VISUAL LEARNING FOR FLORIDA SCHOOLS

[Timothy Gangwer]

VISUAL LEARNING FOR FLORIDA SCHOOLS

Patricia Hawke

At the Florida Education and technology conference in Orlando, Florida, they were putting a huge emphasis on Visual Learning and the benefits that accompany their theory. Miami Schools have already adopted this approach and are beginning to utilize this concept in their schools to help their students to succeed in school. Because of this new generation of students, more motivation is needed or students to have the drive to be successful in school. More motivation than just their parent’s approval is needed for the students of this generation. Back in the day, the fear students had of their parents seeing a bad report card and grounding them from fun activities with their friends during the summer and after school was enough for students to try hard and school and want to do good so their parents would let them out of the house to play. Now in this generation, students mostly want to stay inside and watch TV and play with their electronics. Technology is beginning to make children lazy. It is making students not want to play hide and go seek, tag, hopscotch and ride bikes outdoors. Students would rather play video games; search the web, email friends, make phone calls, text message, chat or utilize social networking sites to communicate with friends. As beneficial technology is to our daily lives, it definitely has a way of taking over. Because of how much technology is used throughout students and their parent’s daily lives, Miami Schools decided to take on an approach to include more and more visual learning into their curriculum. As they saw at the Florida Education and Technology Conference, Miami schools decided that by adding this form of educational technology into the classrooms their students would prosper.

Visual learning helps the students of this generation to focus in the classroom and be able to learn more. The more visual and hands on technology the students have access to, the more likely they are to pay attention in class and be engaged in what the teacher is lecturing about. Weather the visual learning be coming from a movie, TV show, educational video, PowerPoint presentation, interactive white boards, 3-d projection or hands on learning with iPods, iPads, technological educational devices, interactive educational computer games or any other type in hands on learning, this will create an interest from the students and they will want to learn more about the subject and will have fun while learning. Because of how much distractions come along with technology in the classrooms these day such as cell phones going off during class, students listening to iPods during class, text messaging during class or playing games on their phones during class, the smart thing or Miami schools to do was to include fun and educational distractions into the classrooms to distract their students from their non productive technological devices that they have in their bag or backpack. Thankfully schools are getting smart and realizing they need to change their curriculum to accommodate the needs of the 21st century students.

Patricia Hawke is a staff writer for Schools K-12, providing free, in-depth reports on all U.S. public and private K-12 schools.