"Brush up your Shakespeare, Start Quoting Him Now."

Not quite a Shakespeare quote, but a Cole Porter quote about Shakespeare (from Kiss Me Kate).  Our presentation available through Springboard called those familiar with TPACK a triple threat.  The moniker reinforces  that those eloquent in TPACK have technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge.  I couldn't resist thinking about the acting triple threat: dancing, singing, and acting.  Hence, the link to Cole Porter.

I am still a bit nervous about using technology in a classroom.  As someone who is not always a technological expert, I am a bit nervous that things could go wrong.  However, Clare Kilbane's video put me more at ease.  She begins by explaining TPACK and reassuring teachers that they already have part of the Venn Diagram with pedagogy and content.  It is now just adding the interactivity of technology.  I also liked her metaphor of having the tools of technology in your bag.  You should use it when appropriate not just use it for the sake of using it.  Also, her concept of using TPACK as a plan for professional growth helped me see this as a process of continuous improvement.

When looking to use new content tools in the classroom, I think it is important to make sure that the technology supports the other pieces of good instruction (as evidenced in TPACK).  Just using technology for the sake of using it does not do much.  A boring lecture can easily become a boring podcast.  A poorly defined lesson will not improve because it is delivered through Google classroom.  In fact, TPACK itself can serve as an assessment tool to determine whether an activity is a good idea.  Is this a great PACKage where all the circles of TPACK meet?

The benefit of implementing such tools in the classroom is that we are doing our moral duty as teachers to prepare students for the future.  Though we are used to being in a print culture, Punya Mishra's video reminds us how we moved from an oral/aural culture to a print culture.  We are living in the midst of such change, again, and teachers need to be prepared to help students navigate this new world.

Even for those of us who are digital immigrants, we must keep seeing how technology can help us solve educational problems and not suffer from functional fixedness.  I also enjoy Mishra's observation that TPACK teaches educators how to be flexible and not search out easy solutions.  Finally, it is important that a teacher develop passion for technology. Indeed, even if I am not as comfortable with technology, TPACK through its guidelines reminds teachers that we must model good use of technology and building a sound online presence. Seeing the overarching importance of technology in good instruction, I will challenge myself as a future teacher to try to use it in places where it can support me.  We come back to Kilbane's toolkit as a great metaphor.

I think the biggest challenges to implementing TPACK will be overcoming my own technological difficulties and finding good ideas for how to use this in a classroom.  However, we, as a profession, have been struggling with how to improve education for many years through new ideas and technology.  I enjoyed how Nada Salem Abisamra anchored his arguments in quotations from John Dewey.  Further, using online tools such as blogging reinforces traditional pedagogical aims like literacy and higher order thinking skills.  Some sites have even taken this a step further demonstrating explicit skills and the technological tools that can support the instruction.  Then these new technological tools just become ways to reinforce what we have been doing in classrooms for years.  The Journal's article provides some great ideas for how to implement technology in a classroom.  1:1 environments provide a great space for students to use online collaborative tools that allow 24/7 access to resources such as Google documents.

I am very invigorated to begin using TPACK as a way of integrating technology into our pedagogy.  However, I worry about finding good sites for advice and methods on how to do it.  For example, the Digital History Reader seems very strong.  However, there are limitations (only a few lessons available on Europe) as well as the question of whether this is better or worse than reading a textbook.  Is there a difference in how students perceive a large amount of text whether it is on a screen or in a book?  These are my questions.