Sunday, November 24, 2013

YouTube is the ideal tool you are not using

As an educator, I love YouTube. why? simple, it allows me to reach students with different learning styles with one exercise. YouTube allows you to add visual, auditory, numeric, musical and verbal elements o your work at the same time.

For those not that familiar with YouTube, it has a nice, friendly user editor that allows you to ad almost anything to your videos without being tech savvy.

here is an example I presented to my students from the education school at the university I teach. The exercise is just to show how you can add links to a video to create an interactive listening comprehension exercise.

The video is really simple. Focus on how the links work more than the exercise itself. The link will open a new window.

Interactive YouTube exercise

Stay tuned, Next time I'll show you other ideas on how to use YouTube together with the multiple intelligences theory. Further more, I'll publish a small tutorial to show you how to use it.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Encouraging healthy group work



Using different types of intelligences
is beneficial for group work 






     My experience with group work as a student and as a teacher has taught me mostly the same things, but from different points of view. As a student I always feared having someone in my group that wouldn't do enough work or just couldn't keep up with the rest of the group. Of course there's also the fear that my working style won't match the rest of the team and therefore I will be the one not contributing enough.

     As a teacher I'm always aware of every team member's contribution and cautious to evaluate every team member in the same way. There is also the eventual complaint about one team member which I try to handle with extreme care (emphasis on extreme) because as I'm about to explain, sometimes these complaints are not what they appear to be.



Believe it or not the secret to understanding and guiding an effective group work lies in the intelligences type theory. It is fairly simple. As explained in the theory section, not  everyone has the same intelligence profile and therefore not everyone can contribute in the same way inside a group. Let's say for example that we have a group of four individuals. If this group has three members with strong verbal / linguistic intelligence while the other team member leans more to the visual / spacial type, the other team members will easily agree on doing a paper with a strong writing component. This means the member with strong visual /spatial intelligence won't be able to contribute the same in terms of both quality and quantity as the rest of the members of the team. That member will probably feel useless and even worse, the others might complain about him/her.


So, what can we do as teachers?


     Although I can't give you an exact formula, here is some advice that might help to promote and guide a better work group environment.
  • Encourage and ask for creativity and originality to promote the use and development of all types of intelligence. Don't limit the type of work to just one type of intelligence. Ask the students to present visuals, videos, multimedia, etc. Give points for variety. This way you will be creating assignments that fit the students' skills and abilities.
  • Try to structure the tasks so that each group member can make an equal contribution.
  • Teach your students to plan and to assign responsibility when working in groups. Presenting a plan and a responsibility chart for an assignment could be the first part of it. Having a clear division of work and responsibilities helps the group assignment to go smoothly.
  • Create group tasks that require interdependence. The students in a group must perceive that they "sink or swim" together (Davis, 1993), that each member is responsible to and dependent on all the others, and that one cannot succeed unless everyone in the group succeeds. promoting interdependence includes specifying common rewards for the group.
  • Assign group tasks that allow for a fair division of labor, "encouraging students to divide up the labor, and formulating tasks that compel students to reach a consensus" (Johnson et al, 1991, as cited in Davis 1993, para. 10)
  • Make the group work relevant not just busy work.

     I think the key terms in all this advice are "promote creativity" and "give options." Being flexible when assigning work is the best way to tap into the students' multiple intelligences and obtain good results.


     If other members of the team are complaining about one (or more) of the members, try to make them see that that member might be able to contribute in other ways more adequate to their skills. Most importantly, remember the different types of intelligences when evaluating group work. Sometimes we as teachers haven't developed a specific type of intelligence and might not understand the students' creativity. Keep an open mind!



Learning with rhythm

If you already have familiarized yourself with the multiple intelligence theory, you already know that Gardner considers musical intelligence as one of them. In the section “Multiple Intelligence theory” this is explained in detail. It is also explained that as we grow, we develop certain types of intelligence more than others. But the other less developed types are still with us. Using music in your classroom not only appeals to those with a developed musical intelligence, but to everyone else in the class. The effective use of music in the classroom “is a tool that can help teachers maintain a positive and productive learning environment (Merrell ,2004, p. 4) and leads to  better classroom management.

"Music has the power to keep students engaged" (
Merrell ,2004, p. 4), music relaxes the mind and lowers stress levels that inhibit learning. When used effectively, it increases alpha levels in the brain, boosting memory and recall and allowing the brain to access reserve capacities.
Music is mathematical. Certain musical structures stimulate specialized brain circuits, allowing learners to decode complex ideas more easily. Music also inspires emotion, creating a clear passage to long-term memory (Vos, 1999)

Music is a universal language, uniquely capable of crossing cultural barriers. It can set a dramatic stage for lessons in history, foreign language, sociology, political studies and geography (Vos, 1999).

Classic music is the best suited for the classroom. It doesn’ have lyrics that would distract the attention of the learner and it will stimulate concentration. Merrell (2004) talks about the “Mozart Effect" (p. 2) which refers to the connection between music and reading, writing, memorization ability and mathematical skills. Test subjects showed that when listening to Mozart’s music there is an increase in concentration.

In addition, there is also evidence that SAT scores are much higher in students who sing or play an instrument.

Music can be included in any classroom, regardless of grade level or subject matter. As a teacher, you need to evaluate how and when to play it. For some learners, it can be permanent background music, for others it is better at moments when they need to concentrate. 

This is something that you can do in your classroom as an experiment. Talk to your students and ask them if any of them like to listen to music while working or studying. Then suggest playing some classical music while working on a classroom assignment. Evaluate the results and if suitable, you can transform it into a habit for your class.



Thursday, April 5, 2012

You are doing collaborative learning and you don't even know it

If you take a look at the section "Classroom activities" in this blog you are going to realize that most activities are recommended for any number of students or for working in groups. I also posted a small note on group work in this same blog. This "insistence" on group work has a reason; students working in small groups tend to learn more of what is taught and retain it longer than when the same content is presented in other instructional formats (Davis, 1993). If all the types of intelligences have something in common is that students need to be actively involved in something to develop any intelligence and to tap into it later on. No one is going to effectively learn by being passive, and group work is the best way to keep students active because of the collaborative nature of it.


This is what collaborative learning is about. Students working together learning from each other and at the same time learning from themselves due to the interaction with others. Unlike individual learning, people engaged in collaborative learning capitalize on one another’s resources and skills.  More specifically, collaborative learning is based on the model that knowledge can be created within a population where members actively interact by sharing experiences and taking on asymmetric roles (Davis 1993). Collaborative learning also promotes creativity and skill development.


Collaborative learning can consist of formal or informal groups. Those groups formed for a single class are considered informal, while those groups that are going to be working for a long period of time and have to show a result as their work together are considered formal groups. Informal groups are useful in workshops and for classes in which there is a small one-day assignment. Formal groups are better for long term projects that have a big part of the term grade depending on them. 


Most of the activities presented in this blog can be used for both types of groups. It is up to the teacher how to use them and also to decide what type of groups work better for their class. As an example, if each week you are going to be working on a different theory, then you might want to work with informal groups. Students can benefit from this because if one group didn't work, they can try another the next week. 


What you might want to do is to check that the informal groups don't become semi-formal by having the same or almost the same members each week. As a teacher it is your prerogative to assign the group work every now and then. The idea of collaborative learning is to have students learning from each other. If they have the same group every week, then there will be a point when no one is going to learn anything new from their peers.


You might have been doing collaborative learning all along without even knowing it. Other names for this learning form are collective learning, learning communities, peer teaching, peer learning, study teams, study circles, study groups, and work groups (Johnson et al, 1991, as cited in Davis, 1993).
Please refer to the post " Encouraging healthy group work" in this blog for ideas and advice on how to work with groups in your classroom.



Friday, February 24, 2012

Student-centered lessons are all about intellengence types



The activities presented in this blog are mostly open. By this I mean that they can be modified according to what types of intelligence students use the most and also according to their learning styles. This means that students, in certain way, are going to be creating their own material. This is the main principle of having student-centered lessons.


One of the most important aspects of student-centered lessons is allowing students to make choices. They mostly (if not always) are going to choose to work on projects that use their most developed intelligences. As teachers, we should encourage learners to also work on projects that promote growth in those less developed intelligence types (Gardner, 2006).


My experience trying to encourage students to work with those less developed intelligence types has been successful. I am never going to forget one student who was evidently high in visual/spatial intelligence. He would design these amazing graphics and visual aids for his assignments. But my class, as a hybrid between economics and marketing, demanded some mastering of numbers and formulas. So I challenged him to present a paper based more on the economics part of the course rather than the marketing part. If you haven't already done so, you are going to read in this blog that we do not work or develop only one type of intelligence. So I didn't ask him to forget about his inclination for graphic and visuals. Rather, I asked him to use them to represent formulas, equations and mathematical charts. The result was some learning tools that most of the students wanted to copy and use.


The example above shows how letting students work on their own material can make them realize the potential they have to transfer their skills developed by one intelligence to another. Student-centered lessons demand that the teacher to get to know the students and their intelligence profiles. But this doesn't mean that you can't use them from the start. An excellent way of doing this is by gathering  learner feedback pages after each class or activity (Sasson, 2012)