It took me a bit of reflection, but I think I get what TPACK is all about.

So, we’ve been asked to reflect on what to consider before implementing new tools into the classroom. One of the first things to consider (that actually fits into the TPACK model) is “Does this new technology add value to the learning process?”  Being an early adopter may be a good thing, but if you’re adopting just for the “cool” factor you may be diverting resources and wasting the students’ precious attention. Any tech you select should also be robust, supported and adopted. Imagine how frustrating it would be to have spent time integrating Google Glass into your lesson plan. Other considerations would be initial implementation costs, ongoing licensing and maintenance costs, privacy concerns, copyright issues and all the other things we’ve discussed earlier in the semester.

So, with all these concerns, how do you select the right tech for your classroom. I guess the first thing is to start within the framework of the tech available to you in the district. Whether that will be Google Classroom, Brightspace or some other platform, I think most schools now have some digital backbone for teachers to use. And like Punya Mishra points out in his presentation, being creative doesn’t mean you have to break the mold, tweaking the knobs can be creative and effective. I think even in this sense, it would be a good idea to bounce ideas off colleagues before jumping in. Other people might be able to see caveats that you didn’t consider, or maybe see even more potential than what you originally thought. Collaboration usually leads to better solutions, unless you’re in Congress.

If you are thinking about new hardware, you’re probably best working with a tech advisor in the department. Most of us aren’t used to evaluating technology on a long-term cost-benefit basis, so we should rely on those that know more about that than we do. In my opinion, one thing to think about when picking hardware is to find options that connect well with other formats. If you pick something that only works with Apple, you end up locking out a whole bunch of options.

The last two question prompts will kinda take me on a bit of a different path, a path where I think I figured out what TPACK means and why it is even mentioned.  As I mentioned in my intro, my first career was 25 years and a maintenance and reliability engineer in heavy industry. In that time, I had to learn how the equipment worked to make the product (the content area), maintenance best practices (the pedagogy area) and keep up on new technologies to improve both (the technology area). So, as I watched these intro discussions, I kept trying to figure out what the big deal was. In fact, because all the shorter videos in the course materials sounded nearly identical, I got suspicious that this was just a buzzword to use and the people giving the intros were more or less parroting the model and didn’t really understand it. For example, if you ask me about the relativistic effects when an object travels at a velocity approaching the speed of light, I can explain how the object will get shorter and time will slow down as compared to the where it left. I can even give you the equations that say by how much. If you didn’t know anything about the Theory of Relativity, you might be impressed. I know, however, that I have absolutely no comprehension of how this all works, I’m just acting as a playback device for things I was exposed to in college physics.

While listening to Mishra’s talk, I think I came to terms what he and Matt Koehler really getting at. To me, it all came down to the part where Mishra lets people know that creativity doesn’t have to be a grand new idea, tweaking knobs to make something better counts as creativity. That seemed obvious to me, since I spent a large portion of my adult life doing that for a living. For me it comes down to keeping abreast of developments in all three areas and thinking about how they may interact. As an engineer, I followed trade journals for my industry (content), maintenance practices across industries (pedagogy) and new gizmos (technology). I see, however, that internalizing the need to learn about distinct areas inside one profession may not be natural to newer teaching candidates and thus the TPACK model is a good way to start the discussion. If it sticks as an educational theory, I think more people giving their spin of the model and saying it in different ways will make it all the more real to prospective teachers.

So, what TPACK means to me:

• ·         Keep learning in whatever area you teach
• ·         Keep learning about how to be a better teacher
• ·         Look around the world and always ask yourself “Can I use that thing/process/technology to help me teach better or help the kids learn better?”

As I said, this is just what I think this is about. How does it align with what you think?