How do you differentiate instruction for students with diverse needs? As a classroom teacher, I worked with students with a range of needs and interests. Although the curriculum and standards provide guidance for the school year, finding “just right” resources was always a challenge.
Even though a search on Google might turn up a few resources to address a need in your classroom, there are strategies you can follow to make sure differentiated instruction happens purposefully. If you follow along with the blog regularly (sign up here), you know that I love sharing free resources for educators. So when the folks at Kiddom reached out to me to share this EdTech guide, I was excited to tell you all about it! Kiddom’s Special Education Toolkit offers practical strategies, tools, and resources to differentiate for students with diverse needs.
Strategies to Differentiate for Students
In order to know where students need support, gathering information can take many forms. Provide space for students to respond to questions in multiple ways including baseline assessments, one-on-one conferences, and reflections. Understanding your success criteria and gathering actionable information is essential.
Once you have a picture of student needs, curate resources and supporting material to help students further explore content. You might identify a particular strategy you would like to introduce to a group of students in a small group setting. Or you might locate a multimedia resource to provide additional background knowledge for a student.
When it comes to using digital tools or an online platform, you can use these spaces to stay organized and distribute resources. If you are selecting supporting material for individual students or small groups of students, you can use an online space to make sure students have easy access to these resources. Kiddom’s free app for teachers uniquely allows you to personalize assignments for the students who might need more support.
Students with Diverse Needs
The team at Kiddom has put together a free guide for educators to address this topic. It’s called The Special Education Toolkit. The guide includes information you can put into action right away and makes connections to their dynamic platform.
This free guide from Kiddom shares strategies on how to more effectively help students with common learning challenges. It discusses how Special Education teachers can use Kiddom to further individualize supports for students and save planning and instructional time.
If you haven’t downloaded it yet, you can grab your copy of their free guide here.
Extra Resources from Kiddom
On Kiddom’s website, you’ll also find a handful of extra resources for educators. This includes lesson template for support and enrichment that you can customize and share with colleagues. You’ll also find tools (Student Conferencing and Student Reflection) to deepen self-awareness, voice, and agency. Kiddom is designed to help you plan for working with students with a range of needs. Their new guide also includes indicators and strategies for many common learning challenges and disabilities.
Kiddom in Action
If you haven’t heard of Kiddom before, I’ve featured them here on my blog several times. Check out this post on responsive curriculum management. I love tools for educators that are straight-forward, simple to use, and help make teachers lives easier. Teachers can use Kiddom to address a handful of classroom needs. This platform can help you work more efficiently to plan lessons and address the needs of all of your students. This new guide is a great addition to their robust resources for educators.
Take a look at this new guide for educators from Kiddom. The Special Education Toolkit by Kiddom includes practical strategies, tools, and resources to help you differentiate for students with diverse needs this school year!