Simple Planning with a Dash of Differentiation

Last week a few teachers involved in the Virtual Advanced Placement grant attended the New York State Educational Technology (NYSCATE) conference in Rochester. We spent three days attending a variety of presentations given by teachers from around the country. The topics ranged from getting tech ready for PARCC to Google Scripts to flipped and blended classrooms to assistive technology. It was a whirlwind three days and our group walked away with much to think about.

As I am in the midst of "blending" my classroom (part online, part face to face) I tried to steer my focus to those presentations so if you are interested in this topic, send me an email. I also signed up for a Coursera massively open online course (MOOC) on gamification after attending a particularly interesting session. Again, if you have any questions, gamification is something I will be studying over the next few months and would love to talk about.

I am still processing most of the presentations but I wanted to pass along two simple tools I learned about that might make an immediate impact in your classroom.

• The first, Planboard, is an online lesson planning app. I have been playing with this tool over the past few days and the site has a lot of potential. Planboard provides a cloud based lesson planning platform that basically does what you expect a lesson planning app to do. However, it goes beyond by offering collaborative planning and easily accessible Core Common Standards. If you are looking for a simple planning solution that is available anywhere you have an internet connection, this may be it.

• The second, Newsela, provides nonfiction articles for students to read. The cool thing about this site is that it provides the articles in different lexile range. For example, this article provides versions ranging from a 680 to a 1200+ lexile range. The company hires writers to simply the more advanced originals. This could be an interesting tool to help differentiate your instruction. Cooler yet is the fact that you can set your entire class up with accounts using their school issued Google Apps for Education email account. Students could then visit a specific article, choose a level they are comfortable with and take a quiz to give you feedback on their comprehension. If you would like to use the tool more basically, you can simply print out articles at the varying reading levels.