Week Four Reflection

I have been keeping track of what I have been doing this past week, but because of family obligations and getting ready to host Easter and have not had the time to post it, so here it is.

This week I was able to set up a Twitter account. My user name is CathyQ10 if you would want to leave me a twitter message. Once I had it set up I was going to twitter my daughter, but couldn’t because the system was overloaded. What an interesting first experience with this new technology. I’m still working on getting the I-Google account better organized. I read the first 70 pages of Disrupting Class. The authors are noting the importance that motivation plays in successful advancements in our society. We have studied and talked a great deal about extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and how each plays a different role in a student’s learning. Christian explains how throughout history we can see how a country’s people would be extrinsically motivated to study math, science and engineering in order to prosper. However, it was not unusual to see, once a country had become wealthy, the next generation would decide to study the humanities or the social sciences. The extrinsic motivation was gone. It leaves all educators with the challenge of intrinsically motivating students. They see the way to intrinsically motivate students is to tailor education by using software as part of the delivery system to meet the learner’s needs. The authors note that teachers have been good about responding to society’s changing needs (they referred to it as moving the goal posts), so it was good to see them acknowledge how educators manage to change and adapt curriculum in mid-stream. It will be interesting to continue this read to see how their ideas unfold.

I had success in setting up a delicious account and have tagged some grammar lessons that were on YouTube. I need to check them out more to see if they would work for my students. I found a site on classroom 2.0 for using technology in Adult Education. I’m looking forward to exploring this more. I also found a site entitled the Savvy Teacher which explains how to use I-Google.