Macauley McBride- I.C.T blog: October 2013

M3.

When learning there are three main ways in which people can learn. There is a visual way of learning, and auditory way and a kinaesthetic way. Everyone has their own style of learning and I am going to explain what each one is and chose the ones that I think I use to learn new skills.

If you are a visual learner, you most likely prefer using images, pictures, colours, and maps to organize information and communicate with others. By learning this way people find it easy to recall what they have seen, they can follow written or drawn instructions, like to read, they use written notes most of the time and quite a lot of people benefit by watching TV, videos and films. By being a visual learner, you can have a lot of special skills in which to learn, some might be different ways to other people’s, but it you learn in any of these ways then you are most likely a visual learner.

Auditory learning is when you prefer to learn by listening rather than by reading or writing, quite a lot of people learn this way because they find it easy to gather more information in when it is being said out loud. A lot of auditory learners find written instructions more difficult to follow than spoken ones because they can find it hard gathering information in through reading. Being an auditory learner has lots of benefits because you can mostly solve problems by talking about them, so if a student got stuck on a task, they would happily ask a teacher and talk about the task to solve the problem. Group discussions can be a very beneficial thing for auditory learners as well, quite a lot of people including myself like to have discussions and learn through this way.

Kinesthetic learners like to learn through a more practical way, such as learning from demonstrations, this is a good way of learning because you are learning how to do something from someone who knows what they are doing, and when it is a demonstration, you can adapt their skills to yourself. When you are a kinesthetic learner, you learn more from playing games, role playing and you are able to read body language/gestures. When you are on the go and moving around, you find it easier to learn. So if you learn through any of these ways, you are a kinesthetic learner.

When I was learning my new skills, I used the auditory and kinesthetic way of learning. This was easy for me to use because when I was going on websites to learn about things such as blending images, or using goal seek on excel, I was listening to videos and after listening to them, I would try and do what had been explained, and if I was getting stuck, I would go back to either the video or page and start again so everything would go through properly. In ways I did also use a visual way of learning because I was looking at images, videos and I was also reading pages which were showing me how to do certain things. All in all I did use a bit of each learning style, but I was more a auditory and kinesthetic learner when learning my new skills.

D1 Communication styles/channels.

Verbal Communication is important when completing work because you need to make sure that you have done work correctly. Such as if when I finish a task, I will ask the teacher to come and check it for me to see if I need any corrections or advice on how to improve my work. There are a lot of things which involve verbal communication, and I have used it myself when doing a presentation to complete a part of my assignment in business studies. I had to talk to a Year 10 class about their trip to Alton Towers and tell them what they needed to bring and all the information that they needed to tell their parents. The advantages of this were that I could work on my verbal skills and learn more on how it feels like to do a presentation in front of a class. This gave me some experience which I could take in to consideration if I needed to do another one. Verbal communication plays a big part in learning; you are able to communicate with the teacher on your work for example, which helps you learn more. If there weren’t any verbal communication, then nobody would be able to learn anything new. There are some disadvantages that could come with verbal communication though, such as information not being said correctly so people won’t get vital parts of information in their heads. Also if someone is very quiet, they might struggle speaking up to ask the teacher to check their work or run what they just said past them again, so some people do struggle to communicate in this way.

Teacher broadcasting demonstrations are a great way to communicate with students. These are things such overhead projectors, I have learnt a lot of a teacher off an overhead projector in lessons such as Business, English, Maths and Science. I think teacher broadcasting demonstrations make information a lot clearly for students because they can break up different parts of information and project them to us. You can show a lot of things on overhead projectors so I think they are very useful. The disadvantages of teacher broadcasting is that it could be cost effective to the school, a lot of technology is quite expensive now, so having an overhead projector in each room can cost a lot.

Using Blogger can be a very useful way to communicate with students. I have used blogger in ICT to complete work, you post your work on to the blogger and you get feedback from the teacher to tell you if you have completed the task or need some corrections. To me there are a few advantages in using Blogger to communicate because It is really easy to tell if you have completed work or need some improvements, when comments get added to the blogger it comes through on your e-mail which is really useful because it can come straight to your phone if you have your e-mail set up properly. Also it is very easy to post your work on to the blogger for deadlines that you have been given so instead of printing out loads of sheets of paper and getting in a muddle, you can just upload your work on to the blogger. The only disadvantage that I can think of about using blogger is that the system could crash when you try putting work up, but that doesn’t happen, so I think blogger is a great way of communicating.

Using Gmail can also be another great way of communicating because it allows you to send e-mails to one another, these e-mails will also come through to your phone as well if it is set up, which is really useful. I have used g-mail a couple of times to complete work, for example in English Literature, when I done an essay at home and wanted to see if it was correct, I e-mailed it to my teacher, then got feedback from it. So I think g-mail has a lot of good advantages because it is really easy to communicate with other people, and it is very similar to using blogger, which you can sign in to when you log on to your g-mail. The main disadvantage I would say about using g-mail is that it can get complicated, only because there is so much you can do on it, such as making your own personal calendar, everything can get a little bit confusing when you have a lot of stuff on there to check.

Publishing images is a great way to communicate and complete work. If you can’t copy or paste a certain image, then you can just print screen the whole page then later on crop the image down to the one you were originally trying to get. Print screening is very useful and I have had to do it to complete work a few times, especially in Business. But I have also used print screening in I.T to complete a task, this was where I had to make a dummies guide and use images on how to insert an image on to publisher, so I used print screening to demonstrate this. The only disadvantage I can think off with publishing images is that they are not as clear as the images you could copy and paste off Google. For example, when you print screen a page and crop it down to an image, the image won’t be that clear, and writing can be too small to read if you were trying to demonstrate how to do something. But most of the time, publishing images is a great way to communicate with others during your work.

One of the main communication styles that I use would be using PowerPoint. For me this is one of the best ways to communicate because you can cut information down and use images in lots of different slides, which come together to make a great PowerPoint. I have used PowerPoint a lot to complete work, I have had to use the programme in English to do a PowerPoint on someone I admire and explain to the class what they done in their life. These was a very useful way of communicating with the class because all of the information is basically on your PowerPoint, but when speaking you just have to make it more clearer. PowerPoint to me is the best way to complete work which involves communicating with others. The disadvantage with using PowerPoint is that you are limited to the amount of information you can put on one slide. So you might have to use two slides to just add one more paragraph of information. There isn’t really a bad side to PowerPoint though because you can do everything on there and communicate so well with others from using it.

Using publisher is also another useful way of communicating and completing work. You can do so much on Publisher which is great, such as making brochures, leaflets, business cards and postcards. There are so many ways in which you can communicate with teachers on Publisher because it gives you so many options to choose from. I have used Publisher to complete work quite a lot of times, in Business I had to make a leaflet on all of the legal acts a business has to abide from, and by using Publisher I was able to complete this. The main disadvantage with using Publisher is that it can get really confusing because of all the things on there. There are so many options and some have a different name, so you might not be able to find the option that you are looking for because it is called something else.

Using Google calendar is a great way of communicating with yourself and others. You can make your own plan on there over a period of time which will come through to your phone and tell you what you have planned. I have used Google calendar in I.T to complete my own skills calendar which I needed to learn skills which I weren’t too sure on, this was really useful because it came through to my phone and reminded me on what to do. The only disadvantage about Google Calendar is that it does get really confusing sometimes on how to work it, and if you didn’t use it before you would struggle working it.