Are you ready to take off?

What would you do with a wrinkled piece of paper? In today’s class we were given a piece of paper and then the teacher explained to us how to make a paper plane. Every single paper plane was different because the piece of paper itself was different but at the count of three we flew our planes and all of them could do it just in a different manner. Maybe you’ll be wondering why do we do this kind of things at class but the truth is that this was just a beautiful metaphor to start talking about the children’s brain: each airplane was different and all of them flew in a different way, as everyone of us, all children, have a different brain and they are unique. This metaphor is related to neuroplasticity, the brain ability to reorganize itself by creating new connections throughout life and allowing the neurons to adapt their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment. As a future teacher, I must be aware of the fact that each student has a different way of learning as their brains react differently.

Then, teachers introduced us another concept, the neuroeducation: in order to teach and learn better, it is necessary to use all the knowledge we have from brain functioning, taking into account several areas such as plasticity, emotions, motivation, memory, attention, physical exercise, creativity, and cooperative learning. In education, one of the most important parts is emotions because without it there would never be learning. In Task 3 you may find a mind map in which I sum up all we learned about neuroeducation. We used a new tool called Popplet in which you can organize your ideas visually by matching concepts.

Afterwards, we discovered the three parts of our brain: the limbic, the cognitive and the executive system. The limbic system deals with emotions; the cognitive system, with mental activity and the executive system works both limbic and cognitive system.

In addition, we were discussing the importance of motivation in the learning process and how essential is to keep motivation during a class. The attention curve shows that students are not able to be concentrated for a long time so that teachers must motivate their students with games or different activities. Kahoot is a useful tool that permits keeping students motivated when playing a game in order to check if they have acquired the knowledge or not.

Hope you have learned something new reading this post!

See you next week!

Isabel

#Neuroeducation #Brain #Motivation #Kahoot