TPACK in my World

Over the past few weeks I've been talking mostly about how technology can support learning. Not entirely suprising since the course this weblog was originally made for is title Pedagogies for Flexible Learning Supported by Technology. If you look critically at my posts though one can see that teachers are left out. Or when they are not left out I'm mentioning the hard work they have to do in order to integrate this technology into their daily work environment. And that while Michael Fullan says "Educational change depends on what teachers do and think - it's as simple and as complex as that". So if integrating technology is hard and cumbersome, why should teachers even want it.


First I want to go back to one of my first posts on this weblog. It was about flexibility, I was describing how new technology can support flexible learning. Being a student I off course looked at how these situations can be advantageous for myself, how can technology support my learning. But I completely neglected how technology can support my teachers. If location and time-based flexibility helps me by making it easier for me to study, can this work for my teachers as well. In my time at this university I've often received e-mails in the wee hours of the night in response to questions. So my teachers are obviously using it as well. This does mean however that they need some additional knowledge of technology, not everyone is comfortable using e-mail just yet but more importantly their pedagogy has to change, the lectures might not be the central focus of their teaching but rather the communication with their students. This requires them to acquire new skills in order to deal with this but by doing so they gain greater freedom themselves in deciding when and where they want to help students. By becoming more TPACK-proficient teachers can perhaps become more flexible in the way they teach. This can in turn perhaps help alleviate some of the stress of being a teacher by allowing them to plan their own time a little bit more.

Then I looked at different types of pedagogies and how we can support those by technology. And once again I adopted a student's perspective. How can we support students by using technology in working with new pedagogies. As if the students are the only ones that need to get used to this. Looking back and thinking critically it seems teachers are the ones that could actually use the most support. If we change a pedagogy 1/3rd of the TPACK model changes. And due to the integration of all elements this means that more than likely everything else will change as well. So what can TPACK do here. New pedagogies can open up new opportunities to teach content in a different way. It can also let teachers see that maybe not all new technology is evil but that if you change the way you teach, maybe you can change what you use to teach with or maybe even change what you teach. TPACK can help in exploring these opportunities by showing teachers that maybe changing one thing isn't enough. If you just replace a blackboard with a digital white-board not much changes. But if you change your content and pedagogy alongside it a new world can open for both teacher and students alike.  TPACK therefore can help teachers see what the new possibilities of technology are and how they can use if to change their daily routines to perhaps become more exciting.

Looking back at these 2 reflections on earlier posts I now see that if you look at technology from a teachers point of view that there might indeed be some hard work ahead. TPACK in itself is quite a bit of work to get, integrating 3 sub-domains into one can be a lot of hard work. And changing one can often mean changing all 3 which means might mean even more work.

But TPACK can also help show connections between several elements.  This can help the teachers understand the worth of new technologies and how they can integrate them in their daily teaching. Therefore TPACK is a double-edged blade and it all relies on that final part. The context, if we place all the three elements in context we can see the value of them and how they can help a teacher in preparing themselves for 21st-century teaching with technology.