iPod Story

Part of my job as the Instructional Technology Resource Teacher (ITRT) is to manage the set of 28 iPods we have at one of my schools.  iPods are a great instructional tool for providing elementary students with an opportunity to practice skills they are learning, particularly in math.  One of the reasons iPods are great is that they help provide students with differentiated instruction.

Differentiated instruction is an educational buzz word that means adjusting the difficulty level of something so that it matches the users level of ability.  Differentiation is easy to talk about, but difficult to institute in the traditional classroom.  The more differentiation you try to bring into the classroom, the more sets of student materials you need to create.  This takes a lot of time and energy, two things teachers are always short of.  So what usually ends up happening is that everyone in the class does the same thing at the same speed.  Because teachers don't want to leave students behind, the class ends up moving at the pace of the slowest student.  Teachers construct class room routines and procedures around this same pace mentality and it becomes engrained into their thinking.

The problem with this, which I saw this week, is that the iPods eliminate the need for that kind of thinking.  The students had just gotten into a new app and were finding the difficulty level to be too hard.  So we had them back off to an easier setting.  One student piped up and asked if she could make it harder.  Almost without hesitation the teacher started to say NO at the same time I was saying YES.  She was defaulting into that same pace mentality.  The teacher graciously let me win out and the student was allowed to go to the higher level.  (Side note:  I applaud that student for taking the initiative to challenge herself.  You don't always see that.)

So here is my take away from this little event.  Use technology to free  students to pursue the challenge within the concepts we are teaching them.  We need less restrictions, not more.