Motivation

Useful Sites for Teachers

Tap Into the World of Comics is an on-line slide show by S. Hendy that has links to many different Comic Creator sites and provides 21 strategies for students to use the creators in their studies.  This site has something for students from about 8 years old to adult learners.
Roads to Reading by S. Hendy, a school librarian, provides a number of new book titles for children and adults working with childen. 
Goodreads is another site for people who love reading books.  It is social networking site for readers!  Here you can share book reviews and recommendatons with friends.  Threre are also groups you can create or join to read and discuss a book. 
Web Based Projects is a tremendous site for teachers looking for ideas to help students create better critical thinking skills.  These projects have been collected by the University of Richmond as one of the requirements for teacher education to receive their license.  These projects span all age groups.
Everystockphoto.com is a search engine for free photos.  They come from many sources and are labeled with specific licensing information.  This is a great place to send students doing reports.  Just taking a photo off the internet without understanding the copyright issue is not the way we want our children to learn.

Articles of Interest
Can You Make Your Baby Smarter, Sooner? is an interview from National Public Radio concerning the refunds to parents who bought the Baby Einstein videos in the belief that they would make their babies smarter. Dr. David Elkind of Tufts University said it best

I think what Head Start gave people the idea that education was a race and that the earlier you start, the earlier you finish and the better you finish. And that's a wrong idea. But unfortunately, wrong ideas often get you on much more easily than right ones. There's simply no evidence to support it

Teaching Kids to Cheat, is an article in Psychology Today where author Tina Seeling talks about the challenges of evaluating students without using traditional tests. She says,

I read an article a few weeks ago about all the ways kids cheat in school. I was prepared for a long list of terrible transgressions. About halfway through the list, I started to laugh out loud. I realized that almost all of the prohibited actions, such as getting help from other students and looking up material online, are things I require my students to do! As an educator who focuses on teaching students about innovation and entrepreneurship, I spend my time encouraging students how to find creative solutions to problems. They are urged to expand their frame of reference so that they can uncover a wider variety of solutions, to gain insights from everything and everyone they can, and to use all the tools in their midst.

 Get Granny to Google: How the Internet Helps Older Brains is an article I could not resist putting in Education Notes. I worked with technology in the military in the 1960s and have viewed the development of the field differently than many of my teaching peers. Over the years I have taught reluctant educators how to use different types of educational technology. Teaching the use of computers to adults was the most difficult task I undertook during my career. This article reports on a study from UCLA that;

determined for middle-aged and older folks, using the internet, particulalry search, causes enhanced neural stimulation leading to better reasoning and decision-making.

I told you good things would come from learning how to use computers!



 Thoughts from Yrisarri
These thoughts are from reading Education: Class Dismissed in Psychology Today

     I began my teaching career in the Marine Corps as an electronics instructor.  Motivating students to learn was easy, I sent them out to run if they didn't seem motivated.  I am pretty sure that did not cause them to learn better, but it did cause them to behave better.  After discharge I went to the University of New Mexico to become a teacher.  During this time there was a lot of studies on the free school movement.  These were schools that recognized that students would learn what they were interested in learning.  Movitvation is internal and I am pretty sure these students learned better than my marines.  The open school movement certainly influenced my teaching.  I was always looking for ways to turn on that internal motivational machine.
     In 1975 my wife owned a nursery school.  She had a 4 year old student, Beth, who could read.  This caused a number of the students in the school to ask if they could learn.  So the students were taught basic consonant recognition and sounds a with a schwa sound for vowels.  Within a couple months these kids were reading!  There were no drills, just reading.  These children wanted to learn to read and they learned to do it with little instruction.
     So why are we having such a hard time teaching our students in schools today?  My experience is that almost every kid comes to school motivated to learn!  By middle school that motivation has been replaced with a dislike for school and consequently learning.  Maybe what my wife said yesterday while we were walking explains it. 

You put a bunch of different people together who don't necessarily want to be together and make them do things they don't necessarily want to do and they all react!

     My sister (the best of stay-at-home moms) said it would be better if we just let teachers teach!  I think the core problem is that everyone has an agenda and public schools have become politicized to meet those agendas.  We are turning our schools into career preparation academies rather than learning places.  No wonder they have lost their motivation.  School is no longer a place where awe and wonder are at the center of learning!  Getting credits, finding a job, and beating those Frenchies on tests are what is important.
     Read the article Education: Class dismissed and see what can happen when you let kids set their own agenda.  Remember, these students go on to college, maybe not at 18, but when they are ready because the know how to learn.  Sudbury Valley School is a 38 year old free school that;

....is founded on what comes down to a belief about human nature—that children have an innate curiosity to learn and a drive to become effective, independent human beings, no matter how many times they try and fail. And it's the job of adults to expose them to models and information, answer questions—then get out of the way without trampling motivation.

Unfortunately we don't seem to have time for children to learn today.  We only have time to push them through school.