Campfire Session — Differentiation in Flint

In this Differentiation in Flint Campfire Session, we focused on how teachers can use Flint to support diverse learners across the full spectrum—students who need additional scaffolding, multilingual learners, and gifted and talented students—without increasing workload or fragmenting instruction. The session emphasized practical differentiation strategies using chats, activities, groups, and moderation tools, while also surfacing real classroom challenges around AI use, student behavior, and digital citizenship. Content covered in this session includes: Context-setting on differentiation and edtech priorities, drawing on a recent Business Wire survey highlighting attendance, early intervention, AI adoption, edtech consolidation, and the growing shift from family communication to meaningful connection. Using chats for rapid differentiation, including creating and modifying worksheets, study guides, rubrics, and translated materials in seconds without needing to build full activities. Discussion of translation quality, noting strong performance across many languages (Spanish, Arabic, Romance languages), with acknowledgment that accuracy can vary and teacher review remains important. Pedagogical reflection on differentiation, addressing when it makes sense to give all students the same material versus intentionally providing varied scaffolds—and how Flint supports both approaches. Groups and subgroups as the backbone of differentiation, showing how teachers can create a main class group with shared learning goals and background. Live demo: Differentiated writing activity, showing how the same core activity can be duplicated and adjusted to add sentence starters, reduced word counts, speech-to-text, or native-language support for ELL students. Scaffolding vs. subgrouping strategies, including a MAP testing example where teachers improved student growth by breaking instruction into smaller, sequenced activities rather than separating students by performance bands. Honest discussion of math limitations, acknowledging current challenges with geometry and visual figures, recent improvements to image handling, and ongoing development informed by teacher feedback. AI literacy as a foundation for differentiation, emphasizing that responsible AI use must be taught alongside academic content, and highlighting Flint’s customizable student AI literacy resources. Future-facing discussion of student profiles, exploring how Flint is moving toward deeper cross-class context so Sparky can eventually connect learning across subjects (e.g., linking history knowledge to English analysis or math to physics). Community-driven iteration, encouraging teachers to share successes and challenges through the Flint Community and Public Library, ensuring product development reflects real classroom needs. ------------------- Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 00:24 Ice-breaking news 02:36 Using Flint chats for differentiation 04:03 Using Flint activities for differentiation 05:02 Live demo of Flint for differentiation 45:54 Teacher shareouts and Q&A 59:38 Conclusion