Week1: Thing #2

7 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners tutorial

While the tutorial had a nice order and flow to it, I can't say that I was able to add anything new to my personal information store. On the other hand, I appreciated the use of presentation visuals presented side by side with the text narration. This is a vast improvement over slides that are cluttered with way too much text. It also allowed me to switch between listening to the narration and reading it myself when I lost patience with the speed of the narration vs. reading it.

The 7 1/2 Habits

1. Begin with the end in mind
2. Accept responsibility for your own learning
3. View problems as challenges
4. Have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner
5. Create your own toolbox
6. Use technology to your advantage
7. Teach/mentor others

7 1/2 PLAY!

Hardest of these for me: "begin with the end in mind" I often suffer from "scope creep" as I embark on projects and journeys. It's difficult to strike a balance between dynamically adapting goals, understanding that it's all really a process with no terminus, and keeping my eye on the current, reachable goal.

Easiest for me: accepting responsibility for my own learning. I'm innately curious and I learned long ago that if I wanted to learn something new I had to go after it not wait for it to come find me.

I liked the concept of a "learning contract" and so I tried one out below.

Learning Contract from the

1. Goal: to explore widely available interactive web-based technologies as potential tools in classroom instruction and student engagement.
2. Obstacles: too many other demands on my time. Excessive curiosity can be distracting
3. Toolbox: good computer skills, organizational skills, time management
4. Resources: teachers and friends in industry, laptops
5. Path to goal: this course is a start… after that? ISTE or CUE or both?
6. Check-in: in two months (July)
7. Sign it! (posting it here is a virtual signature)