Topic 1 – Educational Technology Imperatives

Comment posted on 25th of August on Kayla Chester’s Blog

“Hi Kayla,

Thanks for sharing your experience and thoughts using the TPACK rubric to assess the use of technology in tackling a task with your Year 1’s through a waste audit. Such a wonderful way to make them more aware of what waste they actually have through the collection of data and to display this data visually through two iPad apps. Making a graph is certainly hard for high school students so it is great that you were able to use a technology that was easy for them to use to display their results.

I agree with you that while the rubric is useful in that it shows areas of the implementation of the technology in the lesson that could be improved, it does look like a lengthy assessment.

It could be interesting to use the TPCK model/rubric throughout a whole topic area assessing the perspectives of students. This could look like taking regular observation notes of the conversations occurring between students during their learning and engagement in a design task using a technology such as the iPad apps for designing graphs and reflecting on their wastes. The conversations between students could be categoried as T, P, C, a combination of the two or TPC together. The details of an approach like this was noted in (MISHRA & KOEHLER, 2006) who found that over time those working in these groups on a design based activity had an increase in frequency of conversations that hit on all three aspects (TPC) as they performed authentic tasks with technology.

While this would look very different for young children, I am curious to know whether the language around these tasks would change for them also as they increased in their understanding of the overlap between these three areas.

Is there much scope in your job to observe and document the conversations (over a series of week) that students would have with each other through a design task with integrated technology? I wonder whether this framework could be a good way to measure whether students understood the integrated nature of these three aspects.

MISHRA, P., & KOEHLER, M. (2006). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017-1054. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9620.2006.00684.x”