Technology can play a key role in helping your teachers efficiently and effectively create personalized and inclusive learning environments for their students. Edtech-supported differentiated instruction (DI) and assessment can help you create an equitable and inclusive system by allowing your students to tap into their unique abilities and backgrounds and leverage those in their everyday classroom learning.

How Can Edtech Help With Differentiated Instruction?

Simply put, differentiated instruction refers to personalizing teaching strategies, learning materials (content), and end products. By differentiating instruction, your educators can help make sure that each of their student’s unique needs, learning preferences, and abilities are acknowledged and prioritized. This then has a positive impact on your students, helping support learner engagement and overall achievement.

The challenge with differentiated instruction is that it can take a lot of time and resources for your teachers to implement effectively. Teachers often have 25+ students in their classes, and creating personalized lessons and offering student choice, is challenging to do at scale. Especially when teachers are already juggling competing priorities and are pushed to their limits.

Enter education technology.

Thanks to edtech tools, your teachers can differentiate learning more efficiently, saving time when implementing strategies like:

1. Personalized Learning: With edtech tools, your teachers can tailor learning to meet individual student students more quickly (and often more effectively). Learning platforms like SpacesEDU are built to help teachers analyze their students’ performance data, identify gaps, and adjust the content and pace of activities. This helps each student receive the appropriate level of challenge and support and creates individualized learning experiences.
2. Differentiated Content: Implementing edtech tools that have differentiation built in (like SpacesEDU), can help your teachers more easily provide content in different ways. For example, with SpacesEDU, teachers (and students) have access to multimedia including audio recordings, video recordings, text, and links. Your educators can leverage these tools to engage students according to their preferences, needs, and ability levels. With these multimedia tools, educators can also provide more personalized feedback to their learners.
3. Data-Driven Insights: Education technology can help your teachers collect and analyze student progress and performance data more efficiently. Edtech can help sort data and make visualizing it easier—meaning your teachers can identify where individual learners are at, along with classwide progress. They can then identify areas where students might be struggling and make informed decisions about how to differentiate learning and teaching strategies to fill these gaps.

Does Edtech Make Differentiated Assessment Easier?

Yes. Edtech can make differentiated assessment easier for your teachers. Many edtech tools have assessment features built into them, that can make assessing student learning and providing personalized feedback easier. These kinds of tools can also help teachers visualize student progress across their classroom, which can then help educators differentiate learning to respond to individual and group needs. Below are three ways edtech can help your teachers to differentiate their assessment.

Differentiate Formative Assessments

Education technology tools, like SpacesEDU, that emphasize formative assessment and focus on the process of learning over the final product, can help teachers differentiate their assessment practices for all learners. We all know how important it is to give students consistent and timely feedback, but this can sometimes fall off a teacher’s plate, simply due to the time it takes to give feedback and the number of students they have.

Edtech tools that help students capture their learning and then sort it based on standard and proficiency level, can help teachers gauge student understanding in real-time, intervene promptly, and provide differentiated targeted support accordingly. When giving feedback, your teachers can use multimedia capabilities to provide differentiated feedback on their student’s learning, through things like audio feedback, video feedback, or written text.

Differentiating with Digital Portfolios

Digital portfolios can act as a powerful way to differentiate instruction and assessment for students in your district. With a digital portfolio platform like SpacesEDU, students can showcase their work, progress, reflections, and growth K-12. This provides your teachers, schools, and your district with a full view of each student’s learning journey. Teachers can then differentiate instruction based on the learning and growth they’re viewing in their students’ portfolios.

Digital portfolios as an assessment strategy can encourage students to self-assess their learning, think critically about their strengths and areas for growth, and develop metacognitive skills that can help them after they leave your district and enter the workforce. This type of edtech tool can support your teachers in assessing more holistically, taking into account not just what they learned, but the skills and competencies they’ve used and developed throughout the learning process.

Multimedia Projects to Differentiate Assessment

Teachers can use edtech tools to differentiate assessment by giving students the choice of how they show what they can do. This means that all students, regardless of grade level and ability, can show their understanding of the concepts covered in class and experience a sense of achievement.

Multimedia projects are one way to have students do this. For example, your teachers can have their students use edtech tools to create a multimedia presentation to highlight what they’ve learned in class rather than submitting a written report. For learners who struggle with writing or just prefer expressing themselves orally, tech tools can help them create a video showing what they’ve learned or a podcast sharing key takeaways. Differentiating the product teachers ask students for, and leveraging edtech to make it easier to share learning in different formats, can help your teachers accommodate all their students’ needs.

Making More Equitable and Inclusive Schools With Differentiated Instruction

For those of us in education, equity and inclusion are top priorities. And differentiated instruction is a great example of how teachers can help directly contribute to these priorities in their classrooms.

By using edtech to help differentiate instruction, your schools can work to break down barriers that are currently impacting groups of students. This means that every one of your students has an opportunity to succeed. Edtech can help support this through things like:

1. Alternative Learning Formats: Using edtech to support differentiated learning formats means your students get to choose from various different content formats that best suit them. Using edtech to make this like videos, audio recordings, or text-based content available helps you to accommodate your students’ different learning preferences and abilities.
2. Flexible Assessment: Tools like SpacesEDU offer varied assessment methods. This means that students can show what they know in different ways. By offering flexible assessments, your educators are ensuring that their students' diverse abilities and strengths are recognized and assessed appropriately.
3. Inclusive Collaboration: Digital platforms that have some form of collaboration can help your learners work together, regardless of their physical location. Not only does this eliminate a barrier to entry if learners are remote or unable to come into the classroom, but it also helps your students develop communication skills, teamwork, and diverse perspectives.

By using edtech to help support differentiated instruction assessment, your teachers can more effectively and efficiently cater to individual student needs.

Looking for a platform that can help with differentiated instruction and assessment in your school or district? Connect with our team.