Week 2 Post

The ARCS motivational model was developed in response to the amount of psychology dedicated to learning styles. John M. Keller, the creator of the ARCS model, thought that teachers should focus on developing a heightened sense of motivation in their students as well as just being occupied with learning styles. Keller was able to divide factors driving motivation into four unique areas, all with a certain respect for using technology in those areas; Attention, Relevance, Challenge/Confidence, and Satisfaction/Success.

The assignment we completed creating a worksheet in Microsoft Word was a great example of how we as future teachers can use technology to help make the creation of simple assignments and worksheets a bit easier. The ease of using Word to align and number questions and answer choices is very easy and straight forward. With a little creativity, one can create different types of common question types, such as matching, using standard characters and keys, no fancy graphics are necessarily needed.

I am glad to see technology being emphasized in the Education curriculum. At all levels of teaching, technology is a big influence at all levels. Technology is being used not only in the classrooms to interact and teach students, but also for administrative tasks. Technology can especially help teachers cut down on time spent on hand written administration tasks so more time can be spent educating students.

My First Post

I have used technology and computers in school, at work, and personally. I have taken a Computer Literacy course and also use word processing applications such as Microsoft Word frequently. I use the computer often to check email, check account balances via online banking, and for surfing the internet and navigating social networking sites such as myspace and facebook. At work, we often spreadsheets to manage tasks such as a attendance and roles.

I hope to learn ways to implement technology and computing into a classroom to enhance teaching activities. For student, most seem to enjoy 'hands on' activities, so computing is sure way to keep children engaged. As a future teacher, I am open to any suggestions to help keep organized, such as using spreadsheets to help organize grades, etc.

By taking the learning style assessment, I found that i am a pretty balanced learner. I have always thought of myself as a fairly visual learner thoughout school.