Class Blog #1

Well, it’s Tuesday night and I’m attempting to use my time wisely and get some work done for class. Here goes!

After class last Tuesday, I came home fired up and ready to dig into some new technologies. I spent time fiddling with I-Google and I also messed with blogger.com and Twitter. I-Google is very cool and the possibilities and fun features impress me, but I’m not sold on using it because it seems like it has really bogged down my computer. Maybe I just have too many gadgets on my homepage… I’ve been on Facebook for some time, so I haven’t been all that impressed with Twitter so far, seeing that it is really only providing the “update” feature from Facebook without the other cool stuff. I’m hoping as I dig into this application more I will prove myself wrong. And I can’t wait to figure out podcasting and work with this blog site some more.

I started reading Disrupting Class this week (before realizing that we aren’t actually “supposed” to be reading for several weeks) and was pleasantly surprised with how engaging the introduction was. It has really made me think about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation… I found the author’s discussion about motivation to be extremely interesting. The obvious statement was made: When there is a high extrinsic motivation for someone to learn something, school’s jobs are easier. On the surface, that seems like a no-brainer. But when I really started thinking about it, I realized I’ve never really thought of students in the United States as having a lack of extrinsic motivation. When I think of extrinsic motivation, I think of getting prizes or rewards for doing a good job. Kids in America are constantly rewarded for everything, right? But… I’m thinking on a smaller scale than the authors. They made the point that prosperous nations have less of a need to pull themselves out of poverty and therefore do not have as many students choosing to study (or choosing to study well, I should say) the harder subjects like math and science. I’m looking forward to reading further and learning about how to make our teaching intrinsically motivating.

I also started reading RSS for Educators as was assigned for this week. It was good to get an understanding about what RSS actually is (I hadn’t even heard this term until last week’s class!) and also learn about podcasts, blogs and wikis (something else I really knew nothing about except for being familiar with wikipedia). This is going to be a very information-packed resource.

What’s next? Well, I am thinking about possible uses for these technologies in my classroom. Podcasting intrigues me. And though these things weren’t necessarily a big part of our readings for the week, I’m looking forward to learning more about powerpoint capabilities (I use it every day but only on a very basic level) and smart boards (We’re hoping to get smart boards in all the music classrooms during this curriculum cycle). I can’t wait!