home

=Using Technology to Motivate Students =



Part I- My Class Wiki
My Psychology Class Wiki There are not a lot of bells and whistles in my wiki but I have really learned to love it for my class. I have had to do a lot of adjusting along the way as the use was unclear and certain parts were less useful than I had imagined. Trying to have a discussion with 25 students on the wiki is hard to organize. I am still struggling with putting together fruitful enough discussion questions so as not have the discussion become boring or repetitive. The most useful part of the wiki is the ability to embed many little psychology content clips. These are 2 and 3 minute you tube clips that help students to understand the concepts I am teaching and leave a lot more time in the class to discuss the relevance and importance of the concept. For each unit I a series of tasks that go along with the reading. It is also a back up plan if we run out of time for book discussion groups that week. Students are expected to lead the discussion on the wiki. This wiki has also been a great tool for assessing the difference in technology based assignments and the traditional system in my class. Each class has 3 book groups for outside reading and students need to lead discussion and assess discussions each week. Some weeks the discussion were held on the wiki and students were very different in the way that they interacted with the wiki. Many students made one post and never returned and the lead student was stuck with very little to assess because unlike a web discussion or live discussion students are on the wiki at all different times and there is a lag in strand of the discussion. I also wondered if any of the students who posted early in the discussion ever went back and looked at the newer posts. I need to figure out a way to have them go back and really see the whole discussion and not just post.

Part III - Podcast
I used a podcast about babies from radio lab for this assignment. Students were to listen to the podcast linked on the Infant Development page of my class wiki for homework. It is a 4 or 5 minute podcast about what neuro-scientists think that babies know at birth. It is a great listen and the students really liked it. They had to respond to the podcast on the discussion tab above and all but 1 student posted. The posts were great - they clearly listened intently to the material presented and they questioned the science and research and unlike many class discussion everyone had a say. I have not yet pod-casted myself or had the students do it either. It has yet to fit well into the curriculum but after mid years there may be a great opportunity in the states of consciousness unit.

Glogster Brain Assignment
Glogster AssignmentThis is the assignment that I created during our neuroscience brain unit. Students were to create a glog to help them understand and utilize the terms and functions of the brain parts presented in this unit. This was a review day assignment that I thought would allow students to use some terms and brain structures to make their poster and then would allow students review and repetition of the terms and functions as they shared their posters. I struggled with how to share them so without having to go one by one on my in focus machine then making another lecture/presentation day. So instead, I had students go to the humanities lab and each student put their glog onto a computer screen. As you will see my assignment glog was rudimentary compared to what the students were able to create. I'm not sure it was as useful a review tool as I wanted it to be bu I think that it was less about the technology as much as it was about the assignment often introducing new ideas in a review unit. Next time I would do it as a separate research section of the unit and not as a review but the glog posters are great! Student Glogster example: Haley F's Glog

Piaget's Comic Strip Options
As part of an formative assessment during the Development Unit - students create a comic strip outlining one of Piaget's development stages or concepts. They do this as a one night homework assignment. This was a great way to introduce as technology option for the students who were interested and it is a creative and visual activity that allows other students to better understand and process the material. Students were given the choice to do it the pen and paper way to use a web anime or comic strip site to create their assignment. What was most interesting was the students who chose this option. It really does reach a certain group of students that are often quiet or disenfranchized in this multi-level often discussion based class. A few artistic, creative thinking students made a few great comic strips. However, less students than I anticipated took advantage of this option.

Juliana's comic strip Greg's comic strip

Erikson's Psychosocial Stages of Development
Last year I assigned students to create a play list of songs that exemplify the struggle of the Erikson's seven stages of psycho-social development. They were to choose 7 songs, burn them on a CD and then hand in a one page write up of how the lyrics connect to that stage of development. It was a bear to deal with. I ended up with 50 CD's that I had no idea what to do with after I painstakingly listened to them all. This year I added a technology option for students. It accomplished the same learning objectives and it was so much easier to manage without all the CD waste. Most students created playlists that had You Tube links to each song and below the stage and link they wrote a paragraph about how the song connected. A few students even were more technologically saavy and used a website that allowed them to download the song and create a playlist. Students definitely found the You Tube play list much easier to work with than the CD burning last year. Here are a few students examples of playlists.

Zoe's playlist Lia's playlist

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out Prezi and I really loved it. It is so much fun to use and is so much more creative than a powerpoint. What I think is most useful about it is that students need to think about a main idea and a theme before they begin. They have to spent time setting up what the whole thing looks like before they begin - so like teaching you almost need to plan backwards when you are doing a Prezi. I created, with help from a much more tech saavy teacher, a model presentation on population in China for a 9th grade. I will need to teach Prezi in class so I created a project as both a student model for when I teach it as well as a rubric to help them see how it will be graded. Prezi China Pop. model
 * Prezi Model for 9th grade**

Social Networking
For my social networking assignment, I decided to try a google docs "create a test" assignment. It was just handed out and the results are still pending. I have high hopes that this will work to increase collaboration and more importantly keep kids motivated to complete the task. I have attached the assignment and the grading rubric on a separate page. Because of logistic, scheduling and quite frankly skill issues, this assignment will cover both my social networking task as well as my student self-assessment and reflection piece. I will also be able to assess whether it reached more of mu standard level students as I am only offering it in one of my mixed level classes and I am going to assign the original assignment in the other. Not only will this provide me a look at the level of motivation through technology but it will alllow me to see of the collaborative effort make this assignment more reasonable and successful for standard students. I can let you know in a couple of weeks how it went.