Blog #1

The ARCS Motivational Model is very interesting to me. A man named John M. Keller developed it to explain that even programs that are designed really well, can fail without student motivation. Therefore, Keller targeted four areas of student motivation: Attention, Relevance, Challenge/Confidence, and Satisfaction/Success. The area of Attention deals with the fact that students need novel and surprising stimuli to keep their attention focused on what is being learned. A student will also be more motivated to learn if something is relevant to their lives. Learning material should also be challenging enough that when students succeed, they build confidence because they achieved something difficult. Satisfaction/Success is all about achieving and then being able to show your peers what you have learned in real-life settings. Achieving and getting positive feedback allows for a satisfied student. Another interesting thing that I learned while reading through the course text was how many people at one school rely on technology for just one day. The students aren't the only ones depending on technology. The computer is valuable for the superintendent right on down to the parent at home.

One major thing that I learned from the last posting is that you need to be very careful when working with technology because if you do not pay attention, you could mess up big time. When I was downloading the SAM software, I had a little bit of trouble. Although I finally got everything up and running, I made a mistake at the end because I was frustrated. I did not pay attention and joined the wrong section. Now I am in Ms. Pashnyak's 8th and 9th sections. Oops.

I have also learned something that applies to both this class and people taking the GRE. I started studying for it because I would like to go to grad school. I did not know this before but the entire test is taken on the computer. For a while now, I thought that only a portion was done on the computer. The questions will also get harder or easier depending on how you scored on the question before that. I'm sure many of you already know this but just in case, I thought I would share :).