools". I tried different searching engines in there, like : iSeekEducation, SweetSearch, Wikipedia, Bing and some other search engines.Through the other engines I couldn't find the information I needed. They didn't show any useful links or results, whereas Bing was great because it showed also some other related links that are very useful, especially: http://oc.course.com/sc/tdc5/index.cfm?action=issue&chapter=2. In this link you can find different information about "Teachers Discovering Computers."
The other search engine that I used is YouTube (recommended by Vinicius ). There I could find different useful videos regarding this topic. Thank you Vinicius!
Finally, my aim as a teacher is to be able to use as much as possible the skills I'm seizing through this course. I hope and believe that the skills that I'm improving through this course can be helpful also to my teacher colleagues.
I strongly recommend this link to all teachers. Here you can find different information about integrating technology in the classroom.
http://oc.course.com/sc/tdc5/index.cfm?action=issue&chapter=2
Hi Blerta! I was reading your post when suddenly I saw my name in it! Thanks! Actually I`ve been using a lot Youtube when planning my classes. I find lots of usable teaching videos.I have just clicked on your link and I agree that the issues concerning the use of technology are very pertinent. Right now I`m trying to learn more about m-learning and finding ways to use the smartphone in class. However, students still think cellphones are only for playing or having fun.
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