Whether used at home or at school, mobile technology provides teachers with multiple avenues to proactively respond to student needs. When using these resources to differentiate instruction, however, educators should pay particular attention to the quality of the learning experiences these technological tools provide. In other words, technology is only a tool. In the same way artisans choose appropriate tools to create well-crafted furniture, tapestry, or cuisine, teachers can use technology tools to develop well-crafted learning experiences by building classroom community, implementing formative assessment, and designing responsive instruction.
Classroom Community
To successfully differentiate instruction using mobile technology, teachers must take active steps to foster a community of trust in both online and face-to-face environments. Teachers should try to
- Delineate clear principles for respect and trust—in both digital and face-to-face forums—so that students feel safe sharing ideas, collaborating, and taking intellectual risks. As teachers establish classroom expectations for respect, they should also establish norms for respectful virtual communication. For example, teachers might lead lessons on respectful virtual interactions where they can model appropriate responses to online articles and respectful counters to discussion posts. Teachers and students can collaboratively develop checklists to gauge the appropriateness of online responses, including prompting questions such as, "Would I say this in a face-to-face setting in front of authority figures?"
- Stress the dynamic nature of intelligence (Dweck, 2006). Make sure all students believe they can grow academically while understanding that they must take risks and expend effort to reach "achievable challenges" (Hattie & Yates, 2014). To reinforce this message, teachers may provide links to videos of famous individuals' stories of struggles and successes, allowing students to explore and share those stories that resonate with them most (i.e., "<LINK URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6hz_s2XIAU" LINKTARGET="_blank">Famous Failures</LINK>").
- Provide opportunities for students to share who they are and what is important to them. For example, students (and their teacher) might use tablets to create their own "bio-videos" (perhaps in the style of the "Famous Failures" video) to share their struggles and successes. Students could then comment on and post questions about one another's videos through a <LINK URL="http://www.todaysmeet.com/" LINKTARGET="_blank">TodaysMeet</LINK> back channel chat or through <LINK URL="http://www.kidblog.org/" LINKTARGET="_blank">blogs</LINK> kept for class material and communication. These focused online discussions set the tone for future opinion- and content-based online discussions.
The goal is to ensure that no matter who students work with or how they interact, they know that they are "in it together" with both their classmates and their teacher; the entire classroom is moving toward the same goal, albeit via different pathways at times.
Ongoing Formative Assessment
Although cultivating a healthy community of learners is an important first step in implementing mobile classroom technology, teachers cannot completely understand their students as learners without using formative assessment. Mobile technology provides tools for infusing frequent informal checks into the learning process, enabling teachers to
- Ask students to answer a few key questions as they enter the classroom. <LINK URL="https://padlet.com/" LINKTARGET="_blank">Padlet.com</LINK> provides a digital forum to display "entry tickets" designed to uncover what students did and did not retain from previous lessons. Students can access padlet.com on mobile devices and post their responses to a digital wall for the teacher and their classmates to review. Once responses are posted, the teacher and students can sort them on the interactive white board or screen to examine patterns in students' thinking, questions, or insights.
- Use back channels such as TodaysMeet so that students can post comments and question responses during instruction and individual or group activities. These types of platforms allow the teacher to actively monitor student understanding and collect important information without having to be physically present with every student or group simultaneously.
- Ask students to reflect on their understanding of homework by posting to the class's <LINK URL="https://www.edmodo.com/about" LINKTARGET="_blank">Edmodo</LINK> page while away from school. Teachers can scan these reflections briefly before class the next day to determine how much time to spend on homework review and which students need the most assistance.
Teachers who take advantage of these opportunities to monitor student progress won't be swayed to believe their students are learning simply because they are engaged with mobile devices.
Proactive, Responsive Instruction
Once teachers have collected this important assessment information, they can use the additional flexibility that mobile technology provides to adjust instruction to meet diverse learners' needs. This is the defining practice of differentiation; teachers who differentiate are characterized by their commitment to "provide specific alternatives for individuals to learn as deeply as possible and as quickly as possible, without assuming one student's road map for learning is identical to anyone else's" (Tomlinson, 2014, p.4). Some specific suggestions for differentiation include
- Using small group tasks to provide appropriate support or challenges—determined by patterns revealed in formative assessments—to help all students progress in their learning. Teachers can accomplish this by assigning students questions of varying complexity using teacher-created QR codes linked to the appropriate prompts. For example, in a world language class, students might read the same passage in the target language but then be asked to respond individually to one of two sets of questions differentiated based on readiness. Teachers should provide students with the appropriate QR code to scan with their mobile device to reveal the questions. Students can then use the <LINK URL="https://evernote.com/" LINKTARGET="_blank">Evernote app</LINK> to record their oral responses to the questions using the target language, copy the links to their notes, and then post them on their blogs.
- Grouping students together who express the need or desire to have the material explained in a different way. Teachers could provide students in an English class with links to online videos (for sample videos, see <LINK URL="http://www.khanacademy.com/" LINKTARGET="_blank">www.khanacademy.com</LINK>, <LINK URL="http://itunesu.com" LINKTARGET="_blank">itunesu.com</LINK>, <LINK URL="https://www.youtube.com/education" LINKTARGET="_blank">learnzillion.com</LINK>, or search for a topic on youtube.com/education) to help scaffold and reteach literary elements without requiring the whole class to participate. Each group may watch a different video but respond to similar guiding questions to facilitate full-group sharing during closure.
- Encouraging a small group of students in a science class who are ready for a learning extension to use their mobile devices and individual white boards to record demonstrations on how to use the scientific method during experimental design. These could be posted to the class's Edmodo page or any other learning management system to serve as a resource for future students exploring the topic.
- Using mobile technology to increase student motivation. Different content-creation media (for example, podcasts or <LINK URL="https://www.thinglink.com/" LINKTARGET="_blank">Thinglink</LINK>, a platform for creating and sharing interactive images and videos) can provide a variety of options for students to demonstrate what they have learned. For example, students might demonstrate their understanding of FDR's presidency during the Great Depression by creating their own Fireside chats via podcasts. (Here are some <LINK URL="http://edtechteacher.org/tools/multimedia/podcasting/" LINKTARGET="_blank">practical resources</LINK> for creating podcasts.) Or, they might use the free app Thinglink to upload images of the Great Depression and add their own captions to communicate the same understanding.
These adjustments need not occur every moment of every class period; rather, they should be used at "hinge points" in the learning process (e.g., "We can't move on until we get this!"), when assessment data demonstrates the need to vary instruction or when student motivation is flagging and teachers need to reharness interest.
Providing students with technology tools does not automatically lead to student learning. Mobile technology becomes useful when teachers use it to proactively tailor learning experiences to meet the needs of all students. By capitalizing on the flexibility of mobile devices, teachers can help students with varying needs progress in their learning while engaging and challenging the classroom as a whole.