Week 10: Technology Across the Senses

I learned about Gardner's Multiple Intelligences while I was a student at the University of Texas at Austin. I was learning how to become a teacher, but had never really had my own classroom. I never really truly believed that students learned in all these different ways until my first year teaching. I would teach the way I learned well and would always have students coming into tutorials who would just not understand how I was teaching. I had to learn to use manipulatives and learn how they thought and how they viewed what the material. It was a revelation for me. I began presenting the information in one way and then following up the activity with activities that involved all sorts of Gardner's Intelligences and found such student success through this.

For myself, I believe that I am definitely a verbal/linguistic learner as well as visual/spatial learner. I have to be able to hear the information as I view it something that guides my thoughts. Graphic organizers and notes that are in sync with the teacher's lecture is key for me comprehending the material. I am definitely not logical/mathematical, naturalist, intrapersonal, nor existentialist. I also make sense of material through actually doing it, so I consider myself Bodily/Kinesthetic as well. I definitely think I am Interpersonal as well. I keep myself organized through use of Post-It notes and class discussion, chat, etc is what really deepens my understanding of the material, after learning the basics through notes and lecture.

In class, I mainly incorporate visual and verbal intelligences through the initial presentation of new material. The days that follow, I try and incorporate the other intelligences as I stated before. I use music through creating songs and chants to understand concepts in my class. This meets the needs of my Musical learners. I create activities for students to use manipulatives when learning new vocabulary or play with sentence structures on their desks which meets the needs of my Bodily Intelligence learners.