Thing 6 - Differentiated Instruction and Diverse Learners

As I read about the principals of differentiated instruction I found that I do use a few of the strategies they listed. I try to present the materials and content in as many ways as possible to try and reach as many students as possible. There are a few limits to how differentiated I can be with my instruction. As a band director there tends to be only one way of doing things and it makes it hard to accommodate different learners. As I was reading I did see that there are more things that I can do as far as the products I get from the students. I always have all of the students perform the same thing or produce the same thing. I think that I could do more to have a variety of options for the students t choose from. I will definitely be working on this for next year.

The second piece that we looked at was the diverse learners website to explore technology tools that could be used to assist the learning process. As I looked through the tools there were many that interested possibly using. There was a DIY video creator and I thought that I would be able to use this to make videos of many of the procedures we have so the students could review them at home. I also liked the graphic organizers to help organize a lot of the new vocabulary the students are learning. As I look at my curriculum this summer I will be implementing some of these new tools.

The third piece we explored was to visit the UDL site and look into the strategies, tool and resources section. I also found many useful tools here. There was a section on how to make learning visual and I am going to see what school tube has to offer a band director. I am also going to look more into livebinders. I am not sure that this tool will be useful for my students, but as I was looking through this I found some resources that would be useful to me and my teaching.

The final piece that we looked at was text to audio converter. I can see many benefits to our none English speakers using this tool. I am not sure how I would be able to use this tool for  my classroom. In the band classroom we do not do a lot of reading text, so I do not see myself using this tool very often. There are a few things that I will be able to use this for, such as my handbook. If there was an audio version of it maybe more parents would understand the procedures and policies of the band class. Just for an example of how it worked I took a selection from a music history site and had it translated into audio, and captured an image of that process.

Overall, there were many useful things that I learned about during this piece of the class and I am looking forward to using them next year to help accommodate all of my learners.