Connecting, Collaborating, Continuing to Learn

Many people assume that a computer in classroom automatically makes it a technologically advanced learning environment.  Throw in a few iPods, a SMARTBoard and start a blog and you it is automatically assumed that students are gaining the technology skills needed for the “21st Century“.  For the last decade or more our schools have been focused on the acquisition of the “tools” of technology.  School districts have focused on “getting wired and connected”.  For many teachers the use of technology in the classroom is something that is layered upon or forced in between existing curricula. Teacher professional development for technology training often consists of a brief introduction to the equipment, followed, if they are lucky, with a video tutorial or two.  It’s a linear approach.  Plug the machine in, log on to this website, follow this lesson plan and and the students complete this activity.  Emphasis on technology professional development has been focused on the “How do I do that?” versus the “Why should I do that?”.  According to the authors, it is simply not enough to place technology into the classroom and expect students to learn.  The TPACK framework challenges the current thinking about technology integration and pushes us to think about and interact with educational technologies in a much more complex and intentional manner.  As the authors themselves put it, TPACK is a form of professional knowledge that technologically and pedagogically adept, curriculum oriented teachers use when they teach. (p. 401)

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) is a framework for educators to develop an understanding of how technology can be incorporated into current teaching practices.  It is not a step-by-step model for integrating technology into the classroom, but rather a way of thinking about how the intersection of teacher technology knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge form a new area of expertise, an educator that is able to view all of these areas as a different, highly complex, area of study.  It is not just enough for a teacher to be an expert in the field they have studied, nor is it enough for them to be a master of methodology.  Technology skills are necessary, but they alone will not provide educators with the skills needed to be successful.  Educators much have a full understanding of all three areas and be cognizant of the ways in which they interact with one another. I believe TPACK provides a guide for teachers to begin to understand and engage in the discourse of the complexities involved in the use of technology in education.

Key Quotes:

In one sense there is no such thing as pure content, pure pedagogy or pure technology. It is important of teachers to understand the complex manner in which all three of these domains–and the contexts in which they are continually formed–co-exist, co-constrain and co-create each other. p. 401

Each instructional situation teachers find themselves in is unique. it is a result of an interweaving of these independent factors” p. 401

We argue that this discrepancy between a vision of transformative uses of educational technologies and the more prevalent efficiency and extension applications can be traced to the nature of how technology use in the classrooms has been conceptualized and supported… p. 394 vs. the transformative uses of educational technologies (see list of 5 traditional approaches)

<Technology should> transform the nature of a subject at the most fundamental level.

p. 395 Different disciplines have differing organizational frameworks, established practices, ways of acknowledging evidence and proof, and approaches for developing knowledge (Koehler & Mishra, 2008)

p. 395
Understanding that introducing new educational technologies into the learning process changes more than the tools used–and that this has deep implications for the nature of content-area learning, as well as the pedagogical approaches among which teachers can select–is an important and often overlooked aspect of many technology integration approaches used to date.

p. 400
Effective teaching requires developing an understanding of the manenr in which subject matter–specifically, the types of content-based representations that can be constructed within and across disciplines–can be changed by the use of different technologies.  Teachers must understand which technologies are best suited for addressing which types of subject-matter, and how content dictates or shapes specific educational technological uses, and vice versa.

p. 402
Using the TPACK framework to frame the development of teachers’ knowledge does not necessitate a rigid or algorithmic adherence to a single approach to technology integration.

Thus the development and demonstration of teachers’ TPACK knowledge requires flexibility and fluency–not just the curriculum-based content, but also with pedagogy, technology, and context–remembering that each influences the other in pervasive ways.