During the class discussion, Dr. G tossed out a question regarding our major project: "how are you going to motivate a bunch of 19-year-old college students to learn something they do not care about at this point of time?" Great question. We didn't really think about that.
I guess, in order for students to be engaged in this topic, we will need to take the following steps:
- In the introduction section, we can provide some fun videos to demonstrate why learning about PLN is important in terms of building up individual's professional image and benign professional connections.
- We can also provide interview recordings of the Jacob teachers (the outstanding educators in Indiana) speaking about incorporating PLN as examples to demonstrate how PLN has been successfully used to increase students' learning effectiveness and motivation.
- One of the tasks in the process will require students to create a PLN community (e.g. a facebook group) for learning PLN. In this way, students will gain a sense of ownership and a sense of achievement during the process. Through the collaborating learning and social interaction in the group, students will also understand the value of PLN in terms of learning as well as professional growth.
Those are the ideas we have so far for motivating our students. Let us know if you have some other ideas!!
Sounds like you have a concrete plan. Try to incorporate what is already available to W200 students. I think Janet would have a better feel of what they know or don't know. :)
ReplyDeleteI think you two have a great topic (from an instructional standpoint), and one that is very important. Especially since these will be future teachers, they need to be prepared for the idea that everything they do in a public space will be judged more harshly simply because teachers are held to higher standards than others, particularly when it comes to things that cause controversy for teachers, such as expressing political opinions, any kind of personal drama, etc...
ReplyDeleteAlso, I really like the idea of training teachers to use and develop PLN's since there is so much you can learn from them!