TPACK can be defined as a framework to explain the knowledge that teachers need to teach students using technology. It stands for Technological Content Knowledge. Watching Punya Mishra’s informative video really helped me clarify how we as educators should be using this model in the classrooms. When being introduced to technology, we need to be careful not to be to drawn into using technology for technology’s sake in our classrooms, as opposed to using it as a vehicle for teaching. Technology is changing at a rapid rate and is impossible to keep up with, although according to Punya Mishra, that is probably the least of our problems. We need to move beyond a technocentric framework and focus in on how technology changes not just how we teach, but also what we teach, ie the content. The TPACK theory can be shown thus in the diagram: So much more information is available than ever before when students have access to the internet and so therefore technology changes pedagogy. Technology changes how and what we teach and the contexts within which teaching and learning happens. It is also a great tool for educators to use to represent and share ideas.
The TPACK model now makes a lot of sense to me – everything is interlinked, and reliant upon one another and does not stand alone. Technology is an important learning vehicle in today’s learning environment and clearly motivates students to learn together with the flipped-based classroom. When thinking about my prototype and capstone project, I found it relatively easy to relate the TPACK model to it. Technology in this case certainly has changed the pedagogy. Students have been able to go on line and choose to analyze a song that they felt related to them. They will be evaluated to see if the use of music has helped them acquire the target language more readily and if they have been more motivated to do so. This week I realized that I only have about 6 classes left with my freshman students before our exam review starts and so I am certainly concerned that I don’t have much time left to gather data from my students, so this could be a challenge. The mind map (prototype) helped me cement my ideas more and formalize the process that students were going to follow to complete their song analysis. Also I was really fortunate to be able to spend some time talking through my prototype with Monica - it was great to be able to bounce ideas off of her as to what would or would not work with regard to data collection. Thank you Monica!
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We have come so far now down this path of technology-based learning, and it has been great to learn alongside some wonderful people. At first I was a little reluctant to step out of my comfort zone, I already was using some technology in my classroom, but it was just in a limited way. As time has gone on though, we have been presented with such a wealth of information showing how much positive change we can affect in our students’ lives by adopting technology in a blended lesson format within our classrooms, that it is impossible not to want to help our students achieve their ultimate goals. If I were presenting at a conference I would literally encourage my fellow teachers “to go for it.” I don’t believe we as teachers have all the answers yet, but we have a duty to do what is best for our students and so we must endeavor to deliver a curriculum and lesson format that is most effective for their needs.
TPACK as shown in the graphic above is a framework which denotes 3 primary forms of knowledge; Content knowledge, Pedagogical Knowledge and Technological Knowledge. It was put forward by Punya Mishra and Matthew Koehler in 2006. As can be shown in the drawing, these three layers of knowledge overlap with each other, and represent deeper levels of understanding. TPACK was introduced to show teachers that they need to be able to understand how to present knowledge and concepts to their students using technology so that students’ learning needs can be fulfilled. To that end, in the beginning I endeavored to use an app once or twice a week in my classroom for just a short period and students would work on that all together at the same time. Quizlet would be a good example of that. I got more and more comfortable with using it, which was great, but I think my students got a little bored of using that same app, although they did tell me that it helped their learning and that they enjoyed it. By following this course I have tried to branch out, little by little. I tried Quizizz, which I really like, and in some ways this is better than Quizlet as it allows you to ask students to log in so that you can track their scores better, and they can play a class game, but it is individual, as opposed to playing Quizlet Live where you are in teams and each player is depended upon. I also found after a while that when using Quizlet Live, students would register themselves more than once and then when it came to playing the game that there could be a team with a non-existent player which was a little frustrating. Thus I have gone back to getting the students to use the more individualized learning plan that Quizlet offers– ie playing the matching game or using the test feature to help them review new vocabulary and grammar. You live and learn! There have been growing pains, but it has been fun to learn about the video presentation apps/programs that there are available. I found screencast-o-matic to be the most user friendly free screencast app to use, but now having been introduced to Adobe Spark, I’m not sure I could go back to using just google sides now even if I did a screencast with it too! The images that Adobe has to choose from make the end product look really professional, and my students seem to really enjoy watching the short videos that I made. A couple of weeks ago I left my comfort zone and got my students to make their own Adobe Spark presentations about their pets, and they loved it! Class had ended, but students were still there working on their presentations because they were so into it and hadn’t finished – that really was an important moment for me personally. We haven’t watched their finished products yet in class, due to the Easter break, so I’m hoping that the momentum won’t be lost. Having recently attended Alice Keeler’s workshop and being shown how instant feedback really makes a difference, I feel that it is important to make sure that things are current. When giving Quizzes I always find that even if you grade them pretty much straight away, there is always someone who missed it and needs to make it up, and so the results end up lingering in a pile somewhere being forgotten about. Recently I used google forms a couple of times to make quick multiple choice assessments, and it worked out really well. Students were able to get pretty much instant feedback which was great. I am still struggling a little with the flipped part of the teaching – we are using lots of different apps in the classroom, but we are pretty much using them together all at the same time. I need to make a leap of faith and organize some stations so that students can make choices about their own learning. When learning is more personalized and students are more in control of their own learning, then they are going to be more successful – I think at this point I just feel as though I will be less in control, and that is what is scary! As an educator, being made more aware of ways to reach your students is so powerful – I feel as if I want to rewrite all of my curriculum, but there is just not enough hours in the day! One step at a time…. -We have come so far since we started studying back in the fall! When I think of building bridges it makes me think of the bridging the gap so that our students can make that leap from being taught something and using that knowledge that they have learned in an authentic real-life situation and proving that it actually works! This week when reading Baggio the key thing that stood out for me, apart from CRAP (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment & Proximity), was that less is more and that consistency is key. In language teaching we often use visuals to introduce concepts and new vocabulary and then in the upper levels it is the students who are doing the presentations about different cultural themes, and so I shall be passing on Baggio’s recommendations to them. When reading Baggio it makes you look at things in a whole new light and I shall certainly be revisiting some of the grammar presentations that I have made and look at whether the visual dominates/detracts from what the slide is about, if there is good contrast in my slides, if there are unifying points and if they are put near to each other, if things are well-aligned (preferably to the left) on the pages and what the text/fonts look like. So much to think about, but what she said made a lot of sense!
This week my group was working on the Pebble-in-the-pond model for instructional design. Just looking at the picture of the ripples on the pond put a lot of things in perspective for me. All of the steps for learning are so closely intertwined and when one ripple (part) of the instructional model is complete, it should lead seamlessly into the next and so forth. Every step plays its part and needs to be presented to students in the best way possible so that they effectively process that information otherwise all of the other ripples in the pond and their outcomes will be affected. When learning a language everything is built on what goes before it, so laying a strong foundation is imperative otherwise the student is never going to be able to move as far forward as they want to. In today’s world presenting students with real life authentic situations to learn from is key – all too often they are taught information but then find it difficult to apply it in a given situation. As educators it is most important that we are familiar with the types of students that we have in our classes so that we can design activities that will best serve those students. The SITE model has the learner at the center of the model, and not an isolated entity, surrounded by sociocultural, technical and informational subcontexts. I have a variety of students in my classes and often I find it tough to reach all of them – they all have different family backgrounds and want to get different things out of their classes/school than each other. They also have varying knowledge about the types of tools that we use in class that will help them with their learning. I’m trying so much more now to put the emphasis back on the students, as opposed to the focus to be on me. It seems that we have to give them the educational tools to make their wings, and then they need to make that leap to fly. It’s like taking a horse to water, but not being able to make it drink. We have to be the ones on the sidelines encouraging the students and giving them the confidence to make that leap, to make those connections and apply the knowledge that they just learned successfully in a real life situation. The knowledge we have gained so far in this course has just totally changed my perspective on learning and makes so much sense. I really want to use all of these new tools that we are acquiring in our toolboxes right now, but there are too many time constraints at the moment. Over the summer time I would like to go back over the designs of my courses and rewrite some of the projects and rethink some of methodologies used, so that learning is much more student-orientated and less teacher-focused. My goal next year is to be much more of a facilitator, rather than be the spotlight. This week to continue our research into sensemaking we read Clark chapters 3-6 and Baggio chapters 7-9. The information that Baggio shared was very straight forward and clear and made a lot of sense to me. In essence as an educator it is important to be familiar with your learner & to know their goals – when we are teaching often I think that this is half the battle. In some ways it is important to know what is going on in a student’s life, where they are headed so you can tailor lessons to meet their needs. When teaching a lesson, objectives should be clear and visuals should be there to support content. Visuals are extremely important, but what is key is that they should attract attention to the content rather than distract from it. I thought it was interesting that they said that visuals should be moved to the opposite side of the page every 3-5 slides just to make students’ brains wake up. Students take in a whole slide as one image so it is important to not put too much information onto it. Levity, brevity and repetition are key in all presentations – repetition will make things stick in the short term memory.
The second reading was Clark which was all together much more complex. The chapters included how to teach procedures, concepts, facts and processes. I found it hard to define the differences between all of these. Essentially when teaching procedures, it is important that students actually practice carrying out these procedures while they are being demonstrated to them. Clark points out that it is pointless for the students to learn just the steps, or be tested on the steps, the action of doing the procedure is the most important. His next chapter was about teaching concepts which he defines as both concrete and abstract. Concrete concepts and things that you can draw, whereas abstract concepts are much less tangible. He suggests that the real reason for teaching concepts in workforce learning is to help employees identify the tools or technical terms they will be using in their everyday jobs. He discusses the importance of giving common and less common examples when teaching concepts. Facts he suggests need different instructional techniques as they can only be processed at the remember level and are stored individually as they are unique. He says that educators should incorporate factual knowledge needed into the overall lesson task objective and that using games can make rote learning more interesting. His final chapter discusses teaching processes, which are descriptive and tell people how something works. For employees who work as part of an organizational system, understanding how things work can certainly help them can more insight into their own job tasks and empower them. How can I use this wealth of knowledge to help me to build a resource for fellow educators for my capstone project? I am still working on defining my exact driving question. Last semester I researched Quizlet and its effects on student learning, but I feel that I would really like to broaden my horizons a little and see how music or other language applications such as Quizziz or Kahoot can help students acquire language more readily. When I have completed my research I will probably be using Adobe Spark to make some kind of a screencast with visuals to present this project. From reading Baggio, it is most clear that visuals should support the content, but not distract from it, and that there should be very little text on the slides presented, as people find it difficult to take in too much information written onto slides. Information should also be presented in a variety of ways to incorporate Dervin's philosophy of each person's unique ability to interpret things differently from each other. Each slide on the presentation could include a separate language application and how it can be used to help with language acquisition. What would be most important I feel would be a link to a demonstration of each one so that my colleagues could see how it actually worked. They could then log onto a separate device and join the application/game that I made so they could be an active participant. In that way, they would become much more familiar with the process of how it could be used with students and be in a better position to use this application themselves in the classroom. In the same way, another idea would be to introduce my colleagues to using music in the foreign language classroom to aid language mastery. I could have a link to an actual song with activities to accompany it, so that they could essentially try out these activities as they were presented to them. I might incorporate a song with a video link and they would have to listen to and fill in the missing words. They may then have to find the meanings of the English words I gave them in the song. At the end I could ask them how or if it had helped them learn any new vocabulary words. ( I would get the French teachers to listen to the Spanish music and vice versa). It would be interesting to see what they had to say! Dervin’s: From the Mind’s Eye of the User:
Sense-making is used to study the needs, images and satisfactions of users and potential users of information/communication systems Sense-making is the term which is used to describe a set of methods developed in order to study the making of sense that people do in their everyday lives. What humans perceive to start with can be translated differently by different parts of our body, & therefore, people get different messages. There are many different ways to judge things – people see things differently. Through discussion and observation humans can arrive at more stable observations. Not all information is fully accessible to all human observers due to time constraints and intellect. Human information systems and use of human information needs to be studied from the perspective of the end-user not the observer. Questions are asked which start in the observer’s world, not the end-user. Designers of the system give order to the system, not the people that are using it. Sense-making focuses on internal and external behaviors & is all about how things are interpreted. People interpret things differently according to past behaviors and experiences. When entering a new situation people try to use past experiences to help them ‘bridge the gap.’ People also interpret things differently depending on when they happen and what happens. Life is unpredictable – humans create different responses according to their class, income, education. Chpt 4-6 Baggio: The Visual Connection: The brain works in patterns; prior knowledge context and expectations influence the way people learn Using prior knowledge to help us learn involves the use of NAPs, which are previously travelled pathways in the brain. It’s beneficial to try something different as new pathways are created in the brain Prior knowledge is the place in the closet where we hang new thought. Simple visuals are the most effective Context is important to adult learning because it provides relevance. If something is really different in contrast to another, we tend to remember it. Our expectations are things we imagine might be true or are likely to happen. Imagination is one of the most powerful words in learning. Learning styles are approaches to teaching and learning that presume that the learner has a way of learning that is dominant. You are influenced by the way you take in information. People tend to know what their learning styles are/what works best for them from the feelings they get inside. Most of us are attracted to visuals – 85% of us are visual learners. There is a limit to working memory – this is why chunking information is important when learning. Visual design for learning should not be overwhelming or overshadow the content & should act in harmony with it. Otherwise people may tune out rather than tune in. When designing visuals make sure that the learner’s eye is focused on the important part of the screen. When creating/designing a visual you need to be cognizant of the fact that the reader takes the visual in all at once - objects, space, light, angle, distance and brightness are combined to form a total effect or style. Clark Chapters 1-2: The technology of training Poor job training results in a loss of productivity for businesses. Instructional Technology is built on the ISD (Instructional Systems Design) model which is used to plan, design, develop and evaluate training. Learning outcomes can be guaranteed. ISD model – stages; needs analysis, task analysis, definition of assessment, development of learning materials, try-out & revision & implementation of the final product. The training has 4 major parts; the information of the training, the performance outcomes, the instructional methods and the instructional media. Information = content of training program Performance outcomes = what the trainees will do with the information provided & are defined in learning objectives. The instructional methods are what causes learning to happen; informational displays and practice with feedback Instructional media = the delivery devices of the instructional methods. None are better. Use cost effective media - instructor/video It is a myth that learning is occurring if there is an instructor present and a chalkboard, or taking a course on the internet. Trainers can’t just have knowledge of the technical information, they need to know how to impart the knowledge successfully. Some training is really no use and can have adverse effects on trainees. Business need to adopt sound training programs. Often products are designed (ie software) but training on how to use the product is an after-thought and inadequate. It is important to spend time in the analysis and design of the lesson as it avoids problems later. Instructional systems development – ISD Model = analysis and design, development, evaluation & implementation When designing a training program, you need to assess and identify appropriate solutions, assess needs, define the content of the training program and then write clear learning objectives. Writing these objectives is very important. Structured lesson design; technical lessons should include and introduction, supporting information, the key lesson task and a summary. Questioning techniques – open and close-ended. Direction of questions individual (targeted), group, relay (starts from trainee to another trainee), reverse (questions thrown back to the asker) and rhetorical questions. I can relate to many of the points here related by the authors and they are all in some sense intertwined. All of our students are different, and their attitudes and learning abilities can often be affected by how they perceive things, which is in turn affected by their class, education and intellect. It is very complex. As educators, we need to try and reach every student and not deliver a one-size fits all type of education. When designing lessons we need to think about learning from our student’s perspectives and not from our own. We need to effectively try and put ourselves into our students’ shoes. Sense-making makes a lot of sense in that it effectively defines how people go about interpreting situations and then trying to use their former knowledge to solve problems. Baggio focuses on visuals and how important they are. In World Language classrooms we often have signs on our walls with simple phrases & pictures that students can use in everyday situations. They are very easy to interpret, and so whenever a student has a common need, i.e. they need to tell you that they left their homework at home, or that they need to use the bathroom for example, they can do so using the foreign language by looking at the picture and reading the phrase underneath. After a while, students just need to look quickly at the picture and then will remember the phrase. Also when introducing new vocabulary, I use a lot of visuals. I try and use unusual pictures so that the word associated with that picture might stick in a student’s mind over another word. We repeat the word, then I ask students is it this, or that, and then finally I will ask them “What is it?” Generally, by that point they can remember the word or phrase. Students are only taught vocabulary words in smaller chunks say 13-14 words in the hope that they will enter their working memory and then be transferred to their long-term memory if we keep reviewing them periodically once they have been taught. Many students also do projects on different cultural projects and will make a google slides or powerpoint presentation. When presenting, I generally tell students to make the slides as simple and succinct as possible, and that they should use each slide just like they would a flashcard, in that each phrase is a spring board for them to talk to the class about something. When there is too much information on the slide I have noticed that some students do tend to zone out, whereas they seem much more focused when the presentations outwardly look more simple. The technology of training was interesting to read about as it showed things more from a business perspective. A key point that was made was that a trainer can have much technical knowledge of a product, but that is not enough – the trainer needs to know how to impart that knowledge to others. From personal experience, I remember having a Chemistry teacher at high school who had come from Industry and seemed to have much in depth knowledge of the subject matter, but we found it very difficult to understand the concepts that he was trying to teach us. It was very frustrating. The ISD model made a lot of sense too; when designing a course and writing a syllabus it is so important to effectively define its content and give clear learning objectives. Too often as teachers, I think, at the beginning of the year we define the course objectives, but then later get bogged down in some of the minutiae of the course. At our school we have started using backward design; we have our course objectives clearly mapped out on our UBD (Understanding By Design) templates, and we also design our final exams nearer the beginning of the semester to ensure that we are effectively teaching the course that we had originally mapped out to teach. It requires a lot of work initially, but it is good at keeping you on track and focused on what the main requirements and important objectives of the course are. |
AuthorI am a French & Spanish teacher at Justin-Siena High School wanting to get new ideas to motivate my students. Archives
May 2019
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