Monday, January 26, 2009

Just call me 'TPACK' g-unit!

TPACK stands for "Technological Pedagogical And Content Knowledge." It may sound like a mouthful, but in reality, it is not a complex subject. Prof. Burgoyne first began teaching this topic by talking about each of the knowledge types and helping the students in my class to understand what they meant and how they related to teaching. Pedagogical knowledge can be defined as knowledge that deals with teaching methods, classroom management, assessment, child development and age- appropriate activities, etc. Basically, it deals with the study of teaching. Content knowledge can be defined as knowledge about a particular domain (i.e. the Utah core curriculum- any subject could be considered a domain in content knowledge). Technological knowledge is knowledge of software, hardware, windows or Mac, file formats, programming, etc. TPAC is especially interesting because it combines all of the knowledge types mentioned above into one. The teacher uses technology, pedagogical knowledge, and content knowledge in their classroom. For example, a teacher may use Microsoft Excel [technological] to teach students about collecting data in math [content] and converting it into various charts. Throughout this assignment, the students would ask their own questions (inquiry) [pedagogical] about the data.
It is vital that teachers have all three of the types of knowledge so that they can teach in a manner that will help students to understand material in more than one way. By combining their technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge- the teacher is able to help their students achieve success in the classroom.



I had a fun time using the temperature rods in class this past Monday (Jan. 19, 2009). This was a fun way to explore science! It was amazing to see the temperature from my hands feeding right into the computer and constructing data right before my eyes! I believe that students could use this type of a project on a science fair project in which they measure how temperature correlates to the growth of plants. These temperature rods could prove to be a very effective method to recording large amounts of data, which the student could observe and record throughout the duration of their experiment.

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