Third Grade Teachers, Church Lane Elementary School
As in any classroom, our classrooms are full of diverse students with a variety of learning needs. Our goal is to foster student growth by meeting each student where they are with targeted instruction. Wixie allows us to differentiate instruction. For example, we use the audio feature in Wixie to record our voices reading word problems so that students with reading specific learning disabilities can access the material fairly. They can show what math they know without being penalized or inhibited by their reading struggles. These students can access the material without needing adult assistance, building their confidence and independence.
Another way that Wixie can help students build independence and self-determination is by putting anchor charts on slides and pushing them out to students. We will often put anchor charts and teacher examples of math concepts on slides and push them out to students for them to reference as they work. This strategy can be used to help remind students of a previously taught concept or in the introduction of a new topic. For example, when we were beginning to work on time, we knew that students had worked on telling time to the nearest five minutes both in analog and digital form. This is a skill extensively covered in second grade so we did not want to take away from our instruction time to review but did want to activate this previous knowledge before delving deeper into the practice of telling time. Therefore, we put an anchor chart and directions on how to access a video on telling time on a slide, before providing students with practice problems to review the topic. Other times, after a new concept is taught, we will have students work on that topic independently while we meet with small groups. To set students up for success we put guides on their Wixies that help them understand a concept and hopefully clear up misconceptions when we are not readily available to do this for them ourselves. When we taught our students how to use the distributive property to multiply, when the students went to work independently we put the steps to using this property as the first pages. Students could use this as a reference as they worked.