Thursday 12 March 2009

Self Determination Theory

Question 1 - How can you initiate, sustain and direct activities in an ICT lesson to motivate students?



As a whole, one evaluation stated that teachers had found that having a laptop with multimedia capability allowed them to make more use of visual
materials. The laptop connected to the Internet allowed teachers to respond quickly and in-depth to student questions. Students were reported to gain
understanding and interest consequent upon teacher use of multi-modal lesson materials.



In order to keep students actively involved in learning and to promote a high level of engagement, the learning environment must offer complexity and variety, a blend of safety and stimulation. (Kritchevsky, et al, 1986) The classroom must offer the children many stimulating choices if we expect them to remain involved and engaged.



An example is a word processing lesson titled "Getting Started With Ms Word" for Year 3



Initiate (Set Induction):

(1) Teacher show on the whiteboard a finished product of several picturesque article e.g. a flyer and a card created with Ms Word.

(2) Teacher then proceed to explain to the pupils how they can create such an article.

(3) Teacher explain what tools available in Ms Word pupils may use to create and further enhance their work.



Sustain & Direct (Class Activity):

(1) Instruct the pupils to form groups and proceed to individual computers.

(2) With the article still showing on the whiteboard, teacher instruct pupils to create a file.

(3) Teacher give pupils several topics of interest for the pupils to create e.g. an invitation to a birthday party, a "Keep Our School Clean" flyer, a "Happy
Teacher's Day" card and a "No Smoking" flyer.

(4) While pupils discuss among themselves what they want to do, teacher further explain where pupils are able to copy cliparts and images for their article. e.g clipart/images folder or googling images from the internet.

(5) Once pupils are engrossed in creating their article, teacher remind pupils of their choice of colours. i.e. blending of colours and making their font and image size moderate so as not to overcrowd their article.

(6) Teacher go round the class and give comments about pupils work, recommend and show other tools that might be of interest to the pupils e.g. borders and shapes

(7) Five minutes to end of class, teacher remind pupils to save their work and that teacher will print out their work for their next class.




Question 2 - How can you help students plan, monitor and modify their cognition to develop self-regulated learning of students in ICT.



Self-Regulated Learning(SRL) consists of a set of cross-curricular abilities which allow people to make the most of their learning activity by controlling all variables that have some influence on it.It is not surprising, hence, that teaching self-regulatory skills in addition to subject-matter knowledge is currently a main goal of education. Although some research studies show that SRL abilities usually increase with age, there is evidence that it does not increase naturally butrather because of suitable training. Research also indicates that students who lack skills inself-regulation tend not only to achieve poor academic results, but also to have behaviour problems and difficulties in their social relations, both in expressing their thoughts and feelings and in attempting to understand others.



An example is a month blog project for Year 6 students titled "Our last year as primary students"



Set induction:

(1) Teacher present a blog to the students on the IWB.

(2) Teacher further explain what a blog is.(3) Teacher further show what is contained in a blog.



Main activity:

(1) Teacher gives the students the title of the project.

(2) Teacher explain to the students they are to work in groups and firstly create their group blog in class.

(3) Teacher further suggest to students to allocate tasks for individual members of the group e.g. picture taking, note taking and structuring of how the
blog should look like.

(4) Teacher may suggest to post in their blog every 2 days or 3 days.(4) Teacher then suggest students to make use of what they learn in previous lessons. e.g. using digital camera and uploading in their blogs and embedding
videos and slideshows in their blog.

(5) Teacher may suggest to students link their blog with the other groups' blogs.

(6) Teacher then will inform the students that the assessment will be ongoing throughout the time span of the project.

(7) At the end of the project, each group will present their blogs during class.