Hi!
My name's Joe Silver – I'm a new student at the Levinsky Teacher's College. I'm from Detroit, Michigan, and I live in Be'er Sheva, Israel, working and volunteering there as a Masa Israel Teaching Fellow. Since I started my teaching fellowship at Neve Shalom School (נווה שלום), I've become increasingly more interested in the study of pedagogy and the prospect of teaching professionally.
My expectations regarding this course, Language Skills Through ICT, are optimistic. On the first day of class, my classmates and I were given a series of difficult, hypothetical scenarios, each of which involved the oversight of heterogeneous groups of students whose backgrounds, skill levels, and behaviors varied widely.
The discussions that followed were fascinating, and I quickly learned that the possible solutions to each scenario were far from obvious. They challenged conventional wisdom of classroom management. For example, how does one properly address a classroom of students, half of which is ill-equipped to grasp the material? Do you assign the stronger students more work? Move them into a higher level? I think the exercise set an interesting tone for the path of the course, and I'm interested in how the application of certain technological tools could assist in "differentiated teaching" methods.
Looking forward to the semester!
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Hi Joe,
ReplyDeleteThat was fun to read being the lecturer for both that Heterogeneous course and this Technology course.
Glad to have you in the course and sorry to be missing you and Grace tomorrow.
Hi Joe,
ReplyDeleteYour blog summarized my thoughts about differentiated teaching in a few sentences. But, as far as I have seen, not many Israeli classrooms have computers. So if technology is part of the solution to differentiated teaching, where does this teaching take place...on smart phones? I-pads? At home? Hopefully we will get some more insights into the actual practicalities of differentiated teaching during our studies at Levinsky.