Understanding how the crew learns...

These results from the learning styles test show that on this scale I am more towards the reflective; think before doing learner, Intuitive; discovering possibilities and relationships, Visual; learning from what I see and a Global learner; trying to absorb information slowly before suddenly ‘getting it’.

In a traditional classroom of 25 students, it might be hard to support the entire range of learning styles in the classroom. I believe that this could be done if each lesson had a number of different strategies to teach the desired outcomes to each of the learning styles; visual, auditory and kinesthetic. By showing a visual picture for the visual learners to see, allow the students to listen to what you are telling them or have a podcast playing for the auditory learners and also have a lot of hands on activities for the students who are kinesthetic learners it should help the students to absorb information a little easier. If these simple things are done to support the students through their learning styles, a learning manager can then look at the other, more complex learning styles and come up with ways of supporting the whole range of students in their class.

In order to support the variety of different learning styles, a number of different ICTs could be used. As an example, a slide show could be used for all learning types. Each slide can have a picture, diagram or even text for the visual learner to absorb the information to the best of their abilities. Podcasts, songs or even a talking avatar can be added for the auditory learner to hear the information that they need to absorb. For the kinesthetic learners, the slide show can be edited in a number of different ways that can make it a hands on experience so the information needed to get across can be absorbed in a way that kinesthetic learners can remember. A slide show is only one example of what an ICT can be used to help students learn, as there are plenty more out there that are easy to create and simple to use for a student.

Although it is easy for a learning manager to see a learning style in a student and develop ways to help teach the student it could always be a good idea to ask the student their preference of ICTs that they would be interested in using. By creating a simple quiz or questionnaire for the students, a learning manager could learn so much. They could ask the students what types of ICTs they already play with and what they already know about ICTs. This could give the learning manager ideas on what to use and what to introduce to the students if they have or haven’t used an ICT before. The learning manager could then structure their work units on the outcomes of the students’ quizzes or questionnaire.

ICTs can help all students to learn new and interesting things throughout their lives. For the new generation of students being the “technology age” all learning managers will need to have a thorough understanding of most ICTs in order to help their students learn what they need to know in order to be prepared for their future.