third+discussion

Discussion
Teacher education and training needs to be a place to start with TPACK. As we prepare the next generation of educators, should TPACK become a required component of pre-service teacher education? Post your thoughts in the Discussion Forum entitled, "TPACK." Remember to respond to other participants in the class. As Mishra writes, //"A teacher capable of negotiating these relationships represents a form of expertise different from, and greater than, the knowledge of a disciplinary expert (say a mathematician or a historian), a technology expert (a computer scientist) and a pedagogical expert (an experienced educator)".//



I think the example Heidi used in the last discussion is a great argument for this one. As a student teacher unfamiliar with the imac movie technology your class was not very successful. How could your experience have been improved if you had had time to play with the program? To be a good teacher you have to be able to impart the knowledge you have. Brendan

Thanks again for getting this started Brendan- I will post my response later this afternoon! I emailed Dr Finlay to clarify how we are supposed to present our summary this week. Will let you know when she gets back to me. Heidi

This is probably the bulk of my post...  Technology requires patience to understand the basics and to learn the nuances of a program or web tool. In the very busy world of teaching there is very rarely the time to become an expert in one technology. I always treat the first or even the second time I teach a new course (outside of my expertise) as a learning time for me. I use this time to study the content and learn the meat of the course. Then I can tweak the material so it is closer to my expertise and more interactive to the students. This means the first students thru receive a rather dry presentation of the course but it allows the next generation to experience a (hopefully) more engaging learning experience. I use my pedagogical knowledge while becoming familiar with the content and then try to add technology, technology that is always changing and requires me to learn on my own. I think giving new teachers a means to create a method of learning new technologies would be wonderful but it would need to quickly establish a reliable basic knowledge of any new technology that could be tweaked next time thru (with help from the students). Focusing on one form of technology would be meaningless as the technology would be obsolete by the time the student teachers graduated. So any course that taught technological knowledge would have to focus on learning technological skills.

What do you think? Brendan

HI Brendan- thanks for posting your thoughts so quickly. I am still muddling my way through all the readings, but I skimmed a bunch this afternoon so I could get a sense of what this section is about- and have a little discussion....with intentions of a closer read this evening. Boy this class sure moved quickly- lots to keep up with!

I agree with you- my imovie disaster is a perfect example of what can happen when adequate teacher training has not happened. It wasn't my style to work that way- but my supervising teacher was a very fly-by -the-seat-of- his- pants kind of guy. His teaching and his approach to adding technology was all over the place and the kids didn't learn much. Harsh criticism...I know- but sadly true. I learned a lot that year about how I would NOT want to teach. Unfortunately, a bad experience like this can turn a person off from trying again. I haven't attempted the imovie project since.

You are smart to give yourself the grace to view 'the first time around' with new technological elements to a class as a learning experience. I think certainly a course such as this one should be an integral part of new teacher training- when I was in the faculty- we learned how to send emails, make a website from html and to run a dvd player- that was about ten years ago. How things have changed!!! How do we approach training more experienced teachers in this? I don't know what the best answer is. That speaks to a good number of the teachers out there. Courses like this are a great start. There are numerous considerations: time- money- resistance to change-access to resources-


 * I think you hit the nail on the head with your comment about 'patience' - this could be applied in so many ways in this particular discussion. I think if teachers are trained a certain way from the start- to at least be open to technology- to have a 'basis of technological skills' - as you say-that it isn't going to be an issue for them to integrate technology as a regular part of their teaching.**
 * I remember when I first started teaching- I had to attend all these PD sessions on mutlitple intelligences, differentiated instruction and learner-centered inquiry based learning. I found it so boring because I had just spent three years at the faculty studying the same things! I then realized that the workshops were designed not for us newbies, but for the teachers who had been around a long time and who didn't necessarily plan their lessons with these things in mind- per se. Some of these teachers continue to stand in front of their classes and lecture with the overhead every single class...others have slowly started adapting their teaching approach. What has helped make the difference? TIME- mainly- and the evidence that these methods actually help students to learn. Also we can't discount the value of pd and sharing sessions where teachers help each other by showing how implementing a certain tool or approach has actually worked in their class...Changing the way we all teach will not happen overnight.**

TPAC really ties well into our first discussion. It's all about how the infusion of technology needs to be purposeful based on a solid understanding of both the curriculum and current best practice. So often technology PD is about the technology - not about the good instruction surrounding it. In our PD we embed TPAC within UbD. Being clear about what we want the students to understand as well as what that understanding looks like helps to be purposeful when embedding the technology into instruction, performance assessment, etc. Otherwise you wind up with the situation you spoke of above. A lesson that is about the content only with technology shoe horned on the side. The pedagogy piece is missing.

Cheers, Doug