Wednesday, February 14th 2018.

WEEK: 5

RANK: 3

“Critical Thinking and Technology” by Ken Bain.

To learn is to reason.

What surprised me about this article is that sometimes teachers do not teach students how to analyze, evaluate or understand, sometimes educators only think about covering the material for the semester but the question is: Have students learnt something? And why is technology related to this problem?

Some years ago educators did not pay attention to student’s main characteristics like their learning styles or personalities because not everybody learns at the same pace. There are more than three types of learning personalities as the article mentions: visual learners, auditory, sensors, intuitors, etc. I think that these kinds of learning personalities are the key to have a critical thinking. I believe that the first thing teachers should do is: recognize the different learning styles, their learning problems, the things they like, and after educators can start teaching students how to retrieve information in a right way.

It is also important to have a comfortable environment in the classroom, teachers should believe in the capacity students have to learn. On the other hand, why is technology important in this topic? Well, technology can help teachers to have learning styles diversity in the classroom. For example, with computers they can make visual representations without the necessity of buying materials (this is visual learners). In addition to this, presentations should not be long students can get bored or they will not be interested in paying attention. However, teachers should not use these tools to just cover the information because “while we are going faster, students are grasping less”(Ken Bain). The main idea is to show your students to understand and analyze in a better way.