LessonUp Academy
menu
Start
Lessons
Search
About
lesson plan

Differentiation

In this course you will learn more about differentiation: why should you use differentiation within your lesson, how do you do it in your LessonUp lesson and what does this look like for your students.

what is it and why should i do it in my lesson?

Differentiation in education means adapting your lessons to students' individual needs. This includes tailoring the content and the way you deliver it so that each student learns in a way that suits them.

It doesn't mean you have to create a separate lesson for each student, but you can divide your existing lesson into different levels. It ensures that each student is challenged. This is important because every student has a different background and thus different needs.
"There is no right or wrong way when it comes to differentiation. In all cases you as a teacher want to consider the differences between students' learning needs. And after all, that is why you want to differentiate in the first place."  - JW, History teacher, Secondairy Education

HOW TO DIFFERENTIATE IN YOUR LESSONUP LESSON

Offering differentiation in your lessons is difficult. It is not one mouse click after which all of the lesson material is offered differentiated. The role of the teacher in this is essential. This is also the idea behind the differentiation in LessonUp.

You can differentiate by using different learning methods. In addition, you can use the differentiation button in LessonUp. This doesn't automatically differentiate your entire lesson, but you can use it to show students which part of the lesson they need to focus on.

By clicking on the 'Differentiation' button a color palette will appear. You can choose from the default meaning from LessonUp or enter your own meaning. 

You can divide the lesson by level, learning goal, type of assignment and many more. Another example is to divide your slides into 'knowledge', 'understanding', 'implementation'.

To mark your lessons with the colors and meanings you just defined click on the differentiate icon next to the thumbnail of your slide. Here you can attach a color to a slide.

student view

Once you share the lesson with your students they will see the lesson on lessonup.app as shown here. For each slide, they see what color code goes with it.