Mary's Case
Mary is teaching 7th grade Language Arts. She is getting ready to teach the elements of poetry (imagery, theme, characterization, etc.). As part of a professional development day offered at her school, Mary had looked at last year’s standardized test results for her class; she noticed that her students are weak on Language Arts, especially her ESL and inclusion students.
Mary is planning the activities to teach the poetry unit and she already knows that they will be difficult concepts to grasp, especially by special population students. This year, Mary’s school board has made it clear that they want the teachers to use computers for teaching and learning on a daily basis. Mary's school has a computer lab, a class set of netbooks on a mobile cart, and a class set of iPad2s on a mobile cart. She can sign-up for the computer lab or to check out a cart of mobile devices.
To complicate things, Mary’s principal, Ms. Klondike, announced that she will go and observe Mary the day after tomorrow – precisely the day when Mary will be in the middle of teaching the elements of poetry to her class. Mary needs to come up with a solution on how to help ESL and inclusion students understand the difficult poetry concepts but, what is THAT solution?
