SHARPENING THE SAW HABIT.

To start that the current week we have practically graduated from our E-Course, the intensive training has only started -  it has certainly received a strong impulse for the long run ahead. In the latest issue of Edublogs the week challenge for teachers is the Making a Video task with a description and suggestion of a range of tools and sites, applications to successfully deal with this task themselves, not to mention the fantastic projects that involve young schoolchildren who are pretty comfortable in front of a camera, not to mention that the little tigers are making their own videos, which then the teacher is editing and uploading to a schooltube channel. So, among the video maker and editor apps and sites that are already familiar to us: Animoto, Windows Movie Maker, YouTube, Vimeo; my revelation as a teacher was EXPLAIN EVERYTHING app. It is an application that lets the user annotate, animate, and narrate explanations and presentations. From the site moderator we found out why they do not allow a video widget in the Edublogs site – so as not to enable advertising there. My curiosity is from how early an age kids are exposed to the blogging experience and authentic creation, including video making! This is like a whispered, sighed after-thought derived from my personal experience documented into my Project Report submitted this Friday.

The week was theoretically very burdened. Howard Gardener’s multiple intelligences theory has revolutionized the psychology of development first, then taken over by the science of education has become the foundation of the learning and respectively teaching styles – the fundamental issue in education. So much so that official validity is queer not to have been granted up till now. To the tests that I have already mentioned I insist on another one that I have taken earlier but enjoyed doing it again and recommend for everybody: Carl Jung and Myers-Briggs’ personality typology index test  the 72 questions answered a detailed description follows on types, mine is INTJ.

I would like to return with an emphasis on  Grasha-Riechmann learning styles characteristics, that they identify as being competitive, collaborative, avoidant, participant, dependent, independent, which require various approaches in terms of focus and types of activities performed. Grasha even finds that the learning and teaching styles can be mapped together to describe the classroom dynamics and so as to create clusters of compatible learning and teaching styles. The researcher offers a perfect table in which we can trace those 4 fundamental compatible clusters with the respective recommended class activities planned and behaviours expected. (“Student Learning Styles and Their Implications for Teaching” by Montgomery Susan and Groat Linda 1999 UMichigan). Here I would like to site also the table that I had only lauded into my post on Nicenet. Here I wanted to specify my opinion about Nicenet as an educational platform, it is perfect as a forum of discussion for advanced learners like us, when other Web tools are available to not only post a link to a resource, and comment but also to post an important video, photo, graph, diagram, table as in my case now.

I decided to by no means post it as I have read some posts by my colleagues having some wrong impressions overall, as for example as that learners tend to have the same learning style as their teachers, or that there are so many learning styles as people, confusing character types with learning types. Here this table shows the main intertwined mixed and matched learner’s learning types with the teacher’s teaching types, with the recommended sorts of activities that I have already mentioned!!!! This is in order to put order with confidence and not be intimidated by the diversity of learners’ personalities, needs or … whims, caprices, but be highly effective not losing yourself in the process, but empowering and enabling students to do their best to take the opportunity.

This week I have continued to work out the functioning of the ANVILL – the virtual language lab, in order to have a clear idea how it works – this is a perfect course management tool, that can trace results, accumulate the portfolio for courses with the tasks, materials and assignments completed – written, audio, video files are stored there, comments column is also enabled. I have stored two lessons for two different courses there, but I think if/when I finish the course my account would be blocked as the user name and password are taken from BB automatically.

My attention was captured by another psychologist beside Gardner and Carl Jung: Stephen Covey’s seven habits of highly effective people.  

• Be proactive.
•  Begin with the end in mind.
•   Put first things first.
•   Think win-win.
•   Seek first to understand and then to be understood.
• Synergize.
• Sharpen the saw – which is the habit of self-renewal and it necessarily surrounds all the other habits, enabling and encouraging them to happen and grow. Covey interprets the self into four parts: the spiritual, mental, physical and the social/emotional, which all need feeding and developing.

And I would like to conclude my week 9 with an annexed diagram by John Fisher which bears the title respectively “Fisher’s transition curve” with the firm conviction – THIS CAN WORK AND BE GOOD!