Learning Styles

Before getting into the technicalities, I noticed my own personal learning style has been a hodgepodge of different mediums. I notice I learn very well when I am hands on from someone teaching me something hands on (for example, how to build a PC) compared to hearing how to building a PC through handwritten or verbal instructions.  I also learn through visualizing things in my mind. For example, I can visualize how I want my physical computer network to run before I implement a change or start a completely new segment.  In the past I've experienced this throughout my undergraduate and graduate college years - most of my education has a heavy emphasis on practice opposed to theory. I think that's what I find my learning to be.

Trying to reach every student in the classroom with a single, particular style won't be a good approach for learning. I think the focus should be combining these learning strategies into one particular way, method or medium of teaching. For example (which can't speak for every lesson you do) you need to try to combine the visual, auditory, and tactile/kinetic strategies into a method.  Let's say you're doing an elementary lesson on the SMART Board for math, and the lesson is coin counting and how many coins (5, 10, 25, 50 cent pieces) makes a certain dollar amount.  You can tie this in kinetically through having students go to the SMART Board and touch and drag the coins to the other side of the SMART Board to make a certain dollar amount. While doing this, the SMART Notebook program/lesson tells the student verbally (auditory learning) from speakers what coin is moving over and then announces the total after the dragging of the coins in completed. If the class is watching this lesson take place, then they will visually see (visually learning) how many coins it takes to make up that dollar amount.  The class will also verbally hear the coins adding up through the computer speakers to help auditory learners.

This is just an example of combining all three strategies to reach your class best. With the market flooding with touch screen tablets and cell phones (with constant dropping costs), I think we will soon see lessons geared towards combing the three strategies to help fit everyone's learning style.