Monday, September 25, 2017

Blogs, TPACK, and Khan Academy

For my article reviews I was assigned to review “Preservice Teachers’ Reflection on clinical Experiences: A Comparison of Blog and Final Paper Assignments” and “Teachers’ Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge and Learning Activity: Curriculum-Based Technology Integration Reframed”.
            In “Preservice Teachers’ Reflection on clinical Experiences: A Comparison of Blog and Final Paper Assignments” they discuss the common themes and differences between blogs and final papers. The common themes being reflection as a deliberate cognitive process that is used for the purpose of analyzing connections and relationships. The study compared blogging students to students who wrote end of the course reflective papers.
            This study is favorable because of the similarities between blogging and reflection papers. Such as the opportunity to habitually reflect on the experiences and what they have learned. Also peers will have the opportunity to read and respond to one-another’s reflections (like we do in this class.).
            During this study are they looked at 9 sections of 3 different courses. They were invited to be a part of the study. All of the courses in this study included a clinical, classroom experience and were taken by middle or secondary teachers. Two types of writing were collected: reflections written in end of the course formal papers and reflections written in blog posts. They wrote the reflections based on 4 different levels. The first level was nonreflection (descriptive), then Understanding, reflection, and then critical reflection.
            The result of the study was that blogging allows students to reflect systematically and publically among their peers increase their depth of reflection.
            The second article being “Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge:  A Framework for Teacher Knowledge” This article discusses TPACK. TPACK is a based learning activity that successfully integrate technology into their lessons. TPACK emphasizes the connections among technologies, and curriculum content. In this article we are introduced to the idea of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK).  The idea of TPCK is brought to us by building on Shulman’s formulation of “pedagogical content knowledge” and extends to the idea of teachers integrating technology into their pedagogy. With TPCK teachers are guaranteed to cover three main components of learning environments:  content, pedagogy, and technology.  Teachers today face many problems including only looking at technology and now how it is used.  The research done in this article shows that, given opportunities to thoughtfully engage in the design of educational technology, teachers showed tremendous growth in their sensitivity to the complex interactions among content, pedagogy, and technology.  
Overall, TPCK is a great framework for teacher knowledge.  It will especially help struggling teachers that are afraid to bring to much technology into the classroom.  TPCK may also educate teachers to know as much information about technology to effectively teach students.  Like the article states, TPCK may not be the best theory out there but it is better than no theory at all.
Khan Academy
I watched a Khan academy video on nouns. The video was very informative, however I feel it would be good for junior high or high-school students. I feel that the information provided is just a bit too advanced for elementary students.
Incorporations for classroom

I feel that blogs are good for junior high students and up. I do not feel that it would be a good idea to have elementary students use blogs. Maybe a mock blog? However TPACK would be useful in all classrooms of all ages.