Personalized learning creates a platform for you to get to know your students’ strengths, growth opportunities, and learning styles. With personalized learning, you will be able to tailor activities and lessons to meet the needs of your students, based on the mentioned factors, along with their interests and skills. It would ensure each student has his/ her plans and goals for learning. Let’s find out more about the different methods and tools that will enable you to personalize instruction for your students.

What are the Benefits of Personalized Learning?

Personalized learning ensures each student actively participates in the learning process. All the activities are meaningful, engaging, and supportive of interpersonal communication among the students. It means that objectives are taught through the activities in the classroom and the soft skills that are necessary for the post-secondary level and career readiness.

An exciting part of personalized learning is that students can take part in enrichment opportunities to apply what they have learned or receive the reinforcement they need.  

The following are just a few examples practices and tools that are utilized when personalizing a student’s learning:

Social Learning Management Systems

Learning Management System (LMS) is a great way to fine-tune personalized learning to suit the needs of your students, but how do you think your planning will be if you consult with an online community of educators like Pedagogue. Pedagogue is a digital educational platform that connects teachers with students and their parents. The platform provides resources for planning lessons that will engage each student through their interests and skill levels. Through the community and the informative blogs, you can find tools and ideas that will enhance your lessons and projects while yielding positive outcomes for your students.

However, just like the traditional learning management system, teachers can see a student’s progress based on real-time data. From this data, they can create a guide for a student’s learning path.

Self-assessment

Self-assessment is a process that allows students to evaluate their performance based on meeting their objectives. This process makes students aware of their strengths and weaknesses with course content and learning strategies. The five-stage model for introducing self-assessment in your classroom involves:

·         The students’ awareness to recognize ownership of achieving the goals of each lesson.

·         Providing clarification which allows them to collaborate with you and ensure proper alignment in the grading process.

·         In-depth knowledge about A, B, or C grades and their criteria.

·         Receiving timely feedback from the instructor.

·         Productive goals for future assessments.

This practice is also useful in preparing students for self-reflection in their future careers.

Using Digital Tools

A student can learn from various sources like podcasts, expert websites, databases, blogs, and online tools available on the internet. Although, you would have to choose your source wisely as there many options to select. You can gather information and links and share them on the Pedagogue platform and conduct short tutorials on how to utilize digital tools or how to conduct research online. Or you can upload lessons and projects for students to complete at their own pace. 

The implementation of a personalized learning program benefits all students because it gives them the ability to learn at their own pace and utilize the pathway that is best for them. It also leads to more opportunities for students to interact with one another and for the teacher to observe the students’ progress closely. Personalized learning also creates room for students to have unlimited choices in learning, which generates comfort throughout the activity by building connections with peers and coming out of the experience as more confident learners.