I hope I'm not totally missing the mark here, but what it boils down to, for me, is that what you teach, why you teach, how you teach, what you use to execute what you teach is all interrelated and cyclical. They all interplay and influence each other.
And this really makes me think of the concept of the reflective practitioner. If something doesn’t go well or “as planned” (does it ever really go exactly as planned?) in a lesson, we need to sit down at the end of it and actually analyze why that might have been so that we can try to improve it for the next time. And referencing the TPACK theory (and diagram!) can help. A lot.
I am finding the need for this self-disciplined practice (reflection) is even greater now that we’re teaching in the 21st century. We are lucky enough to have access to some pretty amazing technology (hopefully) to aid instruction or even to take a lesson to an entirely new plane of reality. But when the promise is so large, it better deliver.
Let’s face it, when technology-enhanced or technology-based lessons fail, they fail HARD. I’ve seen it a million times. In-class demos, presentations. Something isn’t plugged in. You have the wrong cord or no adapter. You can find the “source” button. You don’t know “really” the ins and outs of the SMART board. You use it mainly as a projection screen. It sucks. You feel embarrassed that you weren’t prepared. Or even if you had prepped, now the tech gods were against you. You look bad. Now put yourself in the student/ viewing audiences’ shoes. That's easy. We’ve all been in the audience and whatever engagement or attention we may have been directing at the speaker is now totally gone and the presenter is left with Classroom Management 101 duty because we’re now rowdy and bored. It needs to be slick. It needs to work. We, as educators, need to know how to make it work.
But this isn’t the only FAIL that can happen when tech is in the mix. Because ultimately the A/V guy is called in and plugs something in, is crowned “hero” and then goes back to _____ (fill in the blank). There are bigger fails than this. Fails that the Techie can’t fix for you. And this happens when you haven’t thought about TPACK. This happens when you incorporate tech for tech’s sake or you use something with good intentions, and it backfires. Kids aren’t tall enough to reach the SMART board, their tiny hands can’t create enough pressure to pop that balloon. You do a science demo on the document camera involving a liquid and your shaky nerves spill the substance and total the camera. You use Bitstrips to teach about Upper Canada and discover that a) settlers aren’t that funny and b) you’re not a natural-born comic strip writer.
Going even deeper than this, your peers or faculty advisors or principals, witnessing your tech failure, feel that your taking-a-risk-and-trying-it-out-with-technology lesson could have enlightened, engaged, and expanded some minds had you just left OUT the technology in the first-place. This is a bigger problem because its a way of thinking about technology that is insidious and still fairly widespread - and not just in the “old-school” generations either! It may be safer not to fail, but is it wiser? Is it wiser not to use technology in the classroom? We need to put a stop to this kind of questioning or we'll never move forward. We need to lead. We need know TPACK inside and out.
Or maybe we expect too much from technology. Now that society can do everything with an iPhone except for shave with it, have we - as a supposedly, digitally native generation - set our standards too high for tech-related teaching tools? Is a tech-based lesson necessarily better than an ‘old school’ chalkboard or pencil and paper lesson? You can’t argue that there is a unique kind of anticipation and built-in expectation that teaching with new, shiny tech toys will make the lesson 10x more engaging and help students to understand the content better. If we ignore TPACK and don’t stop to reflect using TPACK, this assumption will come back to bite us every time we fail.
http://www.tpck.org/
