Week 9 - Final Project, Learning styles and Multiple Intelligences

Hello all!
I have mix feelings. After peer reviewing and final project submitiing - is it really over? I have so much more to learn. I even didn't have the chance to "digest" all that was presented to us till now and

     

its almost over. I will also miss our discussions and brain storming. It was so interesting to "hear" you all and "see" the similarities and differences in our points of view, in our students and our cultures.

On the other hand it will make my life easier and I will have more time to devote to my students and familly. These last two years I spent most of my weekends and nights studying and I miss being with them without the worry about how am I going to complete my assignments. Futhermore, although it sounds paradoxical, I will have more time to build better lesson plans for my students and to be more attentive to them.

As for multiple intelligences and learning styles :

The amount of information about learning styles is overwhelming. Therefore, one must choose what is suitable for his/her purpose and stick to it, while changing some as he/she goes along and reflects on the lesson plans' successes and shortcomings.

I think that I might try to implement the above with the ABCD model, bearing in mind what Richard M. Felder and Eunice R. Henriques said, that "the challenge to language instructors is to devise ways of augmenting their verbal classroom presentation with nonverbal visual material—for example, showing photographs, drawings, sketches, and cartoons to reinforce presentation of vocabulary words, and using films, videotapes, and dramatizations to illustrate lessons in dialogue and pronunciation."

To summarize it all, I believe that we should balance between teaching/learning with new technologies while retaining some of the "old school" advantages which are also important in developping our kids linguistic and social skills.