Week 9: Learning Styles & Technology Connections and final project

"There is a very important and fundamental relation between learning and personality development. . . . The two interact in a "circular process." Thus, mastery of symbol systems (letters, words, numbers), reasoning, judging, problem-solving, acquiring and organizing information and all such intellectual functions are fed by and feed into varied aspects of the personality--feelings about oneself, identity, potential for relatedness, autonomy, creativity, and integration."

Barbara Biber

I can not believe that time has passed so fast, we are about to finish this amazing course. It has been a very busy week. We have read about learning styles and technology tools for multiple intelligences to apply in our classes. We also learned how to assess students and worked on the final project.

Learning styles and technology tools

The discussion in this week was about how a piece of technology can be used to meet the needs of more than one learning style, and one learning style can be reached by more than one piece of technology, as well. That is why we as teachers have to plan lessons which evidence a great variety of resources and technological tool, otherwise it is impossible to achieve good results with all the learners.

We also reflected that we have to look for appropriate strategies and approaches in order to propose useful activities that first motivate them to learn and provoke cooperative and autonomous learning.

For example we can:

• Use Photosynth for visual learners: http://www.slideshare.net/Microsofteduk/building-a-class-community-with-free-tools?related=1
• Create a collage using AutoCollage, a free tool that is available on http://www.pil-network.com/
• Use blogs (www.blogger.com), websites, wikis (sites.google.com) and other collaborative tools to promote project based learning.
• Look for opportunities to learn through audio-visual presentations (such as CD-ROM and Webcasts.)
• Books that are available on our institution libraries, e-books, stories, course books.
• Free articles available on the internet selected according to the topics.
• Audio learning: looking for podcast. Some of them are in youtube and others we could find in Itunes. Many universities are publishing their videos in Itunes,too
• Videos: Use youtube also and websites like www.ted.com/ or http://dolectures.com/
• There are some open courses (OCW) like http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/essay-and-report-writing-skills/content-section-0.

Final project

My project was aimed at motivating learners to improve reading and writing skills; that is why I created the following wiki:

https://sites.google.com/site/readingandwriting2015/

First, I want to overcome the problem that I have in my currculum desing course. My students have problems identifyining key information fronm readings and they can not also write academic summaries which makes it difficult for them to achieve the contents of the course; once students strengthen the reading and writing skills, I will feed the wiki with material about the curriculum deign course to teach my students how to plan lessons and courses and how to add free technology resources for teaching English in schools and high schools. Undoubtedly, pupils have a positive attitude towards educational technology, and are willing to use educational technology to support their own learning process.

During these nine weeks I have learned more that just technology, it has been a course where different skills were streghten, starting form organizing time for work, home and study, cooperative learning, critical thinking, innovation, curiosity and others. Additionally, I learned that teaching in EFL classes must be focused on making language learning more engaging and relevant to the digital generation. One way to achieve this goal is by introducing technology in the classes, applying leaner centered approaches, looking for appropriate strategies for teaching and evaluating learning.Therefore, I want to transmit all this beatiful experience to my students.