Rich TPACK Cases: Great Resource Book

by | Tuesday, May 24, 2016

tpack-practitionersguide-cover

The TPACK framework is a theoretical framework that seeks to influence practice. And most gratifyingly (for Matt Koehler and myself) it appears to have had a significant impact in that area. That said, the field lacked concrete, rich examples of TPACK in practice. Cases that would (quoting Darling-Hammond & Snyder) “add context to theory” highlighting the rich telling detail, as well as local contextual factors that are often lost when teaching is discussed in more general terms.

This gap has now been filled with a lovely ebook by my friends and colleagues Mark Hofer, Lynn Bell and Glen Bull. The Practitioner’s guide to technology pedagogy and content knowledge (TPACK): Rich media cases of teacher knowledge focuses on developing rich “exemplary” cases of practice, and boy does it deliver. Consider what is included in each of the cases included in the book:

[Each of the cases] include a number of media elements, including short video clips, student and teacher artifacts, and links to digital tools and resources. The video footage is crucial to these cases and is used in various ways: to highlight teacher thinking, to capture salient moments of TPACK in action, and to highlight student learning. The teacher interviews add to the narrative included in the text, rather than being repetitive. The Classroom in Action and Student Work videos show real teachers and students in real classrooms engaging in unscripted instruction.

Mark, Lynn and Glen need to be applauded for taking on this task and creating this wonderful resource that is of value to practitioners, researchers and teacher educators alike. Matt, Andrea Zellner and I wrote an introductory chapter (citation and link to both the chapter and the entire ebook below).

Koehler, M. J., Mishra, P., & Zellner, A. L. (2015). Mind the gap: Why TPACK case studies? In M. Hofer, L. Bell, & G. Bull (Eds.), Practitioner’s guide to technology pedagogy and content knowledge (TPACK): Rich media cases of teacher knowledge (pp. 2.1-2.8). Waynesville, NC: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). [Links above first to the actual chapter we wrote and then to the eBook available on the LearnTechLib website].

A few randomly selected blog posts…

The brilliantly twisted mind of PES

I discovered PES a couple of years ago when searching for examples of stop motion animation on the web. One glimpse of his work and I was smitten. Combine a prefect sense of timing and shot composition with a whimsical and surrealistic point of view and you get some...

The loneliness of a long distance migrant

“On bad days, I do feel lonely in a way that I can’t explain,” so says Dilip Ratha, a World Bank economist who studies the economics of migration. The article, a profile of Ratha's life and work, is worth a read, but what really stood out for me was the above quote,...

Principled innovation in hiring

Principled innovation in hiring

We, in the Office of Scholarship and Innovation (OofSI), have never been big fans of the typical interview and hiring process. We are not sure that the process helps us identify the right people, and more importantly, we find the process to be unnecessarily opaque and...

Indipix Gallery, cool photographs

The International Conference on Indian Education: The Positive Turmoil. is being held at the India Habitat Center in New Delhi. This Habitat center is a rather cool building and, apart from academic conferences (I saw two different conferences going on at the same...

Of raindrops and dying flowers

Of raindrops and dying flowers

The rainfall in June –the poems I’ve pasted to wallspeel off, but leave traces.~ Basho All photos taken with my iPhone8©punyamishra

Douglas Adams, technologies & anticipatory plagiarism

Image Credit Leeks As readers of the blog know, Matt Koehler and I work together quite a lot. In fact we just rotate author-order in our papers since it is hard to keep track of individual contributions. (I would like to claim that the cool ideas are mine - but again...

On embodiment in online learning

Patrick Dickson just forwarded me an essay from the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled The Sensuous Classroom: Focusing on the Embodiment of Learning [Subscription required]. In this article Suzanne Kelly, the author, bemoans the absence of the physical body from...

Let children play: From evolutionary psychology to creativity

Let children play: From evolutionary psychology to creativity

As a part of our ongoing series on creativity we recently spoke with Dr. Peter Gray, professor of Psychology at Boston College. Dr. Gray’s interest in creativity emerges as a consequence of his background in evolutionary psychology and interest in how humans (and...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *