Reflections on TPACK in Distance Learning How do you make sense now of your perception of the delicate balance between technology, pedagogy, and content as you try to practice TPACK?
I think it's very fitting to address the complex interplay of Content, Pedagogy, and Technology within the sudden, radically different distance learning context. My perception of this interplay has certainly been enhanced due to the current Covid-19 crisis. Knowing the TPACK model has helped me to navigate the sudden changes with a bit more success than I would have otherwise had. It's difficult to know which area to start discussing, since they are so interdependent. Let's just start with Pedagogy. Knowing best practices in this new context is difficult. What I am using is my knowledge of my third grade students' abilities and interests, as well as their parents' abilities and interests. I know my students struggle to maintain concentration for extended periods on tasks that are not motivating, or too difficult to understand and complete independently. The recommendation for third grade is that children should not be doing lessons for more that 2-3 hours a day. My weekly plan consists of tasks that I hope the students will find interesting, that don't take too long, and that they can perform without much adult support, if any. This is a hard time for parents. Many are still working and do not have the regular school day to help them do it. There are parents who can help more than others. I provide all my plans in Spanish and English in case they are able to support their children at home. Much about what is good pedagogy in distance learning is still be figured out by all of us. Luckily, as far as Content goes, there are a wide variety of resources that support our core content standards and yet fit the bill for distance learning. I have been able to link our core reading curriculum and its digital resources into my lesson plans. Students can access the stories and either read them or have them be read to them. I'm avoiding the more difficult and some might say boring grammar lessons. They seem impractical to try to teach in this context. I'm focusing on the core themes and asking students to respond the readings with what I hope are engaging writing prompts. It has been wonderful to have several digital learning programs that are self paced and that provide immediate feedback and rewards. Specifically I'm thinking of Lexia and Freckle Reading. Kids respond really well to these kinds of learning platforms and are able to maintain concentration for more extended periods. It is also great to have access to Epic, which is an online resource for quality, interesting reading material. It has thousands of titles. There are many reading levels, and there are also books in Spanish for my newcomer student. For science, I have simply been asking them to watch Mystery Science mini-lessons, and take short quizzes afterward on Google Forms. The videos are very interesting for the kids! I feel bad they don't have more "hands on" experiences. I DID do an outdoor photo scavenger hunt project, as part of my action research, that went really well at first, but with the fears growing about the virus we have stopped it. P.E. has the YouTube channel called GoNoodle if kids want to move around. Our art teacher has recorded art lessons on YouTube which we share out with the kids. In math, I have been recording and sharing out lessons, too! Thank goodness these classes have given me a head start on using the video recording and Zoom technology knowledge to be able to do this. Which brings us to the third TPACK element: Technology. Zoom has been vital, of course, to maintain any semblance of a classroom of kids. We use it to meet twice a week. In our Zoom meetings we socialize. We go over the previous days' math homework. We do fun stuff like travel on Google Earth to Paris. I also use Zoom to record my lessons because I figured out how to use my iPad as a doc camera there, and share videos and whiteboards. I bet I could also record these lessons directly on YouTube, but since I learned to do it on Zoom, I'm sticking with that, for now. Without Google Classroom, none of this could be happening the way it is. It's our platform to share out the weekly lesson plans with all of the necessary links to videos, resources, and lessons. Let's call it my ICARE. Class Dojo has been an amazing tool to communicate with families and share our learning and art with each other. Without this technology, I hate to think about how much more limited learning would be during these times!!!! So, if we use our imaginations we can see how these three areas overlap in this strange context. I've already written too much, so I'll let anyone who might still be reading this respond to that in comments. I just wanted to close with one funny frustration in TPACK ala Distance Learning. As many of you may already know, running a class in Zoom is disorientating and frustrating at times. To add to the normal frustrations, I have had an additional one. My son and I are at my dad's house in Kansas right now to give him a hand. (Talk about DISTANCE learning.) My son decided to cook pizza the other day during my class. As you can guess, the smoke alarms went off. Disaster. My dad also has a parrot. Guess what? It learned to sing like a smoke alarm. Now the parrot interrupts class. Whew.
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Blog this week about what’s on your mind and what you’ve learned from this program that’s helped you transition to remote learning. What insights do you want to share with others, your administration, etc.
In an overarching sense, just being open to innovation and not seeing big changes as problems but rather as opportunities, has helped me to have the right attitude in this stressful transition to distance learning. We are now being required to teach this way. It will probably end soon. The lessons we have learned from this shock to the system will stay with us and change our teaching forever. A few of the concrete, technical skills I've learning in this class that have helped me are a familiarity with Zoom, an ability to create a quiz in Google Forms, the ability to record myself in a lesson in Zoom that includes a doc cam and Wacom device. I'm doing all of these things for 5 math lessons a week in my distance learning. I share the videos through YouTube. Those are probably the main technical skills that this program has helped me with. Also the increased familiarity with linking content has been a big help. Doing all of this has always felt to me kind of like wading in a muddy pond where you don't know where it's safe to step because you can't see the bottom and you have to go slow and feel around for every step. Now, the waters are starting to clear and I am stepping forward with more ease. I'll include a copy here of my weekly distance learning plan. This has taken qite a bit of energy in the last few weeks. It's kept me from my DQ! Wait that's an excuse. I'm so bummed about my stalled research that I am having a hard time motivating to write the DQ Analysis as an unfinished product. Hopefully, my shareable link will share with you all. I think it will! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AwqvbLdD1xaEIvdAGOVS-4jPbajlAs1iy5ZZvWafqQc/edit?usp=sharing My project is in an unexpected upheaval. I'm busy trying to adjust it. The way it's turning out, I think this new idea, born out of adversity, has the potential to be a more compelling and repeatable capstone project. What happened is our nature preserve field trip was cancelled due to Corona Virus precautions. (Our first field trip was ALMOST cancelled due to the October Kincade fire.) My original plan was to do a second nature report based on this second field trip. I was going to compare nature reports done in both tech and non-tech integrated formats. I was going to compare results to see how the integration of photos and data retrieved from nature apps improved my students' ability to communicate their scientific findings.
I actually found out about the cancellation a half an hour after picking up 11 iPads from Mario at NapaLearns. He graciously installed the nature apps I was unable to install on the iPads from our school due to our district's technology use policies. Now I have these iPads that are not under "lock down" to continue my project, but am unable to carry out the original plan. The freedom these new iPads have given us, even for students to be able to take them home, (which Mario is looking into), awoke an idea I had at the beginning of this inquiry but which I discarded because my students can't take our school devices home. Limited access to technology became a barrier, which has now been somewhat overcome. Let's back up and look at the background and needs that I perceived at the beginning of this project. At my school, both parents and teachers are concerned with the increasing amounts of time their kids are using screens, both in and out of the classroom. Through research I discovered that negative trends in child health, and especially among minority groups, have been linked to increasing use of screen based technologies and decreasing outdoor play. In addition, as children move toward indoor environments, their awareness of the environment, and their interest in advocating for its health, declines. My driving question became: How can educators use handheld devices to increase student interaction with the outdoors and awareness of the environment? My new plan is not dependent on field trips. It is taking the shape of an outdoor photography homework unit. It follows the Flipped Classroom model. The photos students will be taking are aligned to our 3rd grade NGSS science standards. Students take photos of different aspects of nature in their community, and share those photos for peer feedback in class on Padlet. Each Padlet will be saved, and the end product will be a student report in Google Slides or Prezi on the NGSS area of "connections in the environment", for example. This project has the potential to increase parent involvement because I will require the students to be accompanied by a parent while they are outdoors taking pictures. The project has the potential to increase student interaction with outdoor environments on a daily basis. I will be able to get some data here with pre and post surveys on the amount of time they are spending outdoors. It has the potential to increase student peer review and collaboration through the frequent Padlet sharing that will go on in class around the photos they took in their neighborhoods. This project also has the potential to be used as a distance learning curriculum for situations similar to our current four week Corona virus close down. I see great potential in developing this idea to include a well developed, unit by unit, flipped classroom science curriculum, or at least a fun Peace Corps project. The key is in knowing what to ask the students to take pictures of and how to discuss/report their findings in class. It would take some creativity to create the lessons. “Being a Tech-Savvy Educator doesn’t have to be either daunting or complex. It doesn’t mean completely changing our practices or abandoning what already works. It means looking to the tools of technology to supplement those strong pedagogical practices already in place.”
This quote from http://blog.web20classroom.org made me feel better. Maybe I’m uncomfortable using new tech in the classroom because I’m older (49), and did not grow up in a tech driven world. But there’s more to it. All of the choices out there are in fact daunting and complex. The myriad of apps and programs out there are competing for our adoption. Each teacher at our school does, in fact, approach these resources with some form of personal learning plan. We all supplement, (or replace), our core text based curriculums with a variety of programs. While the Common Core standards do guide all of us in our instruction, we are all using slightly different tools to address them. In my classroom, for example, a list of resources we use on a weekly basis looks like this:
This last resource I mention, Google Slides, is actually what I’m planning to use for my next cycle of data collection with my students for my capstone project. My plan is to have the kids take photos using the iPads on our next outdoor field trip to Pepperwood Preserve. Then, they will upload those photos into their Google Classroom slide presentation of the trip. They will do an animal report of an animal that lives in the Pepperwood habitat. The photos will be of the habitat and any plants or animals they see there. I have also taught them to upload photos and videos from the Internet. I want to compare their ability to communicate information in this tech supported format vs a paper and pencil format. We already did the paper and pencil projects. I mentioned in class last week that I was running into trouble getting photos or videos that the kids take from their iPads into the Chromebooks and Google slides. Our district does not give them access to their Gmails until 7th grade. I got some good tips last class on how to skirt around this issue by using different methods. I snapped photos of the chatroom suggestions so that I would not forget the great tips both professors and students gave to me. I brought home an iPad and a student’s Chromebook in order to fiddle around with. Applying the Dervin, Baggio, and Clark Readings to my Project
The best way I could think of to apply what I’ve learned from the Dervin, Baggio, and Clark readings has been to design a set of lessons to teach my students how to create and present animal reports in Google Slides. Here’s a working draft of my plan. Following the Clark guidelines for effective training, I have designed a “learning object”, which in this case is a method for training students to be able to create and present Google Slides presentations. The Clark reading helped me to think about how to best present and teach in a structured manner the skills my students will need to create and present Google Slides presentations. Following the Instructional Systems Design principles, the teaching will focus on two phases: analysis and design, and development. In the analysis and design phase, I focus on needs assessment (who needs what?), task analysis, (what knowledge and skills?), learning objectives, (what will learners be able to do?), and assessment, (were learning objectives reached?). In the development phase, I will focus on development, (instructional materials), try out/revision, and implementation, (pilot testing of materials). This will happen while students create the presentations and during the presentations to their peers. In the design phase, I decided to make the slide presentation pre-formatted. This will help my third graders immensely. Students only need to be able to fill in text and photos. It is geared to grades 2,3,4. The ultimate goal of this training is for students to create and present slide presentations on animals that live in the local ecosystem. The training begins with teacher presentations modeling and presentations. It goes on to practice activities that are designed to develop students’ ability to perform the following tasks:
Students will be trained on finding information from the Internet and presenting it in their slides presentations. This is the part of the lesson where I think about the Dervin reading. One of my biggest burning questions is how I might better assist my students in “gap bridging” as they make sense of information they find on the Internet. Because so many of them are ELLs, and because they are so young, this has always been a challenge. They are still developing much of the vocabulary needed in order to understand the information they find. I need to go back and re-read the last section of the Dervin article to look for insights here. Students will be doing “sense making”. They will be responding to the prompts on the slides. They will be “bridging gaps” in their understanding through web searches. Finding the correct information that is age appropriate for this audience can be a challenge. I will need to show them search engines designed for kids, and how to read articles in order to find answers to questions. The key skills involved here are:
Students need to be trained on how to find and insert images that are from the common domain.
If it does not happen this year, a goal for next year is to have our iPads updated with a number of quality outdoor apps. As long as they get the school’s wifi signal we will be able to use them outdoors on campus. For the real outdoor tech integration we would be doing in the field we would need smartphones with satellite/tower connection. Next, I will adapt the animal report outline that we used after our Fall field trip (paper and pencil) animal presentations into a slideshow presentation. I will use the Baggio CRAP principles to design a slideshow template for my students to fill out and present. It will be 3rd Grade user friendly for the students to insert photos, text information, and sources used. Each slide will contain a student friendly writing prompt in a text box aligned to the left. Font size will be pre-selected to be big enough to see, in a font that is appropriate for audiences to read. Background color on each slide will be neutral so as not to interfere with the message. Each slide will follow the same format so as not to create confusion. It will not allow for too much text per page. Photos will be inserted on the right. Students will be taught how to make each photo reflect the text. They will follow this format: Slide 1. Name: (With a picture of the student) Slide 2: My animal is: Slide 3: To which group does your animal belong? Why? Slide 4: What is your animal’s habitat? (Include countries and the ecosystem name.) Slide 5: What size is your animal? Weight: Height: Length: Slide 6: What does your animal look like? Slide 7: What does your animal eat? What eats your animal ? Slide 8: How long does your animal live? Slide 9: What are the babies of your animal called? Slide 10: Interesting fact 1: Slide 11: Interesting Fact 2: Slide 12: Is your animal endangered? Why or why not?: Slide 13: A question I still have about my animal. Note: If I am able to integrate nature apps into our next field trip experience, additional slides may be needed to show which plants and animals students were able to identify from the animal’s habitat. Once the presentations are made, then students will present their findings to the class, parents, school admin, and maybe even staff from Pepperwood Preserve in a slideshow presentation. I just bought a portable microphone speaker system to assist in these presentations. Students will demonstrate their ability to present based on a rubric which measures quality of: Delivery, Content/Organization, and Enthusiasm/Audience Awareness. I'm starting to see how these reading are tying in together. In simplest terms, our students make sense of new information we give them every day. As teachers, we can help them bridge the sense making gap by doing a good job of designing our content. It should be visually accessible, following Baggio's suggestions outlined below. But our lessons also need to be well planned in the ways that Clark discusses in her article. For example, we should plan our lessons so that we can measure our students' ability to not just remember, but perform any given learning objective. This is true for both digital and traditional forms of content.
As a student in this masters program, I feel this is how we are learning. The combination of introductory live sessions and extended readings are reinforced through the requirement that we demonstrate our understanding through blogs and projects. I have a feeling we'll be doing some visually emphasized content very soon. Clark/Baggio Reading Notes Jeremy Smith Developing Technical Training By: Ruth Colvin Clark Chapter 1: The Technology of Training
Chapter 2: An Introduction to Structured Lesson Design
The Visual Connection By Bobbe Baggio
Dervin Notes 2: New Dervin Notes: Dervin invented the gap metaphor in sense making to serve as a framework to study how humans do make sense and use information in information systems. It is an innovative, flexible theoretic tool with which to do so. It is both qualitative and quantitative. Underlying Assumptions and Theoretical Foundations We have to understand first that sense making is a set of assumptions and propositions about the nature of information, the nature of human use of information, and the nature of human communication.Some of these assumptions are “taken as given”, or axiomatic. Other assumptions are deductive. Still others are propositions that have received empirical support. These assumptions and propositions provide a methodological guidance for framing research questions, collecting data, and charting analysis. It derives down into a set of methods to interview humans and ask them questions about how they make sense in their lives. That’s why some call sense making a theory about conducting interviews about sense making. Dervin is funny here when she says: “It is that as well.” This was supposed to be funny, right? So, the methods for studying sense making derive from the theoretic effort which built the conceptual frame. The problem is that the connections between the methods, the assumptions, and the propositions are hidden. And depending on what your assumptions are, which DO vary, your methods, propositions, (and conclusions?), can differ. Certain things are assumed to be true and they guide the whole enterprise of the study of sense making. But there could be other ways to do it. So, sense making is simply a coherent set of theoretically derived methods for studying sense making. The core assumption upon which the study of sense making rests is the one of discontinuity. It assumes discontinuity is a fundamental aspect of reality. It assumes there are discontinuities in all existence, between entities, times, and spaces. It is an assumed constant of nature generally and of the human experience specifically. The discontinuity assumption serves as a good framework for Dervin’s research on humans’ use of information and information systems. It especially helps study human behavior around sense making that is internally controlled. One does not have to use the discontinuity assumption when they study information as it exists apart from human considerations. (externally controlled). (objective?) But most studies of information management, design, and practice do involve human actors. (Example: How do we market our information systems to people?) This is pertinent for people in the information design and management field. So, Dervin goes on to compare assumptions to show in a logical way why the assumption of discontinuity is particularly helpful, (even required according to Dervin), when studying how humans interact with information. She is trying to break with past assumptions that have guided research on information systems research. Information Use as Transmission vs Construction Using the discontinuity assumption, information is that sense created in a moment in time and in space by one or more humans. It does not exist apart from human behavioral activity. Because there is no direct observation of nature, all observations can only arise out of an application of human energy. This does not mean that sense making goes full post modern and says there is no order out there and no tools for humans to use to form stable pictures of reality. But it does assume that whatever order is out there is discontinuous from time to time and space to space. It also assumes (I love this.), that whatever order is out there is not directly accessible by humans due to the limitations of our senses and intellect. We are constrained by time, space, and species. Further, sense making assumes that humans have no external standard they can use to assess whether their observations are correct or not. Human standards for personal and collective conduct are created through interaction. Human sharing of observations can lead to more stable observations, but they will always be limited. So depending on your assumptions about information, what you choose to study will change. If you think that information exists out there independent of human construction, then focus on questions of transmission. (Did the info get to the person? Was it correct? How much?) But, if you focus on construction questions, you might frame your research like this: (What strategy did that person apply for them to call that info accurate?). (Will she try to show how the gap bridging metaphor works for both sets of assumptions about information?) Info Use as Seen by the Observer vs Actor Another assumption is that any study of sense making has to be done from the perspective of the actor and not the observer. Almost all current research emphasized the observer perspective. (Librarians typically ask people things like: Of the things we offer, which do you prefer? They bend people to fit their system and not the other way around. They cannot explain how people get use out of systems in unpredicted ways. Info Use as State Condition Vs Process Condition Sense making focuses on the internal and external behaviors people demonstrate as they take steps to make sense. It is a process. While people agree on the process view of sense making, many studies still see it as a state condition. They see people's search for information as a monolithic “state of need”. They do not ask what process led this person to be in this state of need or about the qualities of this state of need. It is assumed to exist monolithically. They do not study the behaviors. Human reasons to search for info are seen as too chaotic and varied to be able to study systematically. They retreat from individual to structural understandings of information use. When we do study the process of human information use, we find that it is actually not chaotic or capricious, but very systematic. Sense making sees people not as static entities but as entities acting in space time. People employ tactics to make sense. New info leads to new actions, some of which are repetitions of previous actions. (I think she’s getting the the gap jumping here.) Ok, yes, sense making is a process of gap defining and gap bridging. Sense making, thus, sets forth the gap idea as a theoretic assumption and a guiding frame for methods to interview people about how they make sense. It works for both observer and actor. It works in both set times and across times and situations. It works in both quantitative and qualitative respects. Many people are using the gap bridging framework to conduct studies. Research Paper Recap Questions 1. How did your findings influence your thinking about the bigger challenge? The inconclusive results from the limited data I collected, (the kids expressed no big preference for either tech or non-tech in the few outdoor activities we did), make me now just want to explore different ways we might use handheld devices in outdoor activities and see how we can integrate that into the classroom curriculum. A challenge is getting the kids access to the kinds of outdoor apps that are out there. The bigger challenge is breaking the mold and getting the kids outdoors more often. It's nice to be able to say "it's for my masters". Can I keep up the outdoor learning when the program is over? We shall see and a lot depends on how this experiment works out. 2. What do I know now? Kids highly rate outdoor activities. Parents want their kids to be outdoors in safe environments. Being indoors and on screens too much is bad for their health. Given the challenges that face our planet, schools are not focused on outdoor and environmental education enough. Well, that's my opinion. 3. What do we still need to know? I need to know more outdoor and environmental integrated curriculum/projects/strategies to try with my students. For example, I want to expand our garden project and integrate tech into it in innovative ways that I don't know yet. Dervin Article: When I started this article and found it to be very dense, I first tried to search up the authors Jack D. Glazier and Ronald R. Powell to get some context. I managed to find out that they were involved in libraries and information management as it relates to libraries. I think. So this gave me an idea of where they were coming from. Then I looked up Brenda Dervin on Wikipedia to see, hopefully in a nutshell, what she does. There's a cute drawing there of a stick figure "bridging the gap". This orientated me a bit more because I saw the same drawing when thumbing through the article before reading it. I thought the article would have something to do with project based learning and the cycles of inquiry we are engaged in as we explore our driving question. Because we had discussed this in class on the 22nd, I felt I knew what professor Curtis was aiming at in assigning the reading. Then I started reading and immediately got lost. Suddenly it did not seem to have anything to do with PBL. I re-read every paragraph. After three paragraphs, I decided to start taking notes. I used to do this in college while studying literature. It helps me make sense while I read. It also helps me find my way much like Hansel and Grettle when they leave bread crumbs in the forest. I can reread my notes before I do a second reading of the article to see what made sense to me and guide me. The ideas actually reminded me a lot of what we used to talk about in literature theory classes in college where a big post modern question was about the nature of meaning. The discussion of assumptions and discontinuity especially reminded me of those post modern arguments from college days. As I read I realized that this background experience in studying literature was from where I was coming while trying to make sense of what Dervin was saying. This made me "miss the mark" on a couple of takeaways I got from the first reading. I'm hoping that on my second reading, now that I know where the article is going, this won't happen again. I think that there are a lot of things in this article that I may never fully understand because I do not have the background knowledge that the people do who study this field. I'll try to include some photos of my notes because they best demonstrate how I tried to make sense of this reading as I went along. |
AuthorJeremy Smith teaches third grade at Calistoga Elementary School. Archives
July 2020
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