AIM Model:

This AIM (Analysis, Intention, Measure) model is a thinking tool to help teachers reflect on how they currently use digital technologies to support their practice

Finding and evaluating information relevant to your topic

To what extent can you find reliable and trustworthy information online, and organise what you find using curation and knowledge management tools?
Digital technologies can help facilitate finding and evaluating information, for example by connecting us to multiple sources through powerful search engines such as Google and Bing, enabling triangulation and hence data verification. Being able to both locate and evaluate information online is a key skill, and one that it is important to be able to model for students.

Investigating

Undertaking formative and summative assessment

To what extent can you use digital technologies to capture student understanding and provide written and oral feedback?
Digital technologies can provide a quick and powerful way of gathering both formative and summative assessment information from your pupils. Dedicated apps such as Socrative can provide you with individual assessments of learning in the classroom, whilst free survey tools such as Google Forms can provide both synchronous and asynchronous opportunities for assessment and feedback.

Planning

Motivating

Providing a stimulating and engaging environment

To what extent can you motivate learners through the interaction and gamification opportunities provided by digital technologies?
Digital technologies can provide opportunities for gamification, turning a learning exercise into a fun challenge and an opportunity to compete with peers. Apps such as Kahoot, for example, can be used to transform an end-of-unit test into something akin to a gameshow, stimulating and engaging staff and students alike.

Adapting your teaching for all learners

To what extent can you use the flexible nature of digital technologies to scale the challenge for learners, differentiating your teaching?
Digital technologies are well known for their protean nature, i.e. they are often not fixed entities but are changeable according to need. This changeability can be used to support differentiation in the classroom, e.g. the same online Google Doc could support a less able pupil in writing simple headings and paragraphs, but at the same time provide a much stronger support framework for more literate pupils, e.g. grammar tools and personal dictionaries.

Engaging learners in dialogue and discussion?

Digital technologies can provide a strong framework to support collaboration, and can even offer opportunities for working with others that would otherwise be impossible. For example, they can allow previously unavailable perspectives to be explored through apps like YouTube, or bring together individuals in combinations that would either be impractical or impossible through apps like Padlet.