Week 4: Is motivation an issue?

I'm going to integrate technology in my class of 27 16-year-old students, who I'll be teaching for second year in a row.

I already introduced technolgy enhanced learning in their class on two occasions last year: They described themselves briefly in a post on a social networking site, Ning, which I opened for this purpose. Students were extremely motivated to do this task, as their work was published on-line and read by their peers. However, as the Ning network was private and no students from other schools or countries joined us, they soon lost interest in pursuing it any longer. Having had other things to teach, I didn’t encourage them with the introduction of possible new topics, so that the network communication slowly died out.

The other computer assisted lesson was on Earth Day, when I pledged to go paperless, along with more than a thousand teachers worldwide. I introduced the topic of Earth Day to my students with an online quiz, followed by a video listening quiz on more environmental topics. After that I showed them a video on how to make Zimmertwins animated movies. Zimmertwins is a free tool for creating cartoons. Again, this activity sparked students’ interest which resulted in a number of lively animated movies. The activity, however, never gave rise to a series of cartoons created with no teacher incentive.

I don't believe that motivation will be an issue in my class next year, as we all know that students eagerly do what they like. The problem is how to keep them motivated.