Learning Styles

We are all equally different... or so I tell my students. As a teacher when I walk into a classroom, I know that all of my students have different strengths. I always seek to find these strengths and try to build lesson based around them. It is my view that by doing this students will improve in many areas.

A number of years ago I began looking at various Learning Style theories. I was particularly attracted towards the work of Howard Gardner and his Multiple Intelligence theory. His work states that there are 9 intelligences.These multiple intelligences can be nurtured and strengthened, or ignored and weakened.

Creative Commons

I am about to start a Blogging program with my ES students. One of the first things I shall be introducing them to is Creative Commons and using images on their blog posts. I think this is something that they must be aware of and will be a useful skill for the future.

The image I have chosen is a picture from the recent flooding in Thailand.

Photo Attribution by NIST SCHOOL SHARED ACCOUNT

Creative Commons Licence

Personal Learning Reflection.

When I began this course, I was looking for ways to further integrate technology into my workplace. I felt that I was using a wide variety of technology tools and was able to use these tools effectively. I still firmly believe that we have to teach our students to use these new tools effectively, so that they can make the right choices.

This course has taught me many new things, not only new tools, but many of the sessions have added value to my knowledge. This has been mainly in terms of being able to answer the question 'why'. When I previously tried to introduce these new tools into my workplace, I never really addressed the question "why are we doing this?'. Much of the work I have done has made me, firstly consider the reasons for doing something, secondly, give evidence as to why using certain tools will benefit our students.

My personal learning curve has been heading up since day one of this course. Each of the different sessions has added so much to my development. In the early sessions I was able to further my understanding of web 2.0 technologies and collaborative technologies. I used this information to discuss with members of my leadership team, why I wanted to see teachers in my organisations adding web 2.0 tools to their toolkits. As a result, I have now implemented classroom twitter accounts and will be starting a blogging programme for our upper elementary students. The collaborative tools, particularly Google Docs have been fantastic. Although we are not yet using Google across the school, I have begun setting up documents for teachers to collaborate on. This has been particularly useful during the recent flooding in Thailand. Teachers, who have been dispersed all over the country, have been able to contribute to our efforts to provide an on-line learning environment.

NETS-S Lesson

The following is a post I made some time ago on some work I did with a Maths class. I think it falls under these categories:

Creativity and Innovation (Students demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes using technology.)


Technology Operations and Concepts (Students demonstrate a sound understanding of technology concepts, systems, and operations.)



Our Year 5's are studying Ancient Greece as their topic this term. They kicked off with Greek Day which saw them experience what it was like to live in the Ancient World through a range of interesting activities. They are now busy learning more about this wonderful civilisation through a varied range of cross-curricular learning experiences.

I teach Maths to one of the classes in this Year Group, and last week, got together with another of the Y5 teachers (Two heads are better than one... and Gemma's Brain Rocks!) to look at how we could link our Maths to the topic and integrate some technology for the students. We both felt that it was imperative that the technology must contribute to and enhance the teaching and learning and be used as a tool for reaching the instructional objectives - not be a time filler!

The objectives we wanted to cover were: Recognise and describe 2D and 3D shapes, sort shapes, measure using standard and non standard measurements, Area and Perimeter and Nets of 3D shapes.

The following is a description of how we set about achieving all of this. As the unit will run over the next few weeks, I will break this post into 3 parts.