WEEK 9 - Learning styles

I must say that it's been such a relief to hand in the final project this week! I think it's been a very useful project because, as I mentioned last week, it has forced me to apply some of the interactive resources in my teaching context and I've seen how it will help my students in the future, as well as allowing me to reflect on the changes I can carry out next year to make their learning experience even more effective.

On the other hand, I'm really happy that I finally found some time to explore other resources from past weeks that didn't get my full attention before. Firstly, I watched the ANVILL recorded webinar and fount it really interesting (what a shame I missed it!), so now I'm going to make it my own personal aim to actually open an account and start playing with it to create some resources, come up with some ideas, watch tutorials and think how I can apply all of those into my own teaching context next year :) I believe it will be a great tool to get students to speak outside of class. They never have the chance to practise their oral fluency, accuracy and pronunciation, so ANVILL will be a great way to achieve this. Hopefully they'll appreciate the effort, will show some interest and will be willing to participate.

Secondly, another resource I've really liked is the "Rich Internet Applications" from Michigan State University  http://clear.msu.edu/clear/ria/   I came across it in one of our old Nicenet threads. I think I'll keep backtracking Nicenet in case I missed any other good websites shared by colleagues. You can never be too sure! :)

As for learning styles, it's been interesting to discuss different issues related to them on Nicenet this week. Even though I did one of my PGCE projects on learning styles, I have read some fresh ideas and views on the subject and some of the articles have made me wonder about the whole thing again. However, I'd still say that having a mixture of activities in class is the best option for us as teachers. We all have students with a variety of learning styles, so they can all benefit from a range of resources targeted at different styles. I believe it's good for them to practise all skills in different ways to train both their strong and weak learning styles and thus become better learners.