LAUSR

Carol Rogers-Shaw: What led to your interest in digital learning and learning differences? Mary Ann Wolf: In my first year as an educator, I taught 27 fifth graders of whom 9 had an Individual Education Plan (IEP). I quickly realized that I could not truly personalize learning for every student (nor could I deeply understand their learning needs in each content area) every day. I had access to digital learning in my classroom, but 20 years ago neither the products nor the solutions were sufficient to fully understand the learning differences and to provide personalized pathways. Working with the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), I began to see the potential for digital learning to expand opportunities for instruction and assessment to support educators and students themselves in personalizing the experience for each student including, but also beyond, those with IEPs. CRS: How do you define digital learning and distance education at the Friday Institute? MAW: We look at digital learning as any way that you can use digital resources and content tools or technology to augment the learning experience. We examine what digital content a teacher is utilizing in the classroom, allowing students agency to create and demonstrate learning. Distance education probably goes more to doing this from afar, but it certainly could embody a lot of the digital learning resources, tools, and content that you might see in a face-to-face classroom. We really want to say digital age teaching and learning. We don’t want to limit it. CRS: How does your current work connect policy making and classroom teaching? MAW: We are engaged in and focus on the intersection of policy, practice, and research. In many ways, we are the translator; we help districts and schools build capacity to transition to personalized and digital learning. It is important that they have ways to learn what will impact their work the most. In many cases, we guide administrators and educators through key resources and ideas so that they can identify what will be most beneficial, and we give educators and teams from schools or districts time to explore and create plans together.