Motivation in the Library (Post 2)

Q: Consider the theories of motivation that we discussed in class.  Which theories of motivation are most helpful and instructive for you?  How can they enhance motivation and affect your students?   Please give at least one example of how a theory of motivation could be used in your future classroom. 

A: Looking back at my education experience in high school and undergraduate studies, I find that most of my motivation came from extrinsic forces- grades, approval from teachers, peers and parents, and the promise of a good college--or, later--a good job. The exception to this would be subjects I really enjoyed, like English, or excellent teachers that made otherwise hard-for-me-to-grasp subjects, like Geometry or Biology, really interesting and fun. As a student in these classes, my educational motivation was intrinsic--I loved learning. 

As an adult learner-- some classes may be an ends to a mean (re: a requirement), but intrinsic motivation is more prevalent because I now choose how to spend my time, and am only motivated by my own goals and desires to learn. This largely falls in the realm social cognitive theories through my own self-efficacy beliefs and self-regulation. 

Motivating students is everything-- a model class would have every student engaged and motivated to learn for the entire period/day/week/year.  With motivation, discipline problems decrease and life-long learners are born. 

I might employ any number of behaviorist extrinsic motivators for students in any given class. Examples are praise and stickers for students who are behaving appropriately or who exhibit kindness or caring to a classmate above and beyond what is expected. I also have behaviorist punishments-- three stikes leads to a time-out for individuals, and calls home are employed if there are chronic behavior problems. Likewise, whole classes are motivated to behave by earning stickers for eight weeks in a row. At the end of eight positive classes, the class has earned a reward "Fun Day." 

I hope to nurture more intrinsic motivation to learn and behave in the library as I gain experience teaching. 

Diving into Education Psychology- (Post 1)

Q: What are you interested in learning about? What do you want to get out of this class? How do you think this class will help you in your future profession?

As you know, I have jumped right into a new profession of school librarianship this year. (And what a crazy year it has been--but we'll save that for another post. Or maybe not.) With this career change comes more learning and more school to get my teaching license and School Media Endorsement. I told my administrators when they hired me that I had the library portion of the job down, but that I'm brand new to the world of teaching and education--luckily, they they saw in me some innate ability to teach that I am just starting to see in myself and have been very supportive of me while I work towards "getting it."

I believe that in addition to the day-to-day classroom experience that has been invaluable last year, this course, Education Psychology (for which I am writing this and several future posts), will be a major puzzle piece towards "IT". I am so green, I really had no idea what the content of this course would be. I believe some part of me actually thought that it would (perhaps psycho-analyze would be a strong term, here, but...) help me figure out what is going on in my students brains in order to deflect their tactics of getting off-task, talking as soon as everyone is finally listening, and rocking in their chairs. I am joking--some. So, I am excited that this class will perhaps offer some insight to these behavioral issues, but much, much more--including classroom management, how students learn, different teaching methods, praxis practice and more information on the self-evalutation portion of my four evaluations a year! I am also very jazzed to decode some of the professional language that pervaded me at every staff meeting, PE, and pre- and post-evaluation conference this past year: for example, "transfer" and "summative" and "formative evaluation." Yep, I think this course will be very enlightening not only for the classroom and students, but the culture of schools.

Let's get started!

Micro-blogging is legit

I'm officially going to bring this blog out of its coma with micro-blogging. It is alive!

Birthday Booty!

My DH gave me my birthday present this morning. He totally surprised me by getting a Nook e-reader. I have a Nook, I have a Nook, I have a Nook! I've been talking about wanting one "someday" for some time. I guess all my hinting paid off. Obviously, I just took it out the box and left it to charge this morning, so I can only tell you what I'm excited about. Ahem:

1. It's the Wifi version which was cheaper than the 3G and I don't need to be able to connect at all times to download books and media. But I can still connect at all AT&T hotspots and, of course, anywhere there is free wireless.
2. I can borrow OverDrive books from the library! My biggest issue with the Kindle was having to *gasp* BUY books from Amazon.
3. Popular Science just ran an article about how to hack the nook for things like a Twitter feed. Word.
4. It will sync books to my iPhone... soon they will have a page sync feature so each device will know where I left off.
5. I can "lend" books in my library to friends. Now, I just need another friend with a Nook to let the sharing begin!

And there is more, but those are the highlights. Lot's of reviews available out there too, if you're in the market.

As a librarian I feel I have to defend my love of the physical book. It hasn't gone away. But now I can reserve room in my carry-on for things like shoes and a change of clothes instead of books.

Copyright

Copyright knowledge is one of those things for me that is in the category of "Use It or Lose It." I am often guilty of wanting to put my hands over my ears and sing "LA LA LA LA" to stay ignorant of what people are doing with the articles that they request once I order them.

Other times, I just arch my back and hiss "That would be copyright infringement!" as a gut reaction. Then after I think about it and review the wording of the law and guidelines, I often think that I may have overreacted... Just maybe.

Today I discovered this very informative video from the Copyright Clearance Center. They managed to keep it short (7 minutes), informative (not confusing), and interesting (Mostly because they didn't skimp on production. It features high-quality, good looking animation.)

Next time you get stuck on a simple copyright question check it out:
"Copyright Basics - The Video" can be found here: http://216.183.190.29/

Zotero to the rescue!

One of my major lifelines to other librarians is a local consortium of health science librarians. We meet every few months and often bring in wonderful classes from the National Library of Medicine. When not taking formal classes, we teach each other. Last week I learned about Zotero- a free, open source citation manager (like End Note) that works directly in your browser. Right now, it is only Firefox compatible, but they will be releasing a version for IE, and other browsers soon.

http://www.zotero.org

It works as a citation manager, but also as a really comprehensive bookmarking system. A few of its virtues: you can archive PDFs and Web pages, you can share collections of research sources with others (great for collaborative projects), export nice looking reports of resources, and import/manage citations in Word.

It can pull details out of just about anything- PubMed, Amazon, newspapers, google books, to name a few. Obviously, I am just learning about this, but have downloaded the extension to start using while I pull research, cull resources for requests, and find items of interest as I browse. I already want to upgrade to the new Beta version! Zotero has really good documentation on their website, so I'm confident I can find my way around.

Happy citing!

PUTTING THE NETWORKING INTO SOCIAL NETWORKS

Twitter is the new tool in my 2.0 trunk that is getting me more involved online. My husband, one of those people who was online when it expensive as hell to have a home connection (and almost unheard of) when there wasn’t much to do online beyond text based newsgroups, often says to my question “Who is that?”, “Oh a friend I know from channel so-and-so.” (aka, a guy he knows from an online chat room.) For a long time, I really didn’t understand that. I mean, I understood the logistics of logging on and chatting with familiar faces, but I didn’t really understand how trust and friendship could evolve between people who were essentially strangers.

As a librarian, I often refer people seeking support and information to these resources for the purpose of interaction, yet I have preferred to remain uninvolved myself. By uninvolved, I really mean that I have not formed relationships and I have not networked. Not on Sparkpeople.com- the social weight loss and fitness site I log into regularly, not on Facebook or MySpace, not on LastFM, not even on blogs I read religiously. I’m like an invisible, anonymous, online wallflower.

Until recently, my online habits really consisted of the occasional comment on a blog, posts to list-servs, plotting my own online identity, and communicating with my colleagues and friends. Yes, it is quite easy to be 2.0 with just your friends or even just yourself. Even as I write this, I wonder if I’m the only one who will read it.

Well, as it happens, Twitter has allowed me to seek out, introduce myself (by way of "Following" and a direct message) and get to know people from around the globe. Not that I’m not still being a wallflower elsewhere, but I am having fun and widening my cyber social circle one tweet at a time. And I finally understand how my husband can really call his online acquaintances friends.