Vicki Davis and SDT

Vicki Davis believes that every student has the capacity to learn and be empowered to learn. She approaches her classroom with the belief that students need more then just a pen and paper to learn from, brining technology to her students lives to transform them. Vicki Davis constructs an environment for her students that goes along with her pedagogy by creating opportunities for them to explore ways to figure out their own questions (like literacy and looking up words) to accomplishing strategies to teach themselves how to learn certain computer games and technology. Vicki Davis has used what interests students, such as the type of programs they were using on the computers, to foster their educational experience and what they take out of the class.

There are a couple examples of pedagogical practices that Vicki uses to incorporate autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Giving the students the empowerment to create blogs and projects is a way to experience and learn about what is going on in the world around them. By allowing her students the chance to participate with each other as well as classrooms across the world, they are learning how to collaborate effectively. It seems as though her students experienced autonomy, relatedness, and competence because they were working individually on something they wanted to work on, cooperated together by teaching each other new information, and doing it as a group. Opening up technology to her students, she is able to customize what is going on with that specific group, and find ways to pertain to their interests. Students are able to feel a sense of competence by mastering technology skills and seeing what they were able to accomplish without the direct instruction of the teacher, and knowing that they found the way to do it themselves. This motivates the students to pursue learning more about what they are working on, and exploration into the activities. The work that the students were doing looked like they were excited to be participating in the technology, showing enhanced creativity as a result.

A question that I would ask Vicki Davis is how does she approach a students that has no interest in technology, or a hard time being able to grasp the importance of what technology can do for them?