WEEK 5: Thinking!

I think the article “Critical Thinking and Technology (More Than About Technology) by Ken Bain” was fascinating, not only because it was a six pages doc but because it has very interesting information. Getting to know our students' pace to learn, their emotions toward learning and the important role technology plays in the process, are among the main aspects I may use to sum up the article.

What is critical thinking?
“Critical thinking" refers to the capacity each human being has toward learning and how such capacity may be enhanced when providing the right encouragement. Such encouragement depends on teachers asking the right questions instead of giving meaningless information hoping the student will store it all. When posing the right interrogants, we (teachers) determine how the learner process the given information and if there is any chance for critical thinking to emerge.

Getting to know our students' behavior toward learning is one aspect I would associate with technology and productive guidence.This embraces knowing what kind of learners we have (visual, auditory, kinesthetic), what activities makes them feel comfortable when learning and what activities provoke totally the opposite. As the article mentions, there are people who tend to learn more by listening, others by watching and so on. When I first read this, I thought that not being likely to have only one type of learner in the classroom, teachers should consider to use different approaches for each one of them; however, now that I am more awake, I think it would foster non-autonomous learners( that is learners who rely more on the method that the thinking), not to mention it would be time consuming. I think that  we should promote universal learning, that is, subjects being able to learn not matter what kind of activity is used.

Nowadays, the role that technology plays in the teaching field is very important. As well as it provides a meaningful experience to the learner, it also facilitates information management; however, I think that teachers should not see technology as a tool that makes their job easier. Instead, we should see it as a means to wake up the learner's interest to keep learning autonomally.