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Question 3: With so many academic resources available to teachers, it can be difficult to decide how and where they fit into instruction. What process will you use to go about identifying and evaluating active learning software for your classroom? Choosing the Right Technology = Engagement + Content Transfer At first this is a difficult question, how does a teacher decide on the right technology. Ultimately, any classroom technology should be a corollary to sound pedagogy. Transferring content knowledge to the student is the goal, however, it is easy to fall into the trap of students using technology as a passive time waster. You have no doubt seen this following scenario. Today is Wednesday. That means it is my scheduled time to use one of the school's computer labs. Our school pays for a school wide subscription to IXL for math, science, ELA, and Social Studies. Today, my students will be working on proportional rates. We have had a few class activities on this topic already and my students know the material ok. When we get to the lab, my students mostly just play the games. They seldom read the lesson portion of the program and the practice questions they just guess. In this scenario, the students are passive learners. They are not engaged in the material. Some might be learning the content, but for many, Wednesdays are just the day they get to play games instead of having math class. So how does this change to using technology for engagement? TPACK is a good start. TPACK stands for Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge and it is a graphic way to think about your overall class structure, goals of content transfer, and the use of technology. As the instructor, I have some of all of these knowledge fields. My goal though, is to land in center domain. Most traditional schooling falls into the Pedagogical Content Knowledge region. That is where teaching and content collide without the assistance of technology. The goal for today's learner though is to use technology in a way that serves the knowledge transfer of the PCK domain with the addition of technology. In the educational realm, tech can be a tool for limitless engagement if the right piece is chosen.
To begin, I will use this framework to look at my current technology use in the classroom and determine if it is a healthy or unhealthy use of technology. Does it fit into the sweet spot, the TPACK domain. Then, I can redesign my current class structure to incorporate more tech use keeping in the TPACK framework in mind. For more on TPACK look at the following resources:
3 Comments
6/20/2020 11:00:52 am
Hello, Derrick
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6/21/2020 10:33:00 am
I definitely understand the struggle of balancing fun engagement with deep-level academic engagement. It is so incredibly difficult to maintain student interest, and computer games definitely do the trick. However, like you said, they don't always learn very much from playing "educational" games. During my first year, I found it so challenging to find engaging teaching strategies that also fostered a deep level of understanding in my students. I think it's easy for me to understand what best practice looks like in a textbook or when listening to a YouTube video, but when I try to implement methods into my own classroom, I find that it does not always go as planned.
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Luke Smith
6/21/2020 08:22:08 pm
I love this idea. I know full well how often students fly through lessons in order to just get done with them instead of learn them. I experienced similar issues with my students working on I-Ready, I made the mistake early on in the year telling them they could play games once they finished, and it resulted in most of the students guessing on the questions just to get done and not really to try and learn anything.
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