Learning Styles and Technology

A really productive Week # 9 with something I barely read and skim through: Multiple Intelligences.

I remember having read Daniel Goleman book about Emotional Intelligence a time ago, and afterwards the book about Social Intelligence and even Ecological Intelligence; and now, having read something about Multiple Intelligences and the research made by Howard Gardner broadens my capability to interact with my students and their individuality.

I aim to remark now the term individuality, which emphasizes the concept that we are all different, with individual learning styles and information-process pace that need to be respected at every place or activity.

We, the teachers, have much responsibility on sensing and respecting those different styles by designing class activities that go with both, active and reflective learners, a time for thinking what to do or say, and a time for taking it to praxis. Taking care of visual/verbal and sequential/global learners, or even assigning tasks that can involve different types of intelligence to mixed groups of students.

I remember an activity I worked with a group of students that were into a folklore music band. It was just amazing how motivated they were having known that they were going to travel to US for a presentation and how much important English was in their careers, and even better, designing activities linked to music really took them into classes.

I can think of an activity in which my students can make some kind of internet research, so active learners join reflective learners and allot the surfing work to active learners, and the process of discussing and making the report by email/blog to reflective learners.

There are so many things we can do. Some of those activities are well listed in Teacher Tap website: http://eduscapes.com/tap/index.htm, some others can be created using the tools we've already used in the Webskilled Teachers course like ANVILL, webquest, blogs or social networks, or Power Point for activities in classroom.

Dalton