TPACK Model

 

Thursday, January 24, 2013

TPACK Model

Begin by describing student work that you might design using blogs. Use the TPACK Model to identify each aspect of the work. The following questions will help guide your thinking:

Creating a biographical timeline to represent the children’s lives using picture trail and posting it on a blog would be a great assignment that would also include teacher, student, and parent involvement.  Timelines are a learning and teaching tool that reinforce the concepts of sequencing, cause and effect and linear relationships.
I would have my parents send pictures of their child for each year of life.  Students would sequence their own pictures from birth to present age.  If a child has a missing year, the parent and child would create a picture together to incorporate into the timeline.

Content--What content you addressing? Considering the verb in the standard and Blooms Revised Taxonomy, what is the desired level of thinking from the standards?

Analysis refers to the ability to break down material into its component parts so that its organizational structure may be understood. This may include the identification of parts, analysis of the relationship between parts, and recognition of the organizational principles involved. Learning outcomes here represent a higher intellectual level than comprehension and application because they require an understanding of both the content and the structural form of the material.

I want my students to use higher-order thinking skills that will allow them to take classroom projects and apply them to their everyday lives.
Analyzing requires students to distinguish, compare, contrast, examine and experiment to understand similarities and differences.  Creating a timeline of events allows students to questions their findings.  Students will observe the changes that each photo presents and distinguish the difference in each photo. Children can describe their behaviors beginning at birth throughout their present age.  Students will also learn to sequence events in chronological order. 

Pedagogy--What pedagogical stance (or which learning theories or theorists) does this work support? In other words, whose “shoulders” did you stand on?

Piaget believed a child's intelligence is developed through a series of learning experiences wherein the child's mind assimilates and integrates the knowledge she has and applies it to the world and her experiences.
Lev Vygotsky emphasizes the influences of cultural and social contexts in learning and supports a discovery model of learning. This type of model places the teacher in an active role while the students' mental abilities develop naturally through various paths of discovery.

Technology--What affordances can you identify for the technology selected?

A blog can be accessed from any location and at any time.  A child can dictate thoughts about the photos to parents or a teacher, and each has the affordance to update or change information. Creating a picture trail and adding to the blog will allow parents to view the project at any time and praise their child for a job well in return will motivate and enhance student learning.

Justify the match of your pedagogical stance/strategy with the technology affordances.

Cognitive constructivism is based on two different senses of construction. Both Piaget and Vygotsky believed on the idea that people learn by actively constructing new knowledge, not by having information poured into their heads. Moreover, constructivism asserts that people learn with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally meaningful artifacts (e.g. computer programs, animations).

 

Discuss other ways that this technology can be used in the learning environment.

Technology can be used to support independent work as well as collaboration among learners. It provides students opportunities to connect prior learning with current experience. Learners have access to a variety of tools and resources with which to work. Teachers can design such classrooms, and technology can help.

The use of technology can support the variety of ways learners construct their own understanding. Students who gather information from the Internet can be self-directed and independent. They can choose what sources to examine and what connections to pursue. Depending on the parameters set by teachers, the students may be in complete control of their topics and their explorations.

Identify any obstacles to using this tool. What makes this tool worth using even with these obstacles?

One of the obstacles of using this tool is that parents may be reluctant to place photos of their child on the internet for fear of privacy and the safety. There is a fear of predators looking to befriend innocent children and possibly lure them into harm’s way.  Also, teachers or parents will have to access the tool for the student to make updates or changes. 

However, this tool is worth using because children will become familiar with various tools that they will be working with in the upper elementary grades.  These learning objects can be accessed by learners from anywhere and at anytime.