Forum Replies Created
-
Replies
-
I’ve been thinking about Gaeilge Stations for my class next year, ever since the Class Choice slide in our course. Thanks for your feedback, it’s helped to reinforce the value of this approach in giving children a more positive attitude to Gaeilge lessons!
Hi Nicola,
It’s great that you have been using the learning centres in your class for years – as you mentioned we have all adopted aspects of the UDL approach when providing for differentiation in our classrooms.
I agree that collaboration and sharing are essential to the development of new ideas in teaching and learning. It can help share the load in planning and prep time, and also ensures that new methodologies that are being adopted work well for a particular school environment.
UDL:
Advantages: The advantages of a UDL learning centre is that it makes the learning and demonstration of learning accessible to all students. The choice element also creates great enthusiasm among students when they get to pick how they will learn about a topic and then how they can present their learning. Variety is the spice of life!
Past experience: I have used laptop stations as a sort of UDL where students were invited to play maths games on a particular topic. I also do weekly Maths Stations around a few maths topics, however each station is usually fairly carefully curated by the teacher, and perhaps not as flexible as a true UDL approach.
Challenges: For me the challenge would be space and available resources. We share our resources across the school, so sometimes there is considerable demand for the digital resources. Having said that I could adapt my learning centre to include resources I have available in my own classroom.
I agree that the Google suite of software gives great scope for the students to demonstrate their learning, with lots of opportunities to collaborate and conference. I know my students enjoy being able to present their work to the class, and Google makes this really easy to do.
Hi Nicola,
It can be difficult to find good quality content on a specific topic. A Reading Passage Generator is a great way to create your own content which is suitable for a particular age group or ability.
Gillian
Here’s my plan for Literacy Stations.
Class level – 4th class.We will explore a novel (or maybe 3 differentiated novels for different abilities) as the main activity, but I have included work on Grammar and Word study in the stations also.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XkFmejPMZE9tu3GEV2pYdITuH8EJtAdl5uuLv4b8NR8/edit?usp=sharing
I will use the Canva tool to assess learning in a chosen Maths topic – eg Fractions
I will ask my students to create a Topic Web on the subject and I’ll create a rubric to give students a clear understanding of my minimum expectations regarding the information to be included in the topic web – this will include both the student’s own vocabulary, maths problems, worked examples and also images and videos they locate on the internet that refer to the topic.
One resource I will use is Crossword Puzzle Creator • ABCya!.
I would ask class groups to create and share their own crossword as part of a topic assessment. This could be on any topics from SESE and also Focloir Gaeilge.
One class management resource I will use next year is the Classroom Screen App https://classroomscreen.com/app/
Some colleagues of mine were using it last year and they found it really helpful in displaying the key information for each day on their screens (eg Timetables, Clock, Timer, Homework, Class Values, Anouncements etc)A literacy tool I liked was the Crossword Puzzle Creator. I’d get my class groups to create their own puzzle on a SESE topic, or with foclóir Gaeilge, and then challenge the rest of the class.
