Differentiating Instruction

I'm hoping this blog can be a great mix of updates on my life and also reflections on teaching technology.  There are so many great blogs by other tech teachers that explore questions and conversations that are relevant to our field, and I would love to add my thoughts to dialogue.  So with that said, some posts may be on the techie side, and some on the personal side.  Enjoy :-)

One of my biggest struggles in teaching so far is figuring out how to meet students at every level.  On one side of things, I have students that struggle greatly with typing (which makes everything take SO long!) and on the other side I have students that already know how to do everything I'm teaching.  

The students that finish quickly are always becoming a distraction to those still working, despite the variety of "early finisher" activities that I provide.   The EF activities usually include working on the homework, playing a typing game, or working on a tutorial that teaches an advanced concept of what we're learning.  Students always opt for typing games and manage to be really distracting to others.  

While the EF kids have been finished for ages and are bored, the slower students struggle to finish assignments during class.  Because we use lots of specific software, not finishing work requires them to come in after school to finish.  The same students always get stuck with needing to come after school, and often decide not to.  Therefore, they easily get poor grades because they don't finish their work.  I hate the inequality of some students always getting more work outside of class because they work slowly.  It seems to set them up for failure.  

Anyway, that's a big challenge for me right now.  Probably pretty common for all teachers, with a unique twist since we do all our work on computers.  Feel free to contribute any thoughts on how you've managed this!

I haven't posted in a long time! I've been so so SO busy that I just haven't had a moment! I'm enjoying a four-day weekend, and thought I would update everyone. I'm about to start my fourth week of school, and so far I LOVE teaching! It has been a crazy amount of work so far, but it's definitely worth it! The picture above is of the school, Frontier Academy (You can click it to see a bigger version).

I'm teaching four classes - 2 sections of Multimedia (mostly computer graphics and animation), Critical Skills (A basic applications class for freshmen), and Programming. The students have been really great. All my classes have 28 students except programming which only has 8. I teach in the afternoons, so in the morning I have a planning period and a time for helping teachers with technology and generally fixing all the things that go wrong with computers.

I just gave the first test in Programming and was pleased to see that overall my students did pretty well. They seem to be struggling a bit with syntax (big surprise.) but are understanding the concepts. I'm teaching them Java because I would like to offer AP Computer Science next year (which is in Java).

I'm pretty exhausted from everything, but I really enjoy it. Planning for all the courses is really time consuming, especially as my first year teaching them all. I feel confident that things will slow down a bit in the future.