This list contains websites that may be helpful in meeting the diverse needs of your students. It was compiled by Nancy Grimes, an instructor at the University of Iowa's Belin-Blank Center. I tried to create separate posts so that I could categorize the list by subject area, but, as you'll find, 99% of these sites contain material for ALL subject areas. With that said, I apologize for the post being so long.
Mr. Besler
DI Websites
Most of these sites were contributed by students in the courses, “Differentiating Instruction for Gifted Students” 2009-2010 The University of Iowa, Belin Blank Center. Links frequently change so some sites might be inactive since spring semester 2010. Annotations are those of the students with some editing. It’s important to evaluate the sites for potential use with gifted students. -- Nancy Grimes, Instructor, Belin Blank Center, The U of Iowa.
The Access Center: Improving Outcomes for All K-8 Students
http://www.k8accesscenter.org/index.php home Click on sidebar: Differentiated Instruction for content areas. Science example follows.
I chose this site because I co-teach in a middle science classroom this year. I feel like I am somewhat knowledgeable in science but being able to understand the ways to differentiate for science has helped me turn many hours of work into only a few. I can use the examples given on this site to help me and the teacher differentiate for students.
BBC Skillswise
This is a British site. Think Queen’s English and spelling. Types of text short worksheets with example pages and worksheets to download. There are also fact sheets, games, and quizzes for each type of text. The types of text are instructive, informative, descriptive, and persuasive. This is set up in a simple graphic organizer style. There is a link for tutors.
Bedford County School District, Tennessee
http://www.bedfordk12tn.com/education/components/scrapbook/default.php?sectiondetailid=1153&PHPSESSID=d8c6a5e82cb5a14694dc64d934fc7244 Many TTT examples in different topics, like the Civil War, coordinate planes, Stuart Little, and Tennessee history, among others.
Best on the Web Organized by Shawnee Mission School District, Shawnee, Kansas
This is a great site. It has links to many sites that teachers can branch off to depending on their needs or their student’s needs. It has It has links to sites with activities for all grade levels and curriculum areas. This site is a good starting site because it has all of the links well organized. I have used some of these before such as illuminations. The sites on this web page are all top sites for educators. I will not have to waste time looking for sites if I start here.
Connections – NC: Curriculum Differentiation for the Gifted
This site has a link to Differentiated Lessons that allows you to find activities in math, science, language arts, etc. There are also links to critical and creative thinking strategies. This site is definitely geared towards creating lessons for higher leveled learners.
Dare to Differentiate
http://daretodifferentiate.wikispaces.com/Choice+Boards Lots of choices here for the teacher, separated by subject, like world languages (including French, Italian, Spanish), art (architecture), Language Arts, Math, Science, etc. This isn't separated by grade level. Includes definitions, templates, and examples.
Department of Defense Educational Activity
http://www.dodea.edu/home/ This is the home site for DoDEA. Specific information about gifted education is linked or can be found at the following web address.
DoDEA Gifted Education Program Standards for Curriculum and
Instruction
This site is a curriculum document that lists best practices for gifted education in each subject area at the elementary level. I could see this information being very helpful to the other regular classroom teachers in my district, as well as to myself. None of the lists are very long, but I could easily see applications for my own students. That is always a good sign.
Derry Village School – New Hampshire
“Differentiation Tools” –Explanations and examples provided for tiered assignments, totally 10, RAFT, TTT, anchor activities and learning contracts.
A Different Place
http://www.adifferentplace.org/index.html - home site
This site was helpful because it provides many links, which help teachers learn about differentiated instruction, links for plans and activities relating to different curriculum areas, enrichment, rubrics and topics related to DI. It explains the terminology in a way that is easy to understand. Good starting place for DI ideas. A regular classroom teacher would find this helpful as well.
Differentiation in Music – By Dr. James Frankel
Dr. Frankel discusses how to use differentiated instruction in the music classroom and also how to incorporate technology in the music classroom. Well written article about basic differentiated instruction.
Differentiation in Wilmette Public Schools, Wilmette, Illinois
Provides samples and templates for numerous DI strategies.
Discovery Education
http://school.discoveryeducation.com/index.html Classroom Resources
Lessons plans, puzzle makers, featured content plus more.
The Discovery Education site would be a great site for gifted students because it offers a variety of activities in various content areas. The lessons / activities include higher level thinking skills. Each lesson also states the objective, materials, procedures, adaptations, discussion questions, evaluation, extension activities, links to other activities, vocabulary, etc. This would be helpful to me as a new TAG teacher working with older students than I am use to. It explains the content and offers many options for teachers to use with students.
Discovery School’s Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators
This site is for instructors. It lists categories by subject matter. I clicked on the performing arts link, which took me to a list of different sites that gave lesson plans, different sites that I can share with my students that would help them with their projects. For example, there is a link for costume arts, which could help the students when they are adding that layer onto their dance. It also lists numerous resources for finding music, and sites to help students learn music theory (which is very important for dancers). This site is wonderful, and I look forward to using it in the future.
Education World
http://www.educationworld.com/ home address
This site talks about teaching nutrition to students. I think having a well-balanced diet is extremely important to everyone, especially dancers who are so active and need special foods to keep their strength up, and to have good energy. There are so many young kids who have eating disorders (especially dancers who are under the pressure to be thin and have a "perfect" body), so I think it is important to make nutrition a very important part of the curriculum. This activity involves having students blindfolded, and tasting different foods that are very nutritional and good for them, if they cannot determine what they are tasting they are given other clues like what vitamins and minerals are in them to help them figure out what they tasted. Therefore, they are tasting and learning about the benefits of different foods.
Egg Harbor Township Schools; New Jersy
This web site offers a variety of examples of DI for gifted learners. There are descriptions of Bloom’s Taxonomy (old version), learning styles, and many DI strategies. Lots of directions to go with this site. Useful for staff development and collaboration, too.
Egyptian Webquest – example of weighted activities – Fox Bay, Wisconsin
I love this idea because it used the web. What a great way to let students make choices to display their knowledge. I would like to create a project for my students using this electronic format.
English Learning Area From Tasmania
This website is a core resource for teachers of English working with the Essential Learnings Framework and English syllabuses in Tasmania. It contains teaching ideas, curriculum advice, news, reviews, information on professional learning programs and multiple links. Lots of visuals, lots of organizers. Very in depth—all ages.
Fun Lesson Plans
http://www.funlessonplans.com home site
http://www.funlessonplans.com/differentiated_instruction.htm This website offers some really neat ideas in terms ways to differentiate a lesson. It gives you a template of a topic card with pictures that corresponds with each type of option to learn. The idea is to let the student choose which style they prefer to learn in. For example it gives a picture of a newspaper, a read aloud, a timeline, and a painting (just to name a few). The students then choose which way they would like to present a topic to the class or teacher. Each one can be completed during a class period.
Hoagie’s Gifted Education Page
I know, I know . . . Hoagie’s is a great resource. Unfortunately, I had only used the pages designed for students. This section of the site is filled with helpful articles and websites, as well as several “tempting” books on differentiation for gifted students.
Indiana Department of Education
“Tiered Curriculum Project” from the Indiana Department of Education. Examples are categorized as differentiated by readiness, by interest, and by learning style.
Internet 4 Classrooms
This site is amazing. I have not even been to use all of the information that this site has to offer. I am always going on to this site for ideas and ways to help my teachers. This site is set up into a few different 5 categories to help you with your searches. The five categories that are on this site are going to help teachers not be overwhelmed with differentiation instruction. The teacher is going to be able to go to this site with an idea in mind this site is going to be able to help them without stressing them out due to the overwhelming information out there on DI.
Kathi Shaw website – Electronic Portfolio
This is a list of DI websites complied by Kathi Shaw. WOW!!! There is so much information on here. There are some links that are not related to DI, but most are. VERY HELPFUL!
Kathy Nunley’s Help 4 Teachers
“Don't reinvent the wheel!! Here's a website that already holds a large collection of tiered lessons in all subject areas.” It is an amazing resource with many tiered examples. Search the many layers to find examples by grade spans, e.g. middle school.
Kids Click: Websearch for Kids by Librarians
http://www.kidsclick.org/ A children’s website search site with over 600 subjects. The site includes common topics and online reference sites.
Learners Link: Differentiating Instruction
This is an umbrella site for differentiation for gifted students. It has theory, learner surveys, pre-assessment options, and lots of practical tools for my social studies classroom. It even has a large section for students to use! I am especially excited about the section on using Library of Congress documents to tier assignments.
McGraw Hill Company Teaching Today
Index of the topics related to differentiated instruction.
Montgomery County Schools, Maryland
Link to the Montgomery County public school site. It contains brief descriptions of several differentiation strategies including anchor activities, flexible grouping, learning contracts, exit cards, and tiered instructions. At the bottom of the site, there are also power points for each of the strategies that go into more depth about each one and give examples of how to implement the strategy.
Narragansett Schools, Rhode Island
http://www.narragansett.k12.ri.us/Nes/DInew/tttcubingact.html: Lots of ideas here, divided by grade into different TTTs and cubing activities. The third grade TTT on animal habitats has a lot of fun ideas that could challenge me but also ones that I would enjoy.
Neag Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development; The University of Connecticut – one of the national research centers on gifted education
Studies focusing on meeting the needs of gifted and talented youth have received national and international attention for over 40 years. The earliest research emphasized studies related to creativity, assessment, identification, programming, and evaluation. Several studies conducted by our research team are considered seminal research that guides the design and development of programs and services to meet the needs of gifted and talented students. The research team includes Dr. Joseph S. Renzulli, Dr. Sally M. Reis, and others.
Linked from Neag Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development; The University of Connecticut
Curriculum Compacting: A Necessity for Academic Advancement
This article is an excellent place for a person interested in compacting to begin. It gives a useful explanation of the term, but more importantly, outlines the necessary steps to compact curriculum effectively. This is an area in which I need to improve, so this item was a welcome find.
North Caroline Wise Owl
This is an online resource for schools in North Carolina, but it has some many useful links. Click on Professional Zone > Featured Web Sites for links to themed lessons. New on Wise Owl is a feature to return to various times.
Open: Oregon Education
If you are looking for a site to show you examples of differentiated curriculum samples, this is the site. Core curricula content with K-12 examples. Each lesson includes standards, objectives, essential skills, suggested activities, and resources.
Rutherford County Schools, Tennessee
Strategies, instructions and samples for different think-tac-toe activities.
Science for America
Site has printable worksheets, science projects and experiments. Also has ideas for emergency lessons, video demonstrations and blogs.
SCORE: School of California Online Resources for Teachers
http://www.sdcoe.k12.ca.us/score/cyberguide.html Webquests of complementary instruction for literature broken down by grade levels. This could serve well to supplement larger group instruction, or independent study for able learners. This site is reviewed routinely with new webquests added and broken links noted.
Teachnology
This is a site that will provide teachers with the background on the terms that go along with differentiation instruction. Each term then has another site that goes along with it to help and provide more information. This is a site that I have used to help me understand the terms that go with differentiation.
Think Tac Toe: Differentiating Assessment
This website provides an overview of differentiated instruction (DI), an explanation of multiple intelligences, benefits of using the multiple intelligence approach to DI, samples of using Think-Tac-Toe DI for addressing the multiple intelligences, and rubrics. Another feature that I found helpful was links to other sites.
Thinkfinity - Verizon Foundation
This website gives ideas and links to activities, interactive games, and lesson plans. You can put in a keyword search and it comes up with lots of ideas and suggestions. Not only is this resource for educators but parents and students can also come here and use the resources to help reinforce what is being learned in the classroom at home. I would use this as a computer based center. It has interactive games and my students really enjoy being on the computer. They can pick their own game and be able to learn from that at their own speed and interest level.
What Are We Doing in Art Today?
This is a great resource to explain how to use differentiated instruction in the art room. It lists Differentiation in the Art Room Tips, a ThinkTacToe: A Choice Menu, and a tiered instructional project for multiple Intelligences. This will be useful in planning “like” projects.
Writing Fun
This site, called Writing Fun, has text organizers to assist students with the writing process. Several text types are showcases. There are downloads. Excellent—I will use this one.
Writing Improvement Effort; Reading and Writing in the 21st Century
This has strategies for Differentiation for Gifted and Talented in Regular classrooms. Excellent site. There are some great writing tips including that students need more short-term practice that is not graded but is shared with others. Research based strategies including the “Hamburger” model to teach persuasive writing.
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