week 9: Yoohoo!! I am Word Smart and People Smart!!

The week started with a very hot topic---Learning Styles! Our students, though they may look or behave similar, but they are all different from each other.They all have their own distinctive learning styles. Thanks to latest researches and trends, gone are the days when teachers taught them all in one and the same traditional dictatorial method.

Here are some of  the learning styles given by Howard Gardner:

- Linguistic / Auditory - Word-smart
- Logical-mathematical - Math-smart
- Musical - Music-smart
- Kinesthetic - Bodily-smart
- Visual / Spatial - Picture-smart
- Interpersonal - Myself-smart
- Intrapersonal - People-smart
- Naturalist - Nature-smart
- Spiritual
- Essential
- Moral

I would say, if the teacher is not able to adapt according to the needs of students s/he is not a good teacher. Best is to determine right at the beginning what are the learning styles of the students, for this one of my friends from this course, Maggie, has posted 2 URL's on her blog and I am posting them here

http://www.ldpride.net/learning-style-test.html 
http://www.wright.edu/~carole.endres/learnstyles.htm
To these two, I would add one more test site: 
http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks3/ict/multiple_int/questions/questions.cfm


 These URLs contain survey/test for determining the learning styles of the students. They can be very helpful for the teachers as well as for the students.


When I took a test to check my learning style I came somewhere between Linguistic, Interpersonal and Intrapersonal. Here are the results:

I remember when I was at school I was not quite good in Maths and never liked Physics and Chemistry. In the music class I was the one with no ear for the music too! But when I started college I selected subjects like Psychology and English Literature and they were really my domain and I used to score highest  in all the subjects in class.Now I know why some students are tagged as "poor in studies" and some as "good in studies" by the teachers.

Teachers can make use of technology to combat with the different learning styles in the classroom: Interactive PPT, Webquests, Anvill, Blogs, PBL, Audio/video, Discussion Boards, quizzes/puzzles, images etc

Finally, this week we have submitted our final project plan. Now I am sitting with my fingers crossed to see how much I score there!