Designing learning that empowers students

I have been working with student teachers this last year to help them understand the potential of technology in their classrooms to support students to see their full potential for learning.  As a university we explore differentiation techniques and approaches but I wanted them to go a little further with their approach to ensure that they were not creating a. Ceiling for learners at any point.

We explored science sessions as a basis for the approach and discussed the impact of how we word our outcomes.  By adding a way to answer questions, we discussed how that could limit some learners ability to show exactly what they understood.

Using Keynote I showcased how we can create very simple scaffolded areas that allow learners to go as far as they need with their learning, without adding any barriers to completing activities.

In this example we created outcomes that specify what the teacher wanted to know, but not saying what way it had to be answered.  Prompts were given through the identification of what can be added to the document; audio, drawings, shapes and text.  students were then able to answer the questions in a way that worked best for them.

The outcome was higher engagement but also students that were considered “low ability” actually being able to share a lot of knowledge about the topic.

Creating these is really simple as its all based on the templates that exist already in the Pages app.  This one is the second page of the Textbook template, with just some quick tweaks to the layout.

The beauty is that once created, you can then simply change the outcomes and the topic and you have another scaffold ready to go for a different topic.