MI in the Digital Classroom

It has been a very busy two weeks in the classroom. Along with technology and response to intervention strategies, a major focus this year is using multiple intelligences as a way for students to recognize their learning strengths and their preferred learning styles. Because of the age group of the students, I decided to use the idea of "learning smarts". After a brief introduction of the eight "learning smarts", the students completed an online multiple intelligence inventory where their top three multiple intelligence strengths were identified.
http://literacyworks.org/mi/assessment/findyourstrengths.html
The students were asked to reflect on their strengths in our classroom wiki and I was interested in the number of students who were surprised with the results. For example, students who thought they were people smart were actually self smart. This revelation made their need to work alone legitimized and took the pressure off of always feeling the need to be social. Using technology in the classroom is often collaborative and the students who were people smart immediately recognized their proclivity for working in groups and using technology as a tool for collaboration. Self smart students also recognized how technology could be used as an individual, reflective tool and were commenting on how they enjoy the ability to work on their own online journal. After recognizing their three top learning smarts, the students created bookmarks where the smarts were colour coded and then affixed to the table at each student's home station. The idea is to make it easy to make flexible groupings based on the students'learning smarts. For example, sometimes students will work in learning smart alike groups and sometimes in mixed learning smart groups depending on the activity.