Instructional Tools for Educational Designers: Models, Strategies, and Technologies (M1P3)

The Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge or TPACK is a model instructional designers can use to organize their different knowledge domains. This helps them to ensure they are continuously developing and integrating aspects of all of these domains into their educational design. It also allows teachers to self-evaluate their own levels of knowledge for each domain in order to better choose professional development opportunities. As shown in the diagram from matt-koehler.com, the TPACK model has seven major components: Technological Pedagogical Knowledge (TPK), Technological Knowledge (TK), Technological Content Knowledge (TCK), Content Knowledge (CK), Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), and Pedagogical Knowledge (PK), and Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK).
Along with aiding teachers' understanding of their areas for needed development, the TPACK model aides educational designers in planning and integrating effective, engaging, and efficient technology usage for students. And because teacher collaboration and communication is essential to preparing our students effectively, TPACK offers a common vocabulary for communicating with each other about technology integration activities. Educational designers must be constantly re-evaluating their TPACK in order to remain up-to-date with technology. Technology is growing exponentially and teachers must be prepared to prepare their students; teachers who are constantly aware of their TPACK are more likely to develop their TPACK at a rate consistent with the ever-changing technology and student demographic.
While developing their TPACK, teachers are exposed to new instructional tools to integrate into their planning, implementation, and evaluation of teaching and learning. The text Teaching Models: Designing Instruction for 21st Century Learners defines tools as the instructional models, instructional strategies, and technologies that are able to make teaching and learning more engaging, effective, and efficient for all students. Instructional models are research-based, proven effective methods of structuring learning for students to achieve desired outcomes. For example, the inquiry model promotes students' problem-solving skills, scientific thinking, and related skills for metacognitive learning. As someone who is very analytical and scientifically minded, I prefer inquiry models, such as the 5E instructional model, because they challenge my students to ask questions and think independently. The text also elaborates on the cooperative learning model that promotes necessary social skills such as teamwork and cooperation. I feel that this model would be very beneficial and engaging to use with my current group of third graders such as with an activity about an expository text (our current focus genre). Instructional strategies are less complex than instructional models, can be easily explained and integrated into any instructional model, and are flexible enough to work with almost any content area. My third graders respond best to visual and kinesthetic strategies like anchor charts and math fact brain breaks. We have also begun timing our reading stamina as a strategy to increase their focus. Chapter 3 of the text explains instructional strategies and gives examples of several effective strategies that can be easily used in any subject. In figure 3.4 on page 55, a strategy titled "one-minute paper" is explained. Students record everything they know about a topic on a paper in one minute. I am going to implement this as a pre-assessment for many areas with my third graders. Finally, the chapter discusses technologies that can add value to instruction. Planning and using technologies is not as simple as implementing instructional strategies because of the sheer number of technologies available to the educational world. Teachers must be very intentional in their integration of technology to ensure it is engaging, effective, and efficient for their students. My students currently have access to Chromebooks and iPads, which has really opened up our options for technology use. This coming week I am going to be trying a new-to-our-classroom technology: the Plickers app. I think this will better allow me to assess my students' individual knowledge when asking oral questions. It will also give all my students the opportunity to answer without being overpowered by their peers or overpowering to their peers.

References:
Kilbane, C. R., & Milman, N. B. (2014). Teaching models: designing instruction for 21st century learners. Boston: Pearson.
Koehler, M. (2011, May 11). TPACK Image [Digital image]. Retrieved January 17, 2018, from http://matt-koehler.com/tpack2/using-the-tpack-image/