Jen’s Blog

I just read a wonderful article on student motivation, Six C’s of Motivation, and how teachers can increase it in the clasroom.

1. Choice – students involved in making their own decisions in a task (eg. topic etc).

2. Challenge – providing students with challenge to avoid boredom, but not too much so it doesn’t produce anxiety.

3. Control – Students deciding their own roles, being involved in decision making, organising of content.

4. Collaboration – Students work with others to reach a desired goal inspiring one another.

5. Constructing meaning -Teacher acts as a facilitator to help students construct meaning, setting a meaningful goal, and students begin to understand the value of knowledge.

6. Consequences -  Students work is published to increase ownership, effort, achievement and repsonsibility.

This learning design works well with open ended tasks! Sounds good!!

Finally I can get on here and post! I feel slack, but it seems when I’ve gone to get onto edublogs this week it’s had an issue! I kept getting syntax errors today :S

But anyway! I’ve been reading an article from a magazine called “Music in Action“. This article is called “Using New Resources” and is by Len Clark.

Clark talks about how he uses Audacity in his music lessons to record kids playing. He uses it as a marker of progress, a tool to share with parents what he has been doing and give kids an opportunity to critique themselves.

I think this is a great idea!  I teach flute and know that kids often have trouble hearing what they are playing. Particularly as beginners when they are concentrating on so many things at once often kids forget to listen! I think this is something I’ll try in my own music teaching.

Clark states, “You should have seen his face light up when he heard is own playing for the first time… Until I started recording, it was me providing examples by playing patterns on the drums, or him watching then playing the text on a page. The recording confimed to him what I Had been telling him all along… They were my words, but the recording was his work.”

What great advice – kids have that sense of ownership!

I think that image explains it well!

Reference: Clark, L. (2006). Using New Resources. Music in Action 4, 2, p.26-27. Australian Music Association: Victoria.

Image: http://www.ejel.org/volume-2/vol2-issue1/issue1-art17_files/image002.jpg