Module 5 Reflection

Motivation

Rewards vs Autonomy

This video has me thinking about the way I teach my students to play recorder.  I use a karate belt method where mastery of each progressively harder song results in a different colored narrow sticker (belt) to wrap around the student's recorder. Students learn a total of 8 different songs and earn belts that are white, yellow, orange, green, purple, blue, red, and black.  I like this system and the reward of the sticker seems to be pretty motivating.  The idea of autonomy has me thinking though.  What if a student wants to spend more time at the yellow level?  Right now I only have one song that is a yellow level, once it is completed the only option is to move on to orange. Why can't that student stay at the yellow level by learning another song at the same difficulty level until he/she decides to move on?  What if there were five songs at the yellow level and he/she could earn five yellow belts?  I always have students who are ready to move on faster than most of the class too.  These students would probably enjoy having the option to move to harder songs more quickly. I think I'll try this idea where the students have much more autonomy to decide what they are working on.  I'll probably still keep the extrinsic motivation of the stickers though.  After all, even in Mr. Pink's examples of companies with FedEx time or 20% time the employees still get paid. No one is working at these companies and turning down their paycheck because the autonomy of their working environment is so fulfilling that they are willing to do it for free.

Module 3 Reflection

My students' use of technology is Active/Adaptation-Transformation.  I use technology to allow my elementary students to compose music without having to know all the rules of traditional music notation.  Some of the apps I use are very abstract - sounds are created by moving vines and rhythm is created from the falling star drops.  Other programs I use are more like traditional notation - notes are placed on staff but there is constant feedback available as the note plays itself as the student drags it into position and the computer plays the song back to the student as many times as he/she likes.  The student can create six part harmony, change the tempo at the slide of a button, change the voices of the notes with click.  I feel this is transformational.  The songs a 7 year old student can create with these tools are far beyond what a child of the same age could do with a pencil, staff paper, and a piano.

I would like to work on moving my students into the collaborative and constructive parts of the model. How can we use technology to create a song with kids from another school?  Another country? How can technology be used to connect everything I do in my room?