WEEK 9.0 : STYLISH TEACHING

Dear fellow bloggers,

First, have a look at the video below. It is meant to help you recycle and further digest Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences. Whether you are a visual, auditory or kinesthetic learner, the video will certainly cater for you learning styles. Enjoy and don't forget to read my reflections on week 9.0 below!

Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles were the two starring concepts of the week before the last of this wonderful online learning experience. I have to confess that I'm already starting to miss the ambience of the heated and insightful discussions we've been having on the Nicenet arena . Delicious Deborah's assigned readings and those suggested by coursemates did immenseley illuminate me on these concepts and made me pause for a while and rethink my teaching practices. In fact, every single article I read in this course was an invitation to question and re-evaluate what I do in the classroom. Are the ways I teach conducive to learning? Do I meet my students' learning needs? Do students really enjoy and learn in my classes? Do I have enough intelligences to address my students' various ones? Do I appropriately use technology in my teaching ?... and many more questions.

I knew about Multiple Intelligenes and Learning styles before, but superficially. I used to jokingly think that teachers might need genetics engineering help to be capable of adopting a teaching approach that caters for students' different learning styles. I thought to myself maybe every teacher needs to have, at least, seven of his clones to assist him in addressing students' multiple intelligences and learning styles. That would be "funtastic', but, too bad, impossible so far. Anyway, teachers, as a rule, don't run out of innovative ideas that would enhance 'the marketability of their products' . Based on this week's readings and classroom experience, fellow coursemates suggested a variety of ways technology could be used to engage all types of learners. We seemed to unanimously agree upon the fact that the multimedia feature of technology would greatly help us customize our teaching styles to match students' learning styles and multiple intelligences. Connectivity and interactivity are also two important features of technology that would very likely result in students being hooked after learning. They are 'digital natives', after all, and binary language is perhaps much closer to them than we are to it. I italicised and put between quotes 'digital natives' just to draw your attention to the misleading generalisation with which the phrase is commonly used. Not all our students are digiatl natives. Only a few of them are. And for the great unlucky majority, computers and the Web are no more than science fiction! Well, this is another issue. I may write about it in future posts.

This week, we had also to submit the final versions of our project plans. I had a great pleasure to have Khuloud Assad as my peer project partner and reviewer. We did help each other a lot with pertinent remarks and suggestions that were vey helpful in rewriting and improving our projects drafts. Having a look at my coursemates projects that were uploaded early this week equally assisted me in finalising my project plan. I'm so grateful to you all. You're simply inspiring! Needless to say, I am to be held responsible for any imperfection in my product.

Regards,

Arbi