Components of Motivation

Keller points out four main components of motivation: Gaining and maintaining attention, Enhancing relevance, Building confidence, and Generating satisfation. As I think of a situation that I have encountered where co-workers have been resistant to using technolgy due to a component of motivation, I think of using power-points and streaming video with the LCD projector to teach. Our teachers used overhead projectors. The two bigest obsticles were being able to connect the equipment and the amount of time that it takes to prepare the material. If I put together the slides, and hooked up the equipment, then my co-worker was more than willing to use the resources and enjoyed the lessons.

The area in Keller's motivational design that I would focus on would be building confidence and generating satisfaction. She was attentive to the technology because we worked in an open space school and had only book shelves seperating our classrooms. She could see and hear everything that I did all day. She also found the process to be relavant. Hooking up the technology would be easy. With practice she would have no problem with that. Part of the time issue is that she was still building the skills for using power-point and we could not stream during the day so you had to download all of the streaming video either before or after school. I got to where I would save the video onto a thumb drive and then transfer the data to each computer. These are tips that I could share. The other issue with time is that as teachers your time is thin and it is hard to add more time consuming activities.

One way that I could help with confidence is to sit with her and facilitate the power-point process. I can share short cuts and how to find pre-made power-points on the internet. We can divide the curriculum for the week and each work on 1 or 2 presentations instead of each doing one for every presentation. I can be available to help work out technical difficulties and be supportive and encouraging when a lesson is really succesful.

I could help generate satisfation by putting together a student survey to get feedback from the students on the use of the technology in the class. Other teachers could observe her lessons and learn from her. This would build both her confidence and her satisfaction. I could use encouragment and positive feedback to support her use of new ideas and technology.