The seventh affordance opened by new media is differentiated learning. Differentiated learning means, as defined in the course, that individuals and groups of learners can work at a pace that suits their needs and where data analyses allow that these processes are readily and conveniently managed by teachers. One specific way to differentiated learning is personalized learning.

1. Personalized learning

What is it? Personalized learning is intended to provide a unique, highly focused learning path for each student. The goal is to improve learning by ensuring that students receive the particular kinds of learning experiences and support they need, when they need those resources, and in a form well suited to each learner.

How does it work? Personalized learning aims to build a “profile” of each student’s strengths, weaknesses, and pace of learning—similar to how learning analytics monitors student performance, looking for patterns likely to predict how students will fare— and customize educational experiences and support accordingly. Students no longer depend on specific learning moments but they can choose time and place. When first students were organized in groups, according to the achievement, nowadays students get realtime feedback during learning time and have a more individual pace of learning. In this way, learning is adaptive to students.

Due to this kind of education, the role of teachers differs from traditional school environments. They are more guides, but also able to give more individual attention and advice because the information of each learner is so specific. Teachers needs more collaborative learning for instruction and working, they have to align the standards to the individual, and they have to enlarge their instruction skills.

So, as said by Dr Cole, this is more efficient, and it’s a recognition that not all the students are the same, getting the same does not mean it’s learned equally. According to Dr Cope and Dr Kalantzis, and may others,  educationers have the responsibility to get every student engaged and improve to their abilities. By using digital tools to differentiated students get more attention from the teacher, more feedback and they are having more possibilities to ask their questions.

In his tedtalk Jeremy Friedberg explains how you can use games in personalized learning, achieving more deap learning, more engagement, more critical thinking, by learning during the whole period, instead of only learning when the students have to do an exam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC-zBsc1w-c

2. Personalized learning and collaboration

Although in this course differentiated learning is mentioned as the possibility that individuals and groups of learners can work at a pace that suits their needs, most differentiated learning is still individual. How a more joint, collective approach can be developed even in personalized learning, has the attention of more and more people. Dr. Tim Clark promotes Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT) and mobile learning to empower students and teachers with their personal technology tools for building learning communities. He is the author of the BYOTNetwork. He collects ideas and gives a platform to educators to develop a more collaborative way of working. One of them is Douglas Konopelko. In his blog https://byotnetwork.com/2016/06/13/collaboration-for-personalized-learning/ , written with Dr. Tim Clark, he emphasizes thats students do not learn in a vacuum, “teachers can help students discover what individual roles they can successfully assume when collaborating with others.”

To facilitate collaboration, the formulated some strategies. First, scaffold collaborative activities, for example by modeling strategies to share responsibilities. Second, promote interdependence and utilize students expertise. This can be achieved by making clear to the class which students have which skills, so they know where they can rely on when they are having trouble with the content or specific skills. Students can also facilitate a small group environment to teach other students a concept.  Establish clear guidelines and developing a classroom vision help the class to create a sense of community within the classroom.

More interesting examples of personalizes learning can be found on: http://study.com/blog/3-examples-of-teachers-who-used-personalized-learning-in-the-classroom.html

Konopelko, D. (2016). Collaboration for Personalized Learning. https://byotnetwork.com/2016/06/13/collaboration-for-personalized-learning/