Week 1 - Multiple Intelligences & Learning Styles

Multiple Intelligences:
After completing the online Multiple Intelligences quiz I discovered that I was a close mix of 'Linguistic' and 'Intrapersonal' smart.

I was not suprised at this particular result because I know that as a person I love to work and just be by myself more than normal. I have always enjoyed the peace and serenity I feel when I am alone. I still love to have company, but I'm the type of person that thrives on being independent.

I find, as I get older and discover for myself who I am as a person, that I feel most comfortable expressing myself through the use of words. I personally love to write how I feel and find it much easier to use words to let the people around me know how I feel and who I am. I would rather write a letter than talk on the phone any day!

As a future learning manager, I can see how useful this tool would be to utilise in the classroom to find out on a more deeper level how each learner in my class views the world and essentially learns. I could easily embrace the results I discover to further enrich the learning experiences for the students in my class, as well as allowing them to find out who they are as a person and how they learn.

Learning Styles:

I found that the Learning Styles Inventory quiz asked very similar questions to the Multiple Intelligences quiz. My results indicated that the style I use most is 'Solitary' which to me, was very much like the 'Intrapersonal' style of the Multiple Intellligences. However, I was surprised to realise that the second style I use most often was 'Social' which made me think "how can I love to work alone, yet love to work in groups nearly as much?" This made me ponder just how I learn. Do I prefer to work alone or in groups? Then I thought, well perhaps I enjoy to work in groups to gather a wider range of perspectives and points of view and then like to figure out, alone, what I know based on what I have learnt through group work and my peers.

In a typical classroom of 25 students, I believe that there are so many opportunitites that can arise from the varying learning styles that would be identifiable amongst the students. By having an evident amount of diversity of social, solitary, visual etc learners I could provide learning experiences that would focus on including activities suitable for each learning style. Visual learners, for example, would thrive on learning a new concept through incorporating the use of technology because they would be learning through 'seeing' the concept in front of them.

Due to today's generation of students being brought up as 'digital natives' in such a quick-paced modern world, it would be quite vital for the learning manager to plan and implement learning experiences that incorporate ICT's as frequently as possible, because each learning style whether visual, aural, verbal, physical or solitary can be accounted for in the classroom due to the large variety of technology that is available.

I cant wait to see what is created within the next 5 to10 years!! The opportunities are endless....