Today, I'm subbing at Ankeny High School for a special ed teacher and although (admittedly) I'm not doing much, I did sit in on an Economics class where the teacher announced that tomorrow the kids will be using a program to calculate auto insurance costs with purchasing or leasing an actual vehicle. This is potentially a good project where kids are using technology and real-life context. Unfortunately, I will not be able to see how it goes. I've been reading about transfer of learning for another class and they talk a lot about not "overcontextualizing" learning because students won't be able to transfer those skills to another context. I hope this car project is general enough to help the students actually have some transfer of learning. I feel like it probably will be successful at that because they're looking at different options and such.
Back to CI 556 last week...I thought it was funny that Dr. Schmidt said that TPACK was what she'd been doing all along but just hadn't put it together into a framework. I had JUST said to the person next to me how the reading about TPACK was kind of "duh, I've heard this all before." That probably sounds bad, and I don't mean it to but really, TPACK makes perfect sense, so I guess someone had to put it into a framework for teachers to "neatly" be able to utilize. I liked the activity we did with it, too. It was pretty clever and made it a very visual concept.
That person next to you that you made the comment about the "duh" was me! I was thinking the same thing. The longer that I teach the more I am introduced to new teaching methods/strategies...however....they are not new they ideas are recycled and packaged under a different name.
ReplyDeleteI really like the lesson the economics teacher was going to try. Sounds like it could be a great lesson.
ReplyDeleteFor me, I thought of technology as things that are new and advanced. The models helped show me that there are so many technologies I already consider and use in my lessons. The framework just helped me see what I was already doing.
I personally think connecting learning to life is the most critical part of learning. Whatever teaching and learning occur at school, students should be able to transfer those and make connection to real life one way or the other. That's the value of authentic learning. I think this is where technology comes into picture. Technology somehow serves the role as the bridge between school and life for the young generation and teachers should take advantage of the power to maximize the occurrence of learning!
ReplyDeleteI do think that there are more of "us" educators in the field who actually don't think of technology in terms of the TPACK framework. They think of using technology more as an "add-on" or something to do at a learning center or in the media center - not in my classroom. Although we have heard that also it is at another level to think about technology integration in the context of the TPACK framework...
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