Week 5 and our Professional Development heats up!

Lecture and Tutorial Reflection

This lecture showcased a concept called rich tasks that I can use as an effective teaching and learning framework to encourage higher order thinking, deep knowledge and understanding. These rich tasks are cross-curricular in nature and recognise that effective brain function occurs when we make connections between learning. As we consider the TPACK model (Koehler, & Mishra, 2009) we understand that rich tasks can be further enhanced when integrating ICT’s. Technology is powerful and can result in autonomous and independent learners because they have unprecedented access to knowledge and to the resources to create their own understandings and then to transform that acquired knowledge (Head, 2008). The You tube clip on Digital Story Telling viewed today has helped to guide my initial ideas for a script for our PD video.

Today we were also introduced to a number of different programs. I went home and put together a cartoon in Extranormal that could be used in our PD Video. It is pretty neat what I managed to do with my own discovery learning adventure.



GoAnimate.com: TPACK by jolene.battye

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

 Jake, Nicole and myself have spent the 2 hours after tutorial for the past few weeks discussing how we want to approach this PD. We are now finally in total consensus on what we want to focus on and my initial planning following the digital story telling video seems to be providing a focus. We each have an area to work on so next we will come together with our completed assignments so far…

…Obviously we cannot just pick a technology and decide what KLA & pedagogy fits. We have to actually create an idea that shows how these three aspects of the TPACK model come together in such a way that they enhance and transform the learning experience.  We felt that Sketch Up would benefit learning but we wanted to find evidence of our claims that we make to support our ideas as being effective for learning (Smart Classrooms Professional Development Framework, 2011). For example: We claim that 1.Students may disengage from math and that technology is one way to stop or reverse this process and 2. That children can benefit from being taught to be spatially aware and that 3D computer aided drafting programs (Sketch Up) will aid in this process. These two claims were made based on prior experience and instinct, but in order to validate these claims we needed to find evidence based practices that supported our reasoning’s otherwise this PD plan would be in need of serious overhauling and our reflection of the TPACK model would become quite shallow. 

Engaging with Harris & Hofer (2009) has made me aware that our process of creating our PD has been an educationally unsound development. If we were not creating a PD for teachers and were planning to educate students then we would follow this progression:

“Our work suggests that planning a particular learning event can be described as the end result of five basic instructional decisions:

• Choosing learning goals

• Making practical pedagogical decisions about the nature of the learning experience

• Selecting and sequencing appropriate activity types to combine to form the learning experience

• Selecting formative and summative assessment strategies that will reveal what and how well students are learning

• Selecting tools and resources that will best help students to benefit from the learning experience being planned (Harris & Hofer, 2009).”

I have come to understand that:

“By selecting the technologies that best serve the learning goals and activities last, both students’ learning and maximally appropriate educational technology uses are assured…By focussing first and primarily upon the content and nature students’ curriculum-based learning activities, teachers’ TPACK is developed authentically, rather than technocentrically (as cited in Harris, & Hofer, 2009).”

Papert (as cited in Harris, & Hofer, 2009) tells us that being technocentric is when one is “focussed upon the technologies being used, more than the students who are trying to use them to learn.” How helpful is it to have a sequence laid out in chronological order for me to follow as I prepare to teach? This sequence helps me to avoid becoming technocentric.  



This is Jake, Nicole and my googledoc that we worked on for the narration of our PD Video.



References:

Harris, J., & Hofer, M. (2009). Instructional planning activity types as vehicles for curriculum-based TPACK development. Retrieved         from, http://activitytypes.wmwikis.net/file/view/HarrisHofer- TPACKActivityTypes.pdf

Head, B. (2008). Generation cut and paste. Retrieved from,             http://www.zagami.info/4001EPS/Readings/Entries/2011/3/7_Week_2.html

Koehler, M., & Mishra, P. (2009). What is technological pedagogical content knowledge?  Contempary issues in technology and teacher education, 9(1), 60-70. Retrieved    from http://www.zagami.info/4001EPS/Readings/Entries/2011/3/7_Week_2.html

The State of Queensland - Department of Education and Training. (2011). Smart Classrooms Professional Development Framework. Retrieved from     http://education.qld.gov.au/smartclassrooms/pdframework/