Multiple Intelligence Planning Enhanced By Online Learning

(In response to The Influence of Multiple Intelligence Theory on Web-Based Learning )

Multiple Intelligence integration into my classroom is at times enhancing and at others partitioned. Many of the natural combinations of intelligences come easy to a Language Arts workshop. Students working independently to read/write followed by sharing/critiquing peers is intra and interpersonal. Depending on the particular project, spatial and logical-mathematical are incorporated. These are the enhancements.

At other times, I struggle to incorporate intelligences and force them into separate activities. For example, bodily kinesthetic often seems forced for the sake of getting students out of their desks, not necessarily improving the curriculum. Actually, it often proves to be more of a distraction. The closest I’ve come is gallery walks and inventing body movements for vocabulary recall.

As learning increasingly turns toward technology as a platform, educators are afforded greater ease in combining multiple intelligences with a single lesson/project/activity. A single student’s varying aptitude in the intelligences does have the ability to hamper learning in a dynamic curriculum that combines them (Riha and Robles-Pena, 2009). More than likely, online learning and media integration will limit the interference and allow the intelligences to balance or even augment each other by providing greater combinations and choices of learning tools.

For instance, an online curriculum can create a podcast lecutre that incorporates music for a teacher without musical talent via published soundtracks. Linguistic, logical-mathematical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal are all easily recreated by technology with blog forums and podcasting. These are the elements already most readily produced in traditional classrooms. Bodily-kinesthetic, the least used by classroom teachers, is afforded more opportunity due to the greater allotment of time. By flipping a classroom with online learning at home, class time can be spent exploring tangible, real-world applications on field trips.

If any of these particular elements creates too much interference, online lessons can be edited more simply than a one-time classroom experience. Perhaps one student cannot focus with a soundtrack playing during a podcast lecture. A teacher can much more easily edit and repost a the podcast than they can recreate an in-class lecture minus the song- if there ever was one.

Multiple Intelligence learning is research supported. High-level educators know to consider these in their lesson planning. Online learning opens more doors for synthesizing them within a single learning target.

References

Riha, Mark & Robles-Pina, Rebecca A. (2009). The influence of multiple intelligences theory on web-based learning. MERLOT journal of online learning and teaching. Retrieved from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol5no1/robles-pina_0309.htm