30/06:I haven't done a learning profile on myself as yet but already know that I am very much and reading and writing person in the way I learn. It is a little to easy for me to tune out to aural presentations and start thinking my own train of thought. I also find it valuable to discuss concepts with someone else-generally not too large a group. I need to try the learning style questionnaire tomorrow to see if I am correct.
01/07: I have now done the VARK questionnaire and found that I have a visual score of 1, aural 3, read/write 7, kinaesthetic 5 and I have a mild read/write bias. I am not sure I agree totally with this but it did pick up that I am a read/write person in my learning style and don't benefit much from hearing things.
How can I use this in my teaching? Just really by recognising that students learn in different ways and perhaps trying to use different ways of teaching if possible to account for those students who have different learning styles to mine.
Much of the discussion has centered around collaboration but I think we need to also accept that some people do learn best if they do tasks alone. I am not really sure this will change in an ICT learning environment as we are still trying to achieve the outcomes of enabling learning amongst all out students. I just have to be careful that I don't try to use technology for the sake of it and try to incorporate it in a meaningful way.
I keep on coming back to the fact that my teaching is very face-to-face and using technology may not be the most appropriate method of teaching my students. They come to the classes I teach for practical demonstrations and also for the opportunity to practise clinical skills. Web 2.0 technology may not meet their learning needs -I need to gisve this more thought.
Charlene, Last semester i only did a practical lab for nurses, however, to go through the practical skill that they had to learn, i took all of the learning skills into consideration. Started with an overview (aural), showed them a video clip of the skill (visual), did a demonstration myself & talked them through it. Then, got them to do the skill in a group situation, taking turns (kinesthetic). Before they did the assessment the following week, I got them to talk me through the skill so it reinforced their learning before doing the skill assessment. They were still there to do the skill but we approached it in many different ways.
ReplyDeleteI also did the VARK questionnaire. Apparently I have a "multimodal ARK learning preference". That surprises me, I thought I appreciated the visual a lot more.
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