Teaching a Tool

I taught my girlfriend, Hilda, how to use Animoto to create a cute video documenting our daughter's first four months.

We started on the web-browser and then moved to the app version, which turned out to be easy to use. I introduced her to the templates and helped her choose photos. She spent the greatest amount of time composing the captions for the photos, which had to "tell a story" and convey important information about the milestones our daughter had reached. It also allowed her to send out a subtle "thank you" to the people who had provided us with nice outfits that featured in the photos.

Overall, Hilda said that Animoto was an enjoyable tool for organizing and expressing herself through photos and captions. She immediately speculated about using the paid version to document our daughter's first 12 months, which would exceed the limits of the free version. This is proof that the experience of using Animoto is motivating and convinces the user that it would be worth paying some money to continue using the app.

In terms of the classroom, I think Hilda's experience shows that I could teach this tool to my students and they would enjoy the process. If I provide them with a topic that is personally motivating, they may become motivated to use Animoto again-and-again as an engaging way to organize and present visual and text-based content.

Best practices and philosophical assumptions regarding the use of computers in the classroom

Ah, yes... the Venn diagram. Used for so many things. TPACK seems to be going a bit overboard, though. Not as badly as in the following example, but similarly overboard:

There is definitely a subjectivity and jadedness to the way the overlapping portions are described above. However, the analysis of a problem/challenge through the intersection of its major attributes can yield insight. Let's look at TPACK's approach.

The three categories of knowledge seem clear enough-- technological, content, and pedagogical--  but the overlapping categories are best understood as how each category influences the others. For example, we have to know about technology to teach it, but our technological knowledge will also influence our teaching and delivery of knowledge and the content of what we teach may be changed by technology as well. This means that the overlaps are just where one category mixes with the other, not a truly separate category of knowledge. 

I would much rather see these overlapping areas defined in terms of practice or how one implements the intersecting knowledge from these two categories in the classroom. For example, I might call TPK "Technologically Literate Teaching" to focus on the practice. TCK could be "Technologically Enhanced Research" to focus on the ways content and content discovery are altered by tech. PCK could be "Content Shaped Teaching" to focus on how changes in content require teachers to find different, novel ways to teach concepts. The synthesis of these practices would be located in the center.

That brings us to the middle part which, of course, is where it all comes together. That's TPACK itself! And TPACK is quite simply described as "the basis of effective teaching with technology, requiring an understanding of the representation of concepts using technologies; pedagogical techniques that use technologies in constructive ways to teach content; knowledge of what makes concepts difficult or easy to learn and how technology can help redress some of the problems that students face; knowledge of students’ prior knowledge and theories of epistemology; and knowledge of how technologies can be used to build on existing knowledge to develop new epistemologies or strengthen old ones” (Koehler & Mishra, 2009). 

Hmnnn... that mess of a sentence will take some picking apart. I mean, to start out with, if they understand "what makes concepts difficult or easy to learn" why do they explain things in such a convoluted way? I think basically they mean to say that we teachers have to make all these different categories of knowledge come together in our classroom-- they just chose the most complicated way to say it. Again, I would much rather that they focused on the how, rather than the what.

So that brings us to best practices. With my reinterpretation of the categories, we are led to an understanding of teaching that is informed and shaped by technology and content (both changing and dynamic). 

From the original framework, they seem to only be categorizing different forms of knowledge. I guess we have to be very knowledgeable about different types of knowledge and think about how one kind of knowledge affects the adjacent two kinds of knowledge. Its a bit redundant. It is also a bit abstract. I feel like TPACK is "zoomed out" from the real business of teaching and is describing things from an aerial view. I would revise it to focus on the actual practice of teaching.

I think I like the ISTE approach a bit better. They set their information up in a linear and hierarchical form, like all state standards, and simply describe every component in prose. That being said, ISTE ends up seeming like a very well-written, somewhat wordy shopping list of all the wonderful things a teacher would love to do with technology during the school year, but will probably not be able to organize and make happen without a great deal of help and support.

I think the best practice is to be very planful and deliberate in every use of technology in the classroom. All the different possible pitfalls should be considered and guarded against. We should be constantly growing in our knowledge and modeling interest and engagement in technology in a socially responsible way.

The philosophical assumptions regarding computers is that they are inevitable, make much learning more engaging and easily adapted to each student, and have the potential to ease many burdens that plague teachers. I guess the simplest way of paraphrasing that is that computers are good.

In the end, like any tool, technology is only as good as we are. We must teach our students the importance and moral responsibility of using technology responsibly.