Imagine going camping with your family. You prepare by making the lists, getting packed, and checking these lists a multitude of times. You believe you have everything you need to have a great camping experience. Then, you get to the campsite, you are about to make a nice dinner over a fire and you realize that you brought tongs instead of a wooden spoon. How will you adapt to this situation? It takes some creativity and critical thinking to come up with a solution even though you are thinking "if only I just had that wooden spoon this would be so much easier"! Adapting to these types of situations is something that a teacher goes through on a daily basis. We have to think about the content (the subject), the pedagogy (how are we going to teach it), and what technology tool can we integrate into the lesson. This model of integrating these three components if called TPACK. When a teacher designs a lesson they have to think which technology tool would work best for a certain project. If we give the students the wrong technology tool/platform, the student is left confused and overwhelmed. This is how I felt when I got told to make a PB & J sandwich with tongs, the wrong tool! Watch this video to see how I adapted to the situation! As a teacher we have to give students the sufficient tools to learn a topic and with the TPACK model, that includes technology. But what if there is no technology? in Winner's article: Do Artifacts Have Politics (1980), they discuss how roads were built in a New York City where the upper or middle class could drive their cars but buses were no longer feasible on these roads leaving the lower class with no transportation, which causes more problems for them. (p. 124). This implication can be brought into the classroom and the TPACK model may not "fit" anymore. Some school districts do not have technology available, so teachers have to adapt their lessons to what has been provided from the district, which is not an easy task. References:
Winner, L. (1980). Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121-136. Retrieved May 28, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652
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sTake a moment and think back to how you learned when you were younger. Did you...
Did you every fully understand the concept or were you just going through the steps to pass the class? Been there, done that. Bransford et. al (2000) calls this Performance Oriented, where people are "...more worried about making errors than about learning" (p. 61). The Performance Oriented view does not necessarily help you grow as a learner and help you transfer information from when you learned it to outside the four walls of your classrooms. You need to be more Learning Oriented. Overall, when people tend to be more Learning Oriented, there is a greater chance of Transfer, the idea of being able “…to extend what has been learned in one context to new contexts.” (Bransford et al, 2000, p. 51). But students can't make transfer happen on their own, they need help and guidance to make that happen. An educator can help take students on a path where transfer occurs if "...learners of all ages are more motivated when they can see the usefulness of what they are learning and when they can use that information to do something that has an impact on others..." (Bransford et al, 2000, p. 61). Transfer is a critical part of any students learning journey. Students need to learn the underlying patterns and concepts in an abstract way while having an active approach to their learning and take that understanding and strategies to other contexts. Check out my paper here, that explores the idea of transfer and how educators can make an even bigger impact on their students learning! References Bransford, J., Brown, A.L. & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience and school. National Academy Press. http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368. |
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