How can teachers and schools ensure that their students are learning what they need when it comes to technology and information literacy?

Excellent question – where to start? Let’s start with information literacy. In my opinion, the best way to ensure that our students are learning what they need in terms of information literacy is to offer all students truly differentiated instruction. No one would argue that ISB classrooms are not mixed ability classrooms. Just spend five minutes talking to students and it becomes apparent that each student is different from the others in terms of readiness, experience, interest, intelligences, language, culture and mode of learning.

 In the differentiated classroom teachers meet each student where s/he is at in order to ensure that each student maximizes learning. “The differentiated classroom provides different avenues to acquiring content, to processing or making sense of ideas, and to developing products." Carol Ann Tomlinson

In the differentiated classroom all students would be actively involved in the inquiry process anchored in a concept-based unit and would all be working toward answering the same essential questions and developing the same enduring understandings. The differentiated classroom would offer students both a classroom text set as well as a web-based text set. These text sets would provide each student many avenues to acquiring content that are appropriate in terms of each student’s readiness, experience, intelligence, interest, language background, culture and mode of learning.

In summary, teachers need to ask themselves whether they are meeting each student where s/he is at or are they insisting that students modify themselves to fit the curriculum. If students are provided with a truly differentiated classroom they are more likely to maximize their learning.