December 2006 — Technology Integration
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Customized Learning
A search engine that adapts to individual student abilities has proven to be an ideal addition to one district’s effort to differentiate instruction.
ONE OF THE FASTEST-GROWING and most
diverse K-12 school districts in South Carolina, Richland
School District Two, is committed to integrating new teaching
methods and modern technologies into its daily academic
life. One area that Richland focuses on is the use of
differentiated instruction (DI) in the classroom.
Four years ago, to augment student learning and to fully utilize the information received from the Northwest Evaluation Association’s Measures of Academic Progress testing, the district began providing intensive professional development in DI based on the work of Carol Ann Tomlinson, a professor of educational leadership, foundations, and policy at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education. Building on that training, Richland teachers have continued to develop lesson plans that incorporate new content, activities, hardware, and software that meet the diverse learning needs of each child.
One component of the district emphasis on differentiated instruction is netTrekker d.i., an online search tool that allows teachers and students to hunt for educational resources for various reading levels. Students in more than 70 1-to-1, technology-integrated classrooms throughout the district use it every day. Though some online resource portals such as Answers.com or Askforkids.com also offer relatively safe online searching, Richland chose netTrekker d.i. because it was designed to support differentiated instruction in addition to providing reliable content. The content is all educator-selected and aligned to state standards.
netTrekker users can customize their searches in accordance with students’ instructional level or experience. For example, at Richland’s Sandlapper Elementary School, fourth-grade teacher Dawnn Turner found that the majority of her Integrating Technology to Enhance Curriculum (ITEC, Richland’s 1-to-1 computing program) students are proficient in file management, and are often frustrated by having to use shared folders that are accessible to the less tech-savvy general student population. In response to the requests of her students, Turner created folders within the search engine called “ITEC Castle” for her class to use independently via a private login.
Mary Lane Sloan, a fifth-grade teacher at Richland’s Lonnie B. Nelson Elementary School, says that netTrekker gives her the chance to introduce rich-content topics such as the Holocaust, but with researched materials that she knows are both safe and appropriate. She says that for social studies, she has her students use the timeline search for fact-gathering about different eras, while she often uses the image library to reach and motivate her reluctant readers.
