Learning Styles

I've known for a while what kind of learner I am, but reading about learning styles just helped to confirm it once more. I am definitely a visual learner.  If I can see something written down, I can easily recall it later, but when told something I am more likely to forget the information. I rely on readings and notes to help me remember much more than listening to someone lecture. In fact, during our online classes for this CEP 810 course, I take notes on what is said on a Google Doc or else I know it will be in one ear and out the other.

(*Note: I first read the page on types of learning styles on the "Share" page link and later saw the e-mail about a quiz to take..those results are at the bottom, but for the most part I based this off of being a visual learner because that is how I identify my learning style).

As a visual learner, I always appreciated when teachers wrote information on the board or provided texts to supplement their lectures. Lessons that centered around charts, graphs, pictures, numbers, hands-on activities, and reading were the easiest for me to later recall and to really understand.

I always hated it when teachers just simply lectured. I couldn't always get everything they were saying down in my notes fast enough (although I did learn to write notes at a rapid pace after a semester at MSU), and I often had trouble remembering later what was said in lecture if I didn't have incredibly thorough notes. I used to worry that I had something preventing me from paying attention because I always struggled so much with quick verbal recall or recalling what the teacher had taught. However, I had the ability to see something in a book, sometimes even full paragraphs, and be able to recite them verbatim later just by picturing what I had seen earlier in my head. That's when I learned what a photographic memory was and what it meant to be more of a visual learner. I grew up doing art activities with my dad, an architect, and reading my favorite books to the point of memorization, with my mom, a reading teacher. I imagine learning in those ways as a child helped me to really use visual cues more when learning.

In the article "Student Learning Styles and Their Implications for Teaching" by Susan Montgomery and Linda Groat, they focus on different types of learning styles and what teachers can do in order to meet students' needs. They say at one point, "the problem is not that faculty/student mismatches sometimes occur, but rather it is the failure to acknowledge and work out the potential conflicts and misunderstandings that undermine student learning." I think this is a key point. Teachers can't always appeal to all learning styles all the time, but it is important to be aware that students all bring different learning styles to the classroom. I know that I am a visual learner, but just having my students look at a chart may not have the same effect on some of them that it would on me. Many of them may learn more about the chart by discussing it or even by human role play of what that chart represents. Understanding that I learn differently from my students is key for me to remember when planning my lessons, and accordingly, I will continue to make sure I try to appeal to the different learning styles of my students. This means explaining new concepts in more than one way, ideally by providing visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning experiences. It is impossible to appeal to every learning style with every lesson, but it is possible to focus on engaging students in every lesson regardless of their learning style and providing them with different ways to learn.

* After writing this post about being a visual learner I saw that there was a quiz to take on a different site. I still stand by being a visual learner based on the descriptions I read on the initial link on the "Share" page.
However, here are my new results:

I think that the third result of spatial plays into my visual learning style. The other two do fit with who I am. I do prefer to take time to reflect on things an work independently on assignments. I do love being social, but I am generally more reserved for quite a while before I get to know someone. I also love to be active and enjoy hands-on activities, so I can see how all three of these things match my personality.

Creative Commons

This week I learned all about copyright laws and a great, useful site called Creative Commons. Creative Commons allows me to use photos for class without violating any laws, as long as I properly site the source and follow the proper guidelines/have the proper intent for usage. It made me wonder how many times I may have used images without giving any regard to the source. I never thought twice about this when it came to images, although I teach my students a unit on citing sources for a research paper. Now that I know about Creative Commons, I intend to use it and to properly give credit where credit is due. I also created my own Flickr page.


I found the following picture using Flickr's Creative Commons:

 Photo Attribution: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3662/3408649524_74f5257e0c.jpg

Original Image: "Playing REAL Miniature Golf"

By: JD Hancock

Released under attribution license

Licensed by: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

I thought this would be a neat photo to use when introducing iTouches to my students at the beginning of the year. We have to go over rules and how to appropriately use the iTouch, so this photo would add a bit of humor to that lesson. I can see many other uses for photos in my classroom as well. We could look at photos as writing prompts, photos of famous authors/poets and where they grew up, photos that go along with the themes they are learning, etc. The possibilities for using photos in the classroom are endless. It's great to know I can now do so legally giving credit where credit is due.

The next photo is one that I took on a trip to Las Vegas this past summer. I uploaded it to Flickr for the first time licensed it with Creative Commons. Here is my Flickr page

Cloudy Day by Lisa Mele is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I am looking forward to learning more about Flickr for my own photos and using the great photos made available with the Creative Commons licenses!

Computer Maintenance and Security: What a Learning Experience!

This week in class I learned about how to protect my computer. It is always a bit disheartening to hear all of the problems that others can cause for you because of greed or whatever the motive. I was surprised by how much I did not know about protecting my computer. I thought that just using different passwords and having an anti-virus program was enough, but there are so many more steps to protecting a computer.

One of the assignments this week was to watch Atomic Learning Videos about PC Maintenance and Security. I watched quite a few and learned so much. Below are comments and thoughts I had about three of those videos.

The first tutorial that I watched was "Showing the results of bad security and careless computing." It gave information about all of the potential problems that are out there if your computer is not properly protected. It also gave advice about what you need to install to protect your computer. One thing that I was surprised about was that you in fact do need both an anti-virus and anti-spyware. This may sound silly, but I sort of thought they were the same thing. This is something that my husband and I will certainly need to update on our computers.

The next tutorial I watched was called "Installing Roboform." I think this is a very interesting application. You can download Roboform and it will take any of the passwords that you've allowed your Internet server to remember and will maintain a list of them automatically. You do need a password to access this list it sounds like. I will definitely share information about this program with others as I have never heard of it before. It could be helpful because I do have different passwords and every now and then I find myself forgetting which password I used for a program, especially if it's a program I rarely use. For whatever reason, even when I ask Firefox to always remember the password, sometimes it does not. For this Roboform would provide great back up. However, I tend to be a little overly cautious and it would concern me that if someone ever hacked into Roboform's program, all of my passwords for all of my different programs, including sensitive information like banking, would be revealed. Maybe I'm just being a bit paranoid after having read about all the hackers and scams out there. Has anyone else ever used this program? What are your thoughts?

Since I was curious about Roboform after that introductory video, I decided to watch the next video in the series: "Managing your web passwords with Roboform." One interesting thing I learned from this is that you can still require that your master password from Roboform be used to access any of the sites, or not. Another neat option is that once you fill out your identity on Roboform it remembers it and can fill out other forms for you. That option was the most surprising to me because it showed me that it's not just the convenience of not having to remember passwords, but there's also the convenience of not having to fill out long forms every time a site asks for your identity information. It has definitely led me to re-think whether this would be a valuable tool for me or not. If there is anyone who has had personal experience with Roboform, I would be curious to hear your input. Is it a valuable time saver or could it just lead to more potential problems down the road?

Another Neat Fact Thanks to my Google Reader

While the two blogs I had been following closely in my last post are great, I also learned that they certainly don't post everyday. Which is fine of course, but I had gotten used to checking my Reader each day and while I was still learning quite a bit from the more mainstream websites I had subscribed to, I love getting the personalized feel from real teachers in the classroom who are blogging.

After coming to terms with the thought that bloggers just don't post everyday (especially teacher bloggers who have a million other things to do), I came across a great site that absolutely includes a post each day. On Tammy Worcester's site (which now holds a prominent place in my Google Reader account),  she writes about a new technology tip regularly. I of course had to go through all 90+ of them after the first five tips proved to be so useful. My favorite, and one I instantly shared with fellow staff members, is that Google can search for information by reading level. Just click Advanced Search and voila! You can choose Basic, Intermediate, or Advanced and then only sites and articles at that level will show. This will be great for my students when it comes time for our research project. They are always overwhelmed by some of the language in the articles they find! Another neat tip she had was about using QR codes in the classroom. I was so excited about this prospect and even talked to our tech specialist about a lesson idea I had for it, when I realized QR codes would not work because our iTouches do not have cameras. Oh well! Maybe a plan for the future-if nothing else, now I know how to use them.

Hopefully some of her tips can be helpful to others!

Google Reader- Bringing Information To Me!

A couple weeks ago I created my first RSS feed through Google Reader. I decided to use Google because I love using Google Docs, so I figured it would be an easy transition and I would be more likely to use it regularly if it was linked to my email account. So far, I have really enjoyed Google Reader. It allowed me to bundle different sites I liked according to categories. This makes it very easy for me to find the latest information based on my interest at that moment.

Here are a couple screen shots of my Google Reader page:

  

I've been checking on the Reader almost every day and am constantly amazed by how much new information there is. I have gotten some really great ideas and information about literacy and technology most specifically. There was one site that I added which I read frequently called Teen Literacy Tips.  I commented on one of his recent posts called Wikipedia as Bathroom Graffiti. Although the comment is pending approval, I basically let him know how much I appreciated the article he provided in the post because I will be starting a research project soon and I will be using the article now to explain Wikipedia to my students. He mentions that it should be used as a resource to get started finding information, but not as a source.

I have enjoyed checking my RSS page each day and finding all of the new information. I have noticed a difference in frequency of updates between the literacy sites and the technology sites. The technology sites that I subscribed to are updated either every day or multiple times each day, whereas the literacy sites were only updated every few days.

On another site that I subscribed to huffenglish, I saw an interesting variation in the posts. One of the first posts I read from that site was about the Delicious site potentially shutting down. She wrote an interesting piece about how word spread that Delicious could be shutting down and her own use of Diigo. Another day she posted about Diigo Links that she used and I noticed that it is a weekly post that she does. This is neat because it provides me with even more resources that I can add to my own Diigo account. A third and most recent post of hers described how she had students design their own test questions based on literature they had read using Bloom's Taxonomy. I liked this idea a lot. It is something that all teachers learn, but why not teach these levels of learning to the students? Being aware of Bloom's Taxonomy and how to create their own levels of questions could certainly help students to analyze their own thinking processes and how they approach questions. I would like to put my students up to this challenge one day.


Now that I know what Google Reader is and am becoming more and more familiar with it, I am shocked with how much time I wasted in the past by not using it. It also helps me to really stay on top of the different areas of education and technology that I am interested in. Before, I knew about many of these sites and might visit them once or twice a month on a whim. However now, I have all this information being delivered right to me! I look forward to all that I will learn by being constantly connected to such great sources of information. I am already finding ways I can use the information I learn from these sites in my classroom. I think this will be a huge change in how I look at the internet and how I keep myself informed about current information.