Welcome to Edgy Tips, a side project of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast where I share one quick idea to make your teaching better.

This is Jennifer Gonzalez and I am your host.

This Edgy Tip is sponsored by Flupe.

Do you spend hours giving feedback only to find students throwing it in the trash?

Flupe is an app that allows teachers to give feedback four times faster.

After students submit their work through the app, teachers can respond quickly with comment banks, audio comments, hand-drawn responses,

and feedback that can be anchored to specific places on images.

Unlike other assessment tools, Flupe uses research-based strategies to teach students how to give feedback and use their feedback to learn.

Through dialogue and revision, students can act fast on the feedback they receive.

On top of that, Flupe allows them to do peer review and self-assessment, which both build feedback literacy.

Go to flupeedu.com slash edutips to get a special offer for edutips listeners, or contact Flupe at team at flupeedu.com for a school license.

Today's edutip is try a tiered activity for simple differentiation.

Despite knowing that our students have different needs, many teachers struggle with differentiation.

Not because they disagree with it in theory, but because in practice, the idea of planning so many different lessons is overwhelming.

While you probably know that it's not necessary to plan a unique lesson for every student, you may not be aware of some of the simplest ways to provide differentiation.

So in this tip, I will just share one. The tiered activity, also known as a tiered assignment, and that's TIER.

You can find this strategy in lots of places, but I learned about it from the work of Carol Amtomlinson in books like How to Differentiate Instruction in Academically Diverse Classrooms.

Here's how it works.

Suppose you're teaching students how to type on a keyboard without looking at the keys.

After giving a brief pre-test, you've determined that some students have no idea how to do this, while others have had a few lessons in a previous course.

And a few students seem to have slow but moderately good touch typing skills.

It would not make sense to have the whole class work through a typing exercise that consisted entirely of hitting the F and J keys.

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