Learning Disabled students change in learning styles.

In his article, Growing Up Digital: How the Web Changes Work, Education, and the Ways People Learn, John Seely Brown (2002) uses ecology as a metaphor to describe an environment for learning. Brown says, “An ecology is basically an open, complex adaptive system comprising elements that are dynamic and interdependent. One of the things that make an ecology so powerful and adaptable to new contexts is its diversity.”
Brown further describes a learning ecology as, “a collection of overlapping communities of interest (virtual), cross-pollinating with each other, constantly evolving, and largely self-organizing.”New Web 2.0 technologies and websites, such as a blog, Wiki or YouTube, make new demands on learning and they provide new support to learning, even as they also dismantle some of the learning supports upon which education has depended in the past. If we agree that there are changes occurring across the learning ecology and that new conceptualizations are required to use these emerging technologies, then some care should be taken to think deeply about the impacts of Web 2.0 on the processes and practices of pedagogy.
The above quotations taken from John Seely Brown (2002) holds true in some of today’s classrooms with older teachers. As a co-teacher in a regular classroom, I am consistently trying to change the view of fellow teachers in how they deal with many of my learning disabled students and the change in their learning styles. The Web2.0 site http://goanimate.com/ can be used to teach Learning Disabled students to write all genre of essay writing. Many students enjoy expressing themselves if they can create a product at the same time. In using goanimate.com, students use the site to create and tell a story using characters supplied or purchased on the web site. I have seen many of my students become so engrossed in creating their story that they at times do not want to leave the classroom. This Web2.0 site lets the students see their writing come to life in the form of a live cartoon which can be anywhere from a few minutes to ten minutes. Not only does this site capture the attention of Attention Deficit Disorder students, many of whom have attention problems, but it brings out their creative side and shows their peers that they are able to develop a great product in the classroom.
Teachers can also use this site to teach a lesson to the visual students in the classroom. Students will be more willing to watch a cartoon that is teaching a lesson over and over again, than hear the voice of the teacher repeating the topic over and over. As a teacher, we have to learn to move away from the uses of only pen and paper as a way for students to express mastery of any topic.