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A fun App to use for creating stories in the classroom. Student's can make pictures appear to be talking.

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Give your photos a voice with ChatterPix! Chatterpix can make anything talk -- pets, friends, doodles, and more!

Download for iPad & iPhone

Simply take any photo, draw a line to make a mouth, and record your voice. Then share your Pix with friends and family as silly greetings, playful messages, or creative cards. And best of all, it's FREE!

This App allows sharing via email, Facebook, and YouTube and is designed for adults. If you'd like to restrict these options, please download "ChatterPix Kids" - designed for kids with no sharing features.

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Give your photos a voice with ChatterPix! Chatterpix can make anything talk -- pets, friends, doodles, and more! Download for iPad & iPhone Simply take any photo, draw a line to make a mouth, and record your voice. Then share your Pix with friends and family as silly greetings, playful messages, or creative cards.

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Another fun App that allows students to create their own sock puppet show with audio.

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Sock Puppet is a fantastic app - students can re-create a scene from history by scripting a play and recording their voice! This app allows students to make the actions with the characters they have chosen - record and play back, save their play or performance. It's a fun way to evaluate their understanding of a concept! You can also have students give their book report using the sock puppets!

1. .Click the "New" button to begin a new puppet show.

2. Follow the on-screen prompts to choose the desired puppets, backgrounds, and props.

1. Use the buttons at the top to start and stop the recording, to save and share, and to navigate the app:

2. To record a show:
a. Click the red circle.
b. Hold your finger on a puppet, talk, and move the puppet around.
c. Repeat, touching each puppet as you want it to "speak."
d. Click the "square" button to stop the recording.

3. When you're done recording, you can:
a. Click the "Share" button to upload it to YouTube.
b. Click the "Save" button for replay on the iPad.

Political debate - After downloading the FREE app from iTunes and purchasing the Policapack through the in-app store for just 99 cents, users can animate their favorite candidates, and then lip-sync their voices to come up with live action political cartoons. This is a great way for people of all ages to experience, learn, and engage politics.

1. Use it for a guidance lesson on 'Character Counts' lesson

2. Explaining a Science Concept

3. Retelling a history event

4. Explaining a recipe

5. Famous Person Biography

6. Reading an original poem or story

7. Explaining a "How To" segment.

8. Animal report

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Sock Puppet is a fantastic app - students can re-create a scene from history by scripting a play and recording their voice! This app allows students to make the actions with the characters they...

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One of my favorite educational platforms. It has many features to support you ELs and strengthen their skills in the four domains.

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Easily create beautiful interactive video lessons for your students you can integrate right into your LMS. Track students' progress with hassle-free analytics as you flip your classroom!

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A great creative platform for designing all of your classroom needs. Easy to use and easy to translate things that you have created.

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Canva is a free-to-use online graphic design tool. Use it to create social media posts, presentations, posters, videos, logos and more.

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PDE Educating English Learners Information

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PDE Educating English Learners Information

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This is the Department of Ed's page that includes all of the state information you may need to help support your ELs and their families.

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This page contains all state regulations, policies, and guidance related to the education of English learners. For instructional and other support resources and professional development offerings, please visit the English Learner Portal on the SAS Portal.

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A very helpful translation platform. You can use it on your phone or computer. Easily relays information back and forth in the users specified language.

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TalkingPoints - Improving student outcomes through meaningful school-family partnerships.

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TalkingPoints - Improving student outcomes through meaningful school-family partnerships.

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An online tool that has a wide variety of articles at various levels. Many topics to choose from and you can set some articles up to read aloud or have comprehension questions.

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ReadWorks | Award-Winning, EdTech Nonprofit Organization

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ReadWorks is an edtech nonprofit organization that is committed to helping to solve America’s reading comprehension crisis.

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WIDA's Resource Articles for Family Engagement

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WIDA's Resource Articles for Family Engagement

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Used in our first discussion post. Lots of great tools and tips for helping parents stay engaged.

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Resources to strengthen connections with families

Families play a key role in their children's language development and possess a wealth of knowledge about their children's language use in home and community environments. At WIDA, we recognize families as experts in their children's language learning and development. Engaging with families to learn from them about their children's language use and development is at the core of language-focused family engagement.

The resources listed below provide professional learning for early care and education professionals, and K-12 educators, as well as resources and ACCESS assessment materials that educators can share with families.

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Resources to strengthen connections with families Families play a key role in their children's language development and possess a wealth of knowledge about their children's language use in home and community environments. At WIDA, we recognize families as experts in their children's language learning and development.

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Easily helps teachers create classroom activities. Resources can be translated into other languages.

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Use existing curriculum, or generate standards-aligned content with real, cited sources.

Choose a grade level and language, and watch Diffit create complete, differentiated resources. ✅

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Use existing curriculum, or generate standards-aligned content with real, cited sources. Choose a grade level and language, and watch Diffit create complete, differentiated resources. ✅

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Helps simplify text for students.

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Rewordify.com | Understand what you read

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Rewordify.com helps you read more, understand better, learn new words, and teach more effectively.

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The can do descriptors are a great resource to share with classroom teachers to help them understand their ELs abilities and strengths.

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A tool to help you meet students where they are in their language development

The Can Do Descriptors highlight what language learners can do at various stages of language development as they engage in the following contexts:

Bilingual and English-immersion early care and education programs

Bilingual, Spanish-immersion and English-immersion K-12 language programs

Bilingual, Spanish-immersion and English-immersion K-12 content-area classrooms

Similar to the WIDA English Language Development Standards Statements, the Can Do Descriptors describe what learners can do with language across different content areas. Although the Can Do Descriptors relate to the ELD Standards Statements, they don't replace them but are used to supplement the standards statements during instruction.

Educators and early childhood practitioners can use the Can Do Descriptors to

Better understand what students at different levels of language proficiency can do with language

Expand their understanding of what the process of language development can look like

Collaborate around scaffolding that students need to engage in content-area learning and develop language at the same time

Differentiate instruction and classroom assessment for language

Interpret ACCESS for ELLs test scores

The Can Do Descriptors have not yet been updated to reflect the 2020 Edition; however, they remain available as a valuable tool for communicating with stakeholders about what students can do at each language proficiency level. WIDA is monitoring educator use to help inform the timing for updating the materials.

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A tool to help you meet students where they are in their language developmentThe Can Do Descriptors highlight what language learners can do at various stages of language development as they engage in the following contexts:

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This article gives some great and simple ideas on how to help your ESL families.

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The Connecting Families initiative is investing $13.2 million over five years, starting in 2017-2018 to help bridge the digital divide for Canadian families who may struggle to afford access to home Internet.

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A very simple article on how to adjust activities in the classroom to meet your students needs.

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"Differentiated instruction"-both the term and the idea-can carry a lot of baggage in teaching circles.

But I think it's so important that we can't talk too much about it, so today's post kicks off another series on how teachers can implement it.

Two of today's contributors were also guests on my 10-minute BAM! Radio Show. You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.

'Give Each Student What They Need'
Andrea Castellano serves as an elementary teacher in New York City's public school system. She also supports teachers as an instructional coach and PBL curriculum writer and staff developer:
Although traditional schooling relies on one-size-fits-all instruction where all students receive the same instruction and complete the same tasks, each student is totally unique. You'd be hard-pressed to find a group that shares the exact combination of abilities, needs, and interests. Differentiation is tailoring instruction to give each student what they need. It's also the key to teaching diverse groups of learners; without it, someone will always be left out or left behind.

Even if they understand why differentiation is important, many teachers struggle to adapt lessons that include multiple learning goals, citing concerns with lack of resources, planning time, and support with classroom management. Here are some suggestions for getting differentiated instruction up and running in your classroom:

1. Establish a culture of learning through routines and clear communication.

When shifting away from the one-size model, it's important to keep in mind that students may not have much experience working autonomously. That kind of independence has to be taught explicitly via modeling, practice, and maintaining clear and consistent expectations.

In my 3rd grade class, we mix it up between whole group, collaborative small groups, and stations. In September, after the "teach" part of the lessons instead of pulling small groups as I normally would, I walk around, observing and making suggestions. I make sure to answer all questions before I send them off and always post directions in a visible location in case they forget what to do. When we finish, we have a class circle to discuss how it went and to brainstorm solutions and strategies for next time.

Over time, they learn to hold themselves and their peers accountable. Doing this consistently every day means that by October, we've evolved from a single instructional small group to multiple small groups doing multiple things. Because I set my students up for independence, I am able to assign different tasks, offer a variety of resources, and trust them to do their work while I focus on the group that's scheduled for the day.

2. Know your material and use your resources.

Knowledge of content is essential in order to differentiate instruction. But scaffolding instruction requires planning and preparation that sometimes goes beyond the parameters of the typical scripted lesson plan. Luckily, there are a plethora of resources available online, including curriculum maps, scope-and-sequence plans, and digital curriculum resources. I request access to 2nd and 4th grade resources for any program I'm mandated to teach. If students need remedial support, I should have familiarity with the prerequisite skills, including those from the grades below. If students have mastered the content and need a challenge, I have to have a deep understanding of the material as well as an ability to draw from advanced content and make it comprehensible for students as they become ready for it.

I also maintain connections with teachers in other grades in case there's something I don't know. Talking to other teachers about how they reinforce concepts in fun and engaging ways is actually one of my favorite things about lesson planning.
Get to know your students.
Regardless of class size, teachers should know their students well enough to anticipate and plan for differentiated activities. Learning about your students on a personal level can be done through beginning-of-year interest surveys, icebreaker activities, and one-on-one conversations whenever possible.

Getting to know your students on an academic level is done through a holistic series of formal and informal assessments designed to paint a picture of the individual as a learner. Once you start to notice trends, it will become easier to anticipate questions and misconceptions and choose activities that will support students in reaching the learning targets. In any given math lesson, for instance, if I know a student understands a concept but needs more practice, I'll have a worksheet printed for them in advance. Fast finishers always have a basket of multistep word problems waiting for them, and students who need a reteach know to come straight to my table and I'll have another example ready for them.

In my classroom, knowledge of my students as well as their knowledge of self is what drives the instruction throughout the lesson.

'There Is No One-Size-Fits-All Approach'
Isabel Becerra is the multilingual-services consultant for Region 10 in Texas. She was born in Bolivia and has been an educator since 1992. She is a passionate advocate for emergent bilingual learners:
Just as everyone has a unique fingerprint, every student has an individual learning style. It's most likely that not all students learn in the same way or share the same level of ability. It is our job as educators to find ways to meet the different learning needs of our students in order to ensure that learning is happening.

Differentiated instruction is a teaching approach that is used to adjust curriculum and instruction to maximize the learning of all students; average learners, English-language learners, struggling students, students with learning disabilities, and gifted and talented students. Differentiated instruction is not a single strategy but rather a framework that teachers can use to apply a variety of strategies. In other words, differentiated instruction is simply tailoring instruction to meet a learner's needs. There is no one-size-fits-all approach for instruction.

Research says that "differentiated instruction is an instructional practice that involves a teacher who proactively plans varied approaches to what students need to learn, how they will learn it, and/or how they can express what they have learned in order to increase the likelihood that each student will learn as much as he or she can as efficiently as possible" (Tomlinson, 2003, p. 151).

Teachers who practice differentiation in the classroom may modify assignments to meet the needs of the students, assess students frequently to determine their readiness levels, use data to adjust instruction, provide a variety of scaffolds (visuals, graphic organizers, sentence stems, word banks, etc.) to support student learning, strive to make lessons engaging and meaningful, implement different grouping formats for instruction (e.g., whole class, small groups, independent instruction), and use flexible grouping.

So, what does differentiated instruction look like in the classroom? When differentiation happens in the classroom, students have constant access to learning materials of varying levels of difficulty, and students can advance their learning at their own pace by having choice in assignments and using personalized learning methods. In addition, teachers build lessons around their students' individual skills and customize teaching to suit multiple forms of intelligence. Everyone is learning in a differentiated classroom, including the teacher.

If you are like me and have a background in teaching English-language-learners in a dual-language or ESL classroom setting, you know how important it is to differentiate instruction for learning to happen. We must find effective ways to teach these emergent bilingual students in order to give them access to comprehensible content and develop English-language proficiency at the same time.

Some starting activities to differentiate instruction that are interactive, engaging, motivating, and make learning fun for students are:

1. Give instructions in several formats, such as books, videos with closed captions, worksheets, and projects. These options will accommodate their learning styles, and they will help them practice reading, writing, and listening in English.

2. Provide opportunities to use English as much as possible, such as through group work, classroom discussions, and partner sharing. The more they verbalize it, the more they will internalize the language and content.

3. Incorporate active learning with manipulatives, movement (TPR), gestures, and games. This will allow for students to remember words, concepts, and skills, as many are visual and kinesthetic learners.

4. Use leveled reading materials to help students explore the same content. You must be able to meet the students at their level to take them where they need to be by scaffolding what they need to learn.

5. Create learning centers that give students self-paced practice time in hands-on ways. Tell me and I forget; teach me, and I may remember; involve me, and I learn.

6. Form learning groups and use a tiered approach, with each group mastering content or skills at various speeds.

7. Foster a safe learning environment where students can feel included, cared for, and be opened to new learning material.

8. Allow students to choose how they'll present their work: Write a paper, give a presentation, create a video, etc. Giving students choice will help them engage in the learning process.

Implementing differentiated instruction can be challenging, but it is worth the effort. It may not be possible to apply differentiation all the time; however, what is important is to practice it often to incorporate it in daily instruction procedures so that with time, it can become second nature to all educators. Differentiated instruction in the classroom is one of the keys to success.

'It's the Approach...'
Kara Pranikoff is the author of Teaching Talk: A Practical Guide to Fostering Student Thinking and Conversation (Heinemann, 2017). She consults with schools to center student voices and ideas across inquiry-based social studies and literacy instruction:
Differentiating Instruction is a concept in education that sounds like it should have a special formula. As if you could plan a lesson, whiz it through a magical machine, and receive a plan that is ready for each individual student. Don't let that official descriptor be a boundary. Even if you are at the very start of your career, you have already differentiated on instinct. You know that you have a room full of learners who have a variety of needs and that your instruction cannot simply be one-size-fits-all. Any time you make shifts and changes in response to the learners in front of you, you are providing differentiated instruction.

Every teacher aims to connect with their students. Have you ever considered sharing content in a range of ways (video, read aloud, independent reading, etc.)? Have you provided a choice about the method by which students share their understanding (written, illustration, etc.)? Have you planned strategically when making partnerships or seating arrangements? That is differentiation.

Differentiation is not just about the students in your classroom that have identified learning needs, it's the approach you take for ALL students. It's the foundation of equity in our teaching. Everyone gets the things they need to do their very best learning. Is there any other way to educate?

As you accumulate years in the classrooms and gain experience with a wide variety of types of learners, you develop a repertoire of shifts you can make so that all students find engagement with your content. There are also professional frameworks that can help you know what to consider when differentiating curriculum.

· What are the ways our plan allows all students to have agency?

· What are the ways our plan allows all students to access content?

· What are the ways our plan allows all students to expresstheir understanding?

Remember, we are making plans that fit the needs of ALL students. So, what does this look like in action? Here is an example:
Michelle Shory is a veteran language educator with 26 years of experience in five states. She is currently an ESL teacher and instructional coach at Seneca High School in the Jefferson County public schools in Louisville, Ky. Michelle also works as an adjunct instructor for Eastern Kentucky University and Indiana University Southeast for their ESL endorsement programs:
Differentiation provides students with the agency to learn, access content, and consider how they can best express their understanding. Our flexibility in these areas creates equity. By keeping differentiation as the norm in our planning, we can create a classroom where all students can thrive. Anything that you can do to help meet the needs of your students will help them meet their goals. That's just good teaching.

Universal Design for Learning

A few years ago, my interest in UDL was sparked, significantly enhancing my understanding of student-centered differentiation. While differentiation and UDL both aim to address learner variability, I prefer UDL because of its proactive approach. By implementing UDL, I found that I was better able to plan lessons that offered choices in engagement, representation, and expression, empowering students to become proficient learners with specific goals-and flexible pathways to achieve them.

In terms of engagement, I brainstorm how to captivate student interest and establish the relevance of what they are about to learn. I incorporate various media such as images, videos, articles, or podcasts that provide background knowledge. Recognizing that each student has distinct needs and interests, I encourage them to choose the most intriguing formats and appropriate levels of complexity. One of the strategies I particularly admire, which I learned from Holly Clark, is the implementation of an Explore Board to build background knowledge. To illustrate, I've provided an example I developed specifically for English-learners.

Regarding representation, I thoughtfully assess the materials I utilize. I frequently incorporate images, translations, simplified directions, or audio to enhance accessibility. By planning for learner variability, I ensure that students can access the necessary support they require. This may involve simply providing videos or text-or spending more time modifying the text to make it comprehensible for all learners. The point is to offer the content in a range of formats and levels of complexity. Here is an example demonstrating how I adapt texts for English-learners.

My interest in UDL has changed how I approach every unit and lesson. UDL has enabled me to adopt a proactive approach, planning lessons that empower students to become expert learners with clear goals and flexible pathways. I ensure that students' diverse needs are met by incorporating choices in engagement, representation, and expression. Through strategies like Explore Boards and adapting texts for English-learners, I captivate student interest and provide accessible materials. Additionally, I prioritize student expression, allowing various proficiency levels and formats while focusing on mastery. UDL has genuinely made me a more inclusive educator.
What does "differentiating instruction" mean to you, and what does it actually look like in the classroom? Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email. And if you missed any of the highlights from the first 11 years of this blog, you can see a categorized list below.
Thanks to Isabel, Andrea, Kara, and Michellefor contributing their thoughts!

Today's post is the first in a series answering this question:

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What Does Successful Differentiated Instruction Look Like in the Classroom? (Opinion)

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Many teachers struggle to adapt lessons, believing they lack resources, planning time, and classroom-management support. They don't need to.

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A little lengthy but a great video to watch.

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Differentiating Instruction: How to Facilitate Mixed-Ability ESL Classes