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Technology Integration for the different learning styles:
Welcome teachers! On this page you will find tips and ideas for how you can integrate technology in your curriculum. This page addresses the different learning styles and how we can use technology to help our students learn!
**Like the ideas on this page? Then click here for more tech tools you can use!(Divided by subject)
Got questions about the learning styles/intelligences mentioned here? Then click here to find out more.
Want to know what kind of learner you are? Click here to find out!(Also good for students to use too, so they know what kind of learner they are.)
ACTIVE LEARNERS |
Active learners need to make sense of the information by applying the information. |
You can have students type a paragraph to summarize the content that has been taught. |
Make your own webquest! A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that learners work with comes from the web.
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Students can also use online interactive websites such as:
to create their own comic strips to explain the basic points of the content used. |
Students can also use simple audio programs such as windows sound recorder to record themselves summarizing the content. Another good audio programs for voice recordings Audacity . Below is the link if you want to download it to your computer for use.
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To review their spelling of sight words, students can use this interactive tool:
This is a fabulous site to share on an interactive projector. Have students take turns filling in the blanks. Have students work with a partner or on individual computers. Provide this link on your class website. |
Students can use the interactive website YAKiToMe to help convert spoken words into text or vise versa. This site converts text to speech. Students or teachers can choose which voice they'd like to hear read the text. As they listen to the oral version of whatever they've pasted into the box, keywords for the text appear in a box below the play button. Select to keep your new oral files private or make them public, using the podcast library option. Download files to an MP3 player or wav file. Students can also convert and listen to files in Spanish, French, and German, all with a variety of readers. Registration for the service is simple and free.
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Create a Character Scrapbook to analyze characters in a book that the class is reading or for books that students are reading individually. This colorful site asks for the "Book Title" and the "Character's Name." Then the fun begins! You can design a face (hair, eyes, nose, and mouth). You can enter up to ten things that you know about the character. You can choose to analyze a person or animal. There are many options available at this site. Other highlights include "draw your own" options, print option, a help button, and a link for teachers.
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Now you can listen to classics and poems through the generosity of this site’s creators. Download story files to your mp3 player or listen to the files on your computer. Don’t want to just listen to the classics and other stories? Then, view the text on a webpage or in a printable pdf. Easily browse the site by author or title to locate literature. You are also able to search by reading level; the levels are broken down by month (ranging from 0.0 - 12.0). Stories and poems are added frequently to this site.
Print out up to 25 copies of stories and poems if you do not have print versions. Make your own books and leave blank sections to be illustrated for aiding comprehension. If you have iTunes installed on our computer you can download many of the selections directly into your ITunes library. Use individual laptops for reading the stories online or as a download. |
Read the Words is a site that allows students to download or upload any text material in order to HEAR it. The site will read the text aloud. Languages offered include English, Spanish, and French. Students can select the speed at which the text will be read. You can use a wide variety of formats including Microsoft Word, PDF, a website URL, anything copied and pasted, or from RSS feeds. Likewise, students can listen to the oral text online, download it to the desktop or MP3 players, post readings online in several forms, and even create podcasts with the selected material. Techie students can even modify the reading avatar's appearance by selecting from those available, both male and female.
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Auditory learners do best in classes where listening is a main concern. These learners prefer verbal lectures and discussions. Auditory learners can get a leg up on their learning with these Web tools. |
Presentation Tools |
Put your notes or classroom information into an audio format with these handy apps. |
SlideShare: This site takes more of a networked approach to creating presentations allowing you to post your presentations and browse those of other users.
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Empressr: You can access your organized class materials or projects from anywhere with this tool and share them with friends and other classmates easily.
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PhotoStory 3: Make your slides for class a little more interesting with this free program from Microsoft.
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Audio Books |
Those who have trouble retaining information from printed words can listen to their assigned reading instead with help from these sites. |
LibriVox: This site provides free audiobooks for books in the public domain and has numerous titles. If you don’t find what you want, see if you can volunteer to create a recording of the book yourself.
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History and Politics Out Loud: Here you’ll find speeches, historical information and more in an audio format, making it easier to take in and absorb for the auditory learner.
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Project Gutenburg: Books that are no longer under copyright can be found here and there is a special section for audio books, both read by computers and by humans.
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Free Books.org: If your class is reading an older text you may be able to find a free version of it to listen to on this site. It contains recordings of numerous out of copyright books.
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Visual Learners |
Visual learners learn through seeing and retain more information when it’s presented in the form of pictures, diagrams, visual presentations, textbooks, handouts and videos. Here are some Web resources that cater to those needs. |
No registration is needed to use this free, web based application. Users need to be able to find an appropriate You Tube video and know where the start and end times of the portion they wish to cut. If more than one portion is wanted from the video (i.e. remove the whole middle), users will have to create two chopped segments which can be posted separately.
To use TubeChop: First, select the video you want to use. If the URL is not known, no problem. Search for the video within TubeChop itself. Once the video is selected, click the "Chop" button. Select the part you want by dragging the two black sliders that appear under the video to choose the desired start and end times of your chopped piece. It is helpful to note the time markers when you are previewing the original video and then move the markers to those points. Once your chopped piece has been chosen, simply click "Chop it." The chopped video appears with its own Tubechop link. Copy the embed code to share the video on your blog or website. The embed code is easily entered on a wiki as well.
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Get your ideas charted out in a visual format with these easy-to-use online brainstorming and organizational tools: |
Use Awesome Highlighter as you would conventional highlighters: to mark the best parts of a web page for sharing. Use awesome highlighter by entering a website, choosing the text to highlight, and share the url for others to view.
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Mapping,flowcharts |
Students could use tablet writing software such as Windows Journal and One note to create outlines. If students do not have access to tablets, they could use interactive tools to organize their thoughts. Below is a link that provides a nice online outlining and notetaker tool:
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Visual students can also use mapping software like Kidspiration, Inspiration or Pixie to create graphic organizers to help organize their ideas. Students can also create visual graphs using excel.
Below are some nice online alternatives you can use to create many different graphic organizers and graphs:
· Bio Cube: This tool allows students to develop an outline of a person whose biography or autobiography they have just read; it can also be used before students write their own autobiography.
The Webbing Tool provides a free-form graphic organizer for activities that ask students to pursue hyper-textual thinking and writing. The tool provides a quick way for students to trace out options and rearrange connections:
Interactive graphic organizers:simply type, save and print:
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Charting and Diagrams |
FlowChart: Create great flow charts for your classes using this online tool, which comes complete with drawing tools and objects as well as collaborative tools.
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DrawAnywhere: This online program allows you to create diagrams and flow charts to represent all kinds of information. Best of all, you can log in from anywhere to get access to your diagrams.
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Project Draw: This program is a feature-rich web-based vector drawing application that will allow you to create diagrams and graphs of any kind of information as well as making a variety of other kinds of drawings.
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LovelyCharts: Charts created through this tool really can be lovely with full color capabilities and loads of graphics.
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Videos and Photos |
Videos-Videos are always a good way to help visual and auditory students. There are a good amount of online educational videos available to you-many of them free of charge. Below are some links to some of the best online video resources:
BBC Streaming Videos: Type in the search box to see the streaming videos available to you- for free! (all subjects!)
Annenberg Media's web site Learner.org is an educational resource with hundreds of educational videos and a satellite TV channel you can view online: http://www.learner.org/index.html
Educational Videos Database! Screened by teachers!This incredible site is a database of videos on an abundance of topics! They are arranged by topic and very easy to access. The general subjects include physical science, life science, earth and space, social studies, math, English, and the human body!
National Geographic Video is the section of the National Geographic website devoted to
online videos about animals, people and places, the environment and more.
Free streaming videos of PBS' series Nova area available online.
Green Tv: Green Energy TV is an online television channel dedicated to educational programming about green and renewable energy.
The VPW Classroom Information Network offers free sponsored educational videos and print materials to teachers, librarians and group leaders in the United States.
Brain pop :BrainPop features short, animated educational videos on a variety of topics.
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Provide a safe site to watch child friendly videos from You Tube online. Be assured that these videos have been screened to be appropriate. Look through a variety of categories including Fairy Tales, Holidays, Spanish, and Nursery Rhymes. Search also by the different age groups: preschool through 10 years old. Beneath each video, view the age recommendations and description of the video. Use the tags to decipher specific content found in the videos. Use kid friendly play and full screen buttons to manage the video. Find other videos for view in the related videos suggestions below the video. Registering is not required for viewing the videos.
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Picasa: Picasa is Google’s answer to photo sharing and you can upload images from an art history or anatomy class and study them from anywhere on the Web.
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Scooch: Scooch is a Web-based slide show program that will allow you to post photos and make slide shows that you can share with others over the Web.
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Multimedia |
Allowing students to download multimedia presentations with graphics, is also useful for visual learners. Several powerpoints are available on my site for your use. The powerpoints cover a lot of material from math, science, social studies, language arts, P.E, dance, China, Spanish, French and game templates. Click here to access these powerpoints. Click here to access many more powerpoints on all subjects. |
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Ppt to video- Powerpoint is a wonderful software that lets you make presentations. It is a great tool to use for visual and audatory learners. Author stream is a free service that lets you concert your ppt presentations into Video so that you can access to your presentation anytime. Students an download the video to their ipods, you can e-mail the video to your students for review and you can copy the link on your webpage so students can see the presentation regardless if they have powerpoint or not! You can also embed it into your website too. Works on Macs and PCs too. And best of all, it's free!
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Visual math students can benefit from using virtual manipulatives. Below is a great link to virtual manipulatives:
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International Children’s Digital Library (Free access to actual page images of 900+ children’s books in 35 languages, categorized by ages 3-5, 6-9. 10-13 and other groupings, such as real stories, imaginary creatures, and award-winning books. Reader options include using your browser or a java-enhanced “comic” reader.
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A web application that organizes information chronologically. Google News Timeline allows users to view news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and more on a zoomable, graphical timeline.
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More interactive stories:
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Wordle and Worditout:This site takes any quotation or poem and creates a "word clouds" (graphical display) of the words in a passage of text. Paste in any passage or the URL for any blog entry or web page (including newspapers online) to create a wordle of the text. Students (or teachers) can choose their own colors, type of display, and font. The most frequent words appear larger and darker. Students can view creations others have made, or make their own with or without saving them to the database of clouds.
This is a terrific visual tool to share on an interactive whiteboard or projector. Another idea: use this site during the first week of school. Have students create word clouds about themselves and create a “Wordle” bulletin board introducing your students (and yourself). Remember that the most frequently appearing words will appear larger so plan accordingly. |
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What student could resist matching sounds to characters in a painting, searching for hidden animals in illustrations, matching shapes to a drawing or creating their own curious collections? Students will make personal connections to art as they work through unique interactive art activities: story time, match up, and play with art. The parent and educator resources include tips for looking at art together, engaging follow up activities, podcasts, video clips, and lesson plans. Don’t miss this site!
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Kinesthetic Learners |
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Note Taking Tools |
No matter what you’re reading or watching you can make it more interactive by taking notes and these tools can help. |
Google Docs: With this program from Google you can take notes online, save them, and even send them to your peers for collaboration.
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Zoho: Like Google Docs but you can do much more! Make wikis for your students, save online work, take notes online and more!
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Notely: Keep your class notes, to-do lists and more organized and easy to access with this site.
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ShortText: This is a very simple tool for taking notes online. Simply enter your text, hit save, and you’ve got an online note you can revisit anytime you like.
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Interaction |
Get involved with the material with these online applications.
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Flash Card Machine: This site allows you to create web-based flash cards to study the information you have for class using text and pictures.
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Quia: With Quia, you’ll be able to create your own online quizzes and educational games to help you study your materials in a more interactive fashion. We do have a quia account. See me for our login information.
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Zoho quiz: Easy make online quizzes that you can use again and again.
Zoho Challenge is a powerful, feature-rich software that automates and streamlines online test creation, distribution and evaluation/scoring process.
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Quizlet: Quizlet makes it easy to study things like vocabulary words with it’s online study tools. Quizlet |
Learner.org Interactives: Need a more interactive explanation of a concept from class? You’ll find dozens of educational ones here that can help explain geology, pharmacy, chemistry, math and more.
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This site allows you to create ONLINE quizzes. You MUST register to use this site. Registration does require an email address, user name, and password. Registration takes less than ten seconds, and is very simple.
Once registered, you click to create a quiz. Then you are asked to choose between a personality quiz or a scored quiz. This site offers extraordinary details. At the scored quiz, you are able to provide a title, tags, description, and choose the type of questions (multiple choice, essay, or fill in the blank). It is simple to insert images, change font styles, insert links, and even score the online quiz. You can create a pass/fail quiz, a graded quiz (with YOU determining what qualifies as an A, B, etc..). You are also able to set a time limit, issue a certificate of achievement, and fill in the possible total score.
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REFLECTIVE LEARNERS |
Reflective learners need time to grasp and review the content. |
Since reflective listeners need time to grasp and review the content, they can use interactive flashcards. They can use interactive websites such as :
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They can also create their own flashcards using the following flash card template on PowerPoint: flash cards template.ppt Using this template, students can add their own audio clips to help them with remembering the content. |
Practice math facts online.
Share this site on your projector. Then create a learning center and have students practice on their own or in cooperative learning groups. Share this site on your class web page, so students can practice basic addition at home. |
Wow! You can make your educational games from this site, save it and you can embed it into your webpages. All for free!
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For almost any technology user. Sometimes you just need to memorize certain facts and Memorize.com provides the easy to use resources to get the job done. The format of this site is simple and easily accessible to all. Choose pre-made flash cards or create your own. If you choose to create your own, you can create an account or let the system create one for you. Options to switch between flashcard, multiple choice, and matching formats are provided. Diagrams and explanatory text can also be included with your choices.
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This site allows students to enter texts of varying lengths which they would like to memorize, but it can also be much more. Working like a sort of reverse cloze test, the site erases more and more of the text as the student works through it. A blank remains, marking the spot for each word that has been removed. Alternatively, students can also select "letters" to see the first word of every sentence in the item. Two ways of entering the text passage allow students to copy items from a spread sheet (like vocabulary words) instead of retyping or entering each word. This site also allows you to create flashcards to use for practice.
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This Study Skills site is fabulous! The activities are all divided by ages (5-9, 10-14, and 15-18). Each age level includes teacher information, parent information, and Learners… the link to find the neat interactives! Each age level also highlights four key areas: Do, Get, Remember, and Understand. Each area includes some age-appropriate text and interactives.
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Sensing Learners |
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Sensing learners do well with facts and do well with information that has a real world connection. |
Discussion boards would be very useful for students here, as they can discuss how the content they learned is useful in the real world. Sharepoint does have a discussion board capability. They are easy to create and use. Click here for an example of how to use a discussion board. |
Students can also use pre-made powerpoint templates to input the facts and use it for content recall. The following powepoint templates are examples of what you can use:
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Shopping math! This is a fabulous site on money. Students are given a specific amount of money to spend in this virtual toy store. Basic addition, subtraction, counting, and money skills are all necessary to play this great game!
http://teachersfirst.com/getsource.cfm?id=8519
Use an interactive whiteboard or projector to introduce this activity (or review basic concepts of money). Then allow students to work independently and try out the activity. This one will work well for students practicing during assigned times on a single classroom computer or cluster. |
Use the metric system to measure the height and weight of boxes being placed on a large ship. You are told the specific height and weight to locate. Then you are presented with three packages to weigh and measure. You click and drag the items onto an interactive scale that measures the height and weight. There are three levels of difficulty.
Come to this website to practice the metric system. Share this website with your class on a projector and show the students How to use the program. Then, create a learning center for students to use this website, or provide individual laptops from our laptop cart. Use the three difficulty levels to differentiate for your students. Play a game of "Around the World" using this activity. Or divide your class into teams and have some healthy competition. You can also have the students write or type journals that explains how they were able to find the solution for their problem. |
Practice telling time at this site created by the BBC. Molly and Max (your child guides) are at Big Ben in London. They need your help to make sure the time is correct on this famous building. There are three levels of difficulty. Simple questions ask for the time, while the more difficult questions ask what time it will be in a specific amount of time (for example, what time will it be in 3 hours and 10 minutes.
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Intuitive learners |
Intuitive learners are your innovators. They don’t like rote memorization and like being challenged. These students may benefit from having open ended projects where the end result is the same, but the students have freedom in the execution of the project. |
Other technology based projects that could be used are having the students create and design their own posters or brochures using graphics programs like Pixie, Kid Pix or Microsoft Publisher.
Nice online alternative can be found at the following websites:
Using these websites, students can create their own brochures, newsletters and newspapers.
Click here for some ideas on how to use this tool.
On that note:
Here are some templates you can use to help your students create brochures or posters on Microsoft Publisher:(Simply use the templates and have students edit the templates as they want to)
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Create your own Olympic games: This creative lesson plan challenges students to participate in their own version of the Olympics. Students choose which activities they want to "try their hand at" and are required to keep score. Some of the classroom Olympic "sports" include Speedy Spelling, Tongue-Twister Tournament, The Math Meet, and several others.
Bring the Olympics into your classroom. Share these "ready to go" sports with your students. Then have students try to invent their own Olympic games to share with the class. Student can create posters to advertise their game using software like Publisher, Pixie, or a free graphics program called Tux paint. Click here to get Tux paint. Students can also type a description about the sport they created or create their own powerpoints about their sports. |
Make your own electronic books! Now you can have your students create their own electronic books. Just create an account and have fun. *Note: I would recommend that the teacher creates a made up e-mail account using one of the free e-mail services like google, hotmail or yahoo. This is for privacy issues.
Be sure to obtain written parent permission before posting ANY student work online. Be aware that their work will “show” in “Recently published books” for others to see.
The opening page for outsiders and members shares featured and popular books, so you will want to preview for possible inappropriate books created by others.
Possible Uses: Use an interactive whiteboard or projector to share the tutorial presentation and some samples of student-created books. Create a "class book" or have students create individual books. |
Make your own wildlife video from National Geographic website:
Students of all ages can create simple films for use in presentations about a specific biome, food chains, or reports about specific animals. Students can play their film on a screen with a projector or with an interactive whiteboard. Students can use created films for language arts exercises such as poems, storytelling, informational writing, or journal writing. |
Digital storytelling! This is a great site for making your own electronic stories. The story creator is free and easy to use. Teachers can register their school for free and therefore, have administrator rights to use the site. That way teachers are involved in the whole editing process. A wonderful tool to help engage and encourage creativity.
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Global Learners |
Global learners see the big picture rather then all the details that make the big picture.
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Students can use interactive online graphic organizers to help them with chunking the information. Many good organizers can be found on the www.readwritethink.org website. See visual learners to access the organizers.
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Students can also make fact books to help retain information.
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Prezi is an internet based presentation application. It is similar to PowerPoint and Keynote in idea and ease, however there is so much more to this program. The strength of this particular program lies in the ability to graphically arrange a large amount of content or a big idea with its supporting information. With the popularity and educational benefits of using graphic organizers with your students, why not use a presentation tool that does the same thing? It is visually interesting, fun to use, and creates very dynamic presentations. You can also view Prezis created by others and use them as templates for your own work.
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