Every individual takes in information in their own distinct way in order to help them retain and absorb the given information in a productive way. There are three types of learning styles that people appear to use; these are auditory, kinestetic (hands-on learning), and lastly, for the purpose of this blog, visual.
Visual learners are individuals who do best by actually seeing the information. Making great use of visual aids such as charts, graphs, pictures, etc... are the best way to help these kinds of students study and prepare for a test. According to about.com, visual learners are described as having characteristics such as being good at spelling but forgets names, likes color, is good with sign language, and several more.
Visual learners, as shown in the graph below, make up more than half of the different types of the learners. To find out where on the chart you fall into, I found this short and fun little quiz. I took it and ended up being a visual learner, just like I assumed I would be.
Visual learners are individuals who do best by actually seeing the information. Making great use of visual aids such as charts, graphs, pictures, etc... are the best way to help these kinds of students study and prepare for a test. According to about.com, visual learners are described as having characteristics such as being good at spelling but forgets names, likes color, is good with sign language, and several more.
Visual learners, as shown in the graph below, make up more than half of the different types of the learners. To find out where on the chart you fall into, I found this short and fun little quiz. I took it and ended up being a visual learner, just like I assumed I would be.
There are several ways that educators can account for these different learning styles and to accommodate to each student. There is a nice website I found being that I am going for Special Education. It is titled Visuals for Special Education. This site introduces different tactics and ways to use visuals in the special education classroom. I feel like it could be very helpful to make note of recommendations and to integrate them, and is worth looking into if that is the area of education one is in.
Another awesome website I found that I definitely want to take more time to look into, especially when I do become an educator, is Box of Tricks: Education and Technology. Is it a list of free education tools to create visuals to benefit those have a visual learning style. It is constantly being updated and already has 209 items. It is another site that is very much worth looking into for educators!
There were three different visuals I put together myself. The first one is a TagCrowd. With this I used words that go with Ethics in response to the previous blog. It makes words that are most associated and most like the term Ethics and makes them bigger. The whole visual picture could be greatly beneficial for students to look at and remember at it's most basic level, what ethics is and what it consists of.
Another awesome website I found that I definitely want to take more time to look into, especially when I do become an educator, is Box of Tricks: Education and Technology. Is it a list of free education tools to create visuals to benefit those have a visual learning style. It is constantly being updated and already has 209 items. It is another site that is very much worth looking into for educators!
There were three different visuals I put together myself. The first one is a TagCrowd. With this I used words that go with Ethics in response to the previous blog. It makes words that are most associated and most like the term Ethics and makes them bigger. The whole visual picture could be greatly beneficial for students to look at and remember at it's most basic level, what ethics is and what it consists of.
The second one I created was a poster to leave hanging up in the classroom. I feel like individuality and differences are important to talk about with all populations of children, but especially in the special education area. They may feel incredibly inferior due to their placement and because of whatever diagnosis they may have received that got them to where they are (autism, ADHD, and other learning disabilities). I chose this picture because it demonstrates individuality in a nice way. It could be a nice segway to a great class discussion about individual differences but also similarities. This site made it very easy to upload a chosen photo and to create it into a poster and whatever size you may want it in. You print it off in blocks and put it together yourself. It could even be a great activity to encourage the students to put the picture together theirselves and then discuss the topic after working together on the poster.
ImageChef is the last website I used. It does essentially the same thing as the last source, and helps to create images that can be utilized in several different ways. There are many different filters and effects you can do to the image, and can even include text and a little bit of animation. It was definitely a fun website to play around with and explore.
With St. Patrick's Day being tomorrow, I thought this could be pretty appropriate. It could be used to discuss the holiday with the students and do other different fun learning activities to learn the culture and the history of the holiday.
There are several more visuals I could have done, but these are the three. They were all very simple and could be very useful in the classroom. They all could be great for visual learners to learn a great amount of information and to make it fun also. I enjoyed exploring all of the different tools and putting everything together. Not to mention, it is also pretty easy enough for the students to be able to do their own projects on these sites.