Mar/100
TPACK Traction
Borrowed from the TPACK wiki (http://www.tpack.org/tpck/index.php?title=Main_Page)
I am listening to a presentation about assessing the TPACK (Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge) of teachers and faculty. As much as I have read about TPACK, I must confess I am still getting my head around it. Both in terms of research and implementation. Each of these presentations has been very helpful for me in gaining traction in this understanding. I have also been challenged to reflect on my own teaching and TPACK.
The more I think about TPACK, I compare it to tightening the lug nuts on a tire: the more you tighten one lug nut, it will create slack in the others. If you want to really tighten all of the lug nuts, you need to tighten each of them a little at a time. You rotate between the lug nuts until all of them are tight. The same is true of TPACK. It's hard to develop all three knowledge domains at once. As a teacher, you might work on one of the knowledge domains, wrestle with it, implement something related to that knowledge domain, reflect on it and then look at it in terms of the other knowledge domains. For example, the more I learn about a content area, the more I will think about teaching strategies to transform that content into learning experiences, and the more I will think about tools to use as part of the instruction, which will make me revisit instructional strategies, which might make me see the content in new ways and consider new ways of representing it.
Just some random thoughts, but something I probably wouldn't have thought about were I not sitting in these conference presentations. Go SITE!
Mar/100
Technology and Priorities
I am at the SITE conference in San Diego, and after 1.5 days of presentations I have heard one theme emerge above all others. This theme can be reduced to one question, "Why do students, who use technology in almost every aspect of their lives, seem so clueless when it comes to using it in their teaching and learning?" You may have seen versions of this conversation framed in other ways: digital natives vs. digital immigrants, 21st Century learning, Content-creators, Millennial Students, etc. The assumption on the part of teacher educators is that students who love technology in certain areas of their lives should love it in their learning and teaching.
I would like to suggest a radical idea: teens and college students don't love technology. They love what they can do with technology, which is to address their priorities and motivations. Take technology out of the picture, and this is what I know about college students:
- They like to have fun
- They are more likely to listen to their friends than their parents or professors
- They like to be entertained
- They are confronted with a lot of information that has challenged their worldview, and they are trying to make sense of it all
- They view their classes as something they have to do to a) stay in college and be with their friends and b) graduate and move on to the next phase of their lives
So, why do students know so much about certain technologies yet know so little about other types of technology (e.g., educational/learning technology)? The technologies they know and use help them address their priorities, and as sad as it may seem, being a life-long learner is not a priority for them at this stage in their lives.
I spend a lot of time talking to teacher candidates about knowing their students and meeting where they are in their skills, abilities and prior knowledge. As a teacher educator, I must do the same with my students. I need to understand their priorities and motivations, and meet them where they are.
Mar/100
The Powerlessness of Some Stories
I am still thinking about stories, memory and learning. As I wrote earlier, with a quick scan down the list of former students I can recall the digital story each one of them created for my class. I have had former students tell me the same thing. They can remember the stories created by their classmates, recalling some of the most amazing details. When I read the names of my students, I could hear their voices, see the images in my head, remember the anecdotes they shared, and in some cases, associate the music they included as part of their projects.
This made me think of another project I was involved in while I was teaching these undergraduate classes. I spent the better part of two years of my life working with teachers and helping they and their students create short historical documentaries by mashing up archival material and user-generated content. The movies ranged from the Harlem Renaissance to the Great Migration, to the causes and effects of the Civil War. I worked with about a half-dozen teachers and approximately 150 students. I didn't spend as much time in those classrooms as I did with my preservice teachers, but I did spend enough time with them that when I scan the list of students from each class I can place a face with the name. Over the course of 3 very intense projects, I helped them make about 150 movies, give or take a few students who missed too much school or didn't use their time wisely.
Oddly, I could remember very little about the movies they created, even though they shared many similarities with the movies created by the preservice teachers. In contrast, I helped over 200 preservice teachers create digital stories over a 4-year span and I can remember every single story. As another contrast, the quality and form of the movies was quite different. This is not meant to be a knock on 6th graders, but undergraduates at the University of Virginia knew a little more about storytelling and expression than the 12-13 year olds I was working with. Here are some of the notable differences in their projects:
| 6th Graders |
Preservice Teachers |
| Chose images from a pool hand-picked by teacher | Took or found their own images |
| Most of the stories used the same images | Every story was completely unique |
| Narrative was an expository essay | Narrative was a story |
| Most of the narratives covered the exact same main points (convergent coverage of the topic) | Narratives were totally unique (divergent coverage of the topic) |
| Stories did not have music | Stories had music |
| Stories reflected what the teacher told them they had to remember | Stories reflected personal learning |
I know this is probably not a complete list, but this is what I was able to come up with after viewing a few of each type of story. Honestly, the 6th grade movies all sounded and looked the same. Yes, the topics were covered in different order, there was slight variation on the images used and the narrative was worded differently, but for the most part they were identical. Kind of like Kevin Costner movies.
This is an interesting topic to me, and I plan on covering it more in the future. I am leaving tomorrow for SITE, and I hope to have some good conversations about digital storytelling and other tech-related teaching strategies.
Mar/100
The Power of Stories
I have recently been reading (and re-reading) some interviews I conducted with former teacher education students at the University of Virginia. The purpose of the interviews was to ask each person, who also happens to be in his or her first year of teaching, which aspects of their educational technology coursework they are using now that they are full-time teachers. The information obtained from these interviews has been fascinating, but what is even more amazing is how much they remember from the Digital Storytelling project we did. Most of these teachers were in different sections of my class and made their digital stories about various (sometimes random) topics. Some of them did creative writing, while others told personal stories. Some of the movies were based on a topic from the school curriculum, while other themes will likely NEVER find their way into a textbook or unit of study.
I always made a big deal about these movies. I would put them all into one, long movie and added my own silly introduction and somewhat sentimental/inspiring conclusion. We brought in food and generally had a lot of fun watching everyone's story. It was always a great way to end the semester.
As I was reading through one of the interview scripts, it dawned on me that I actually remembered the movie made by every participant in my study (n=8). So, as an experiment I went back and looked at every class list from every ed. tech. class I taught at UVa. Sure enough, I could recall what every single person's movie was about, just from reading each name! Stories about fathers who immigrated from other countries, stories of working with special needs students, stories told from a dog's perspective, stories about stuffed animals that wandered away from their class on a field trip and discovered the UVa Grounds in the process. Stories using scanned photographs, stories that were hand-drawn, stories using images from a memorable experience, stories with roommates posing as the characters in the story. I was amazed and was briefly lost in the symphony of stories washing over my memory. I remember pitching digital storytelling as a great activity to engage students in writing, but it's now clear to me that the real power of stories was completely lost on me at the time. People connect, identify, place themselves in, and yes, even remember stories.
Has anyone else experienced this power in their own use of stories in the classroom?
Mar/100
Oh, be careful little CV what you say
A colleague just passed this CV along to me, which is quite creatively displayed in Google Maps. I think this a good example of how one can mix new media (interactive map) with an existing purpose (CV) and create a completely unique message. I will definitely be showing this to my students, both as an example of an innovative use of media and as a nonexample for how to write for an intended audience. Let me qualify my impending rant with this statement: I am in academia, not in advertising or copy writing, so the standards and expectations for a CV may differ quite a bit between the two worlds. Furthermore, the owner of this CV is a professional writer and undoubtedly knows more about his audience than I do.
That said, I have three main observations about his CV, which I think would be great conversation starters for graduating seniors or grad students. First, how casual is too casual for a CV? I think I am just too accustomed to the stuffy academic CV. The overall tone of this CV is quite casual and resembles something you might read on Facebook or a blog. Should style change with the medium? Would a more formal tone undermine the affordances of the interactive map?
Second, he does a pretty good job of focusing on the high points of his career, but he also commits some major job interview no-nos: talking about goofing off in college, bashing (or at least making fun of) a former boss and mentioning dissatisfaction with an old job. I have sat on several committees where we interviewed teachers for an open position, and I was always able to tell what kind of colleague the person would be just based on what he or she said about former students, principals, schools and districts. If a former principal or colleagues were described as "horrible," chances are he or she would find something horrible about future colleagues and principals. I was always "coached" to be very positive about former work environments and be selective in what I said about colleagues and bosses. In Ed's defense, he doesn't say anything really scathing and he is much more positive than negative in his descriptions of former employers.
Finally, some of his humor is a little misdirected. Considering the recent earthquake in Chile, the comment about Chilean geography may come across as insensitive. I am not an overly sensitive person, and I was immediately struck with how untimely and inappropriate this was. As a person who knows a thing or two about digital media, I know it won't take very long to move that little pin to a different place on the map.
Overall, I think this is pretty cool and I hope it ultimately leads to a job. Best of luck, Ed!
