I am a digital immigrant and this has been quite a week for
me. To understand my thoughts on this
week, I need to take you back to the beginning.
It was 1992, our oldest daughter was in second grade, and one
night in the fall was Family Open House, a chance for the students to show the
school to their parents. Our daughter
showed us all over the school, but it was the room next to her classroom that taught
me a lesson. It was the school’s
computer lab. We went in and she showed
us what she had learned. It was KidPix, a
drawing program for kids. She went so
fast that we couldn’t follow her. Our
seven-year-old knew more than her parents!
How could we help her learn? Soon
after that, we got our first computer, an Apple IIc with a green screen!
Now, 23 years later, remember that second grade
daughter? We have used Skype to stay
connected to her when she lived in Hawai’i.
I am taking an on-line course about technology. I have a blog and a Twitter account. I use technology in the form of laptops, iPads,
computer projectors, smartphone, multiple programs, and apps.
I use lots of technology, but I am hoping to be able to integrate
technology into my classroom and into the hands of my students. TPACK will give me a way to understand and
integrate technology in the classroom. I
can even follow TPACK tags on Twitter (#TPACK),
Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/tpackdotorg/),
or on on-line (http://www.tpack.org/). I really appreciate the author’s point of
view that integrating technology involves technical, content, and pedagogical
knowledge.
The
videos and web pages that supported this week’s learning were very easy to
understand. Each one explained one part
of our personal learning network (PLN), either Blogger, Feedly, or
Twitter. They did not talk down to the
beginner, but gave the information I needed to understand the usefulness of the
social media part of the PLN. I can
foresee that I will be using my PLN for many years to come.
Reproduced by permission of
the publisher, © 2012 by tpack.org”
Kathy,
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate your perspective on the evolution of technology! I have a 1st grader and a 4 year old, and the iPad has been a part of their lives, so much that I have witnessed both of them try to swipe the pages of a book as toddlers, in order to bring it to life the way the iPad works!
It's hard to imagine what sort of technology we'll be adapting to in another twenty years, but clearly we keep marching ahead in the computing world at lightning speed.
Like you, I was very encouraged by the TPAK topic this week, and love that you pointed out that we can find posts related to that topic even through Twitter! As an educator it seems that we have so much valuable information to enrich our students' educational experience than ever before. I hope to learn/create several lessons, or even perhaps a unit that would incorporate all three realms of the TPAK model.
Thanks for the post!
It's so interesting to read everyone's recounting of their early experiences with technology this week! The first home computer we had my parents bought when I was in 5th grade -- it was an early, early, early Macintosh (when they were still commonly called Macintoshes and not just Macs!) My mom was in med school and needed to be able to connect remotely to a database that housed articles and journals, called MedLine. By the time we got to high school, my brother and I were allowed to connect to the internet at home through our libaray's BBS, and then when I got to college I learned about the World Wide Web (and spent WAY too much time reading and creating web pages about all kinds of stupid things, back when GeoCities would host your page, but you had to write all of the .html code yourself!). I always thought I was a little slow with all of the tech stuff, but I'm beginning to think that I must have been an early immigrant.
ReplyDeleteOne of the most amazing things to me, and I just commented about this on someone else's blog as well, is that our students today will be using tech that hasn't even been invented yet by the time they're our age. But the corollary to that is over the next 10, 15, 20 years... we're going to have that new tech made available to us as well and we'll need to find ways of effectively incorporating it into the classroom (and I'm being generic with classroom here; the music classroom can be challenging to integrate technology into).