This week in CEP 810 we focused on TPACK theory (Technological, Pedagogical And Content Knowledge). There are 7 components to the TPACK framework. Referencing the above image these areas of the framework are outlined as: content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, technology knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, technological content knowledge, technological pedagogical knowledge, and at the crossroad of all areas you will find TPACK. During his Keynote Speech at the 21st Century Learning Conference Punya Mishra says we live in a world with a variety of technologies and it is up to us as educators to repurpose and customize these technologies for our needs. In his speech Mishra talks about all sorts of ways people repurpose items and technologies to make them useful in a different way.
Relating this to myself, as an educator I can tell you hoarding was the first thing that came to mind when I entered my first classroom, that had been inhabited previously by a teacher of 25 years. There were so many things in every crevice of the room. I immediately took to throwing things out that I thought served no purpose. I was soon stopped by a veteran teacher who told me to think creatively before tossing everything to the curb. So I put a pause to the purging and let the year play out. When it came time to teach fluency I had read up on different techniques to teach 1st graders fluency. Read to Self phones was one of the techniques I wanted to try. They are essentially phones to help the students monitor their tone and rate while reading. Well I remembered amongst ALL my new/ old things I had inherited there were PVC corner connection pipes (previously used for building blocks), and enough for me to connect them all to make read to self phones for all of my students. A picture of these can be seen below. This is just one of many examples I have found for repurposing technologies and materials to fit into the 1st grade curriculum.
Continuing with repurposing this week as part of our learning we had a quick fire challenge. We were asked to have a friend pick out some utensils to help with completing a kitchen task. In my video below you will see that a spoon may not be the best for making a veggie tray, but my knowledge about a veggie tray helps me to repurpose the spoon to be quasi successful in creating a veggie tray.
References
TPACK.ORG. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://tpack.org/
Comments