PART B - Application of TPACK

At my school, along with with many others, our teachers are hungry and thrilled to introduce technology into their lessons. The lesson has a strong focus on collaborative group work. To support the teacher's modeling and the disciplinary culture of the course, there is a need for collaboration to be embedded early on in the introduction of the lesson. The teachers carrying out both sides of this course, remember it is split into two rotations, have similarities in that they follow the gradual release of responsibility method of teaching, which includes an emphasis on collaboration. Using Google Sites as the platform enables the teachers to present, model, and deploy both the structure of what the project will be as well as teach students critical web technology skills. Releasing responsibility to the students with this platform will offer the teacher both the flexibility to model and scaffold as needed by their groups, as well as give the students accountability and facilitate their communal learning experience.

A teacher using this technology can present the site as an example of what their research will be structured like by showing the site's template, and how it will already list the questions just like in the handout they receive in a hard copy or a shared Google Doc. Modeling how they will work collaboratively using the site's ability to handle multiple simultaneous logins and edits, will greatly impact how quickly the student groups can work and learn together. 

Google Sites, by association and origin, brings with it the ease of web integration. With its multiple connections to widgets and other web 2.0 resources, it allows for a teacher to show students how to integrate their research into their project. As students are working on their laptops, in whatever topic they are assigned, the teacher can bring up an essential point: "How are the tasks you are performing right now, thinking, processing, outputting, designing, planning and compiling onto a website, be different for those with the disability you are researching?" By implementing a mix of both web and physical technologies, the teacher can influence the students to think outside of their norm. Utilizing this web technology, students have the ease to access resources on the web and apply them to their project on the go, or store them for later review. Since the site does not necessarily need to go live just yet, the information stored in their topic's page will not be public to anyone other than those who have edit privileges to the website. Supporting the content covered in this course with the use of laptops, web services like Google and perhaps multimedia hardware to facilitate student created videos will help in both representing some of the essential content covered in class by the instructor, but more so it will inspire students to synthesize the culmination of the content, skills and creativity explored in the course.

The PC connection in this solution is something that I will work out further with the teachers I work with. Since my role as technology coordinator has so far been in suggesting, planning and implementing the technology side of it, I still need to meet with the teachers and understand how they plan on teaching with the technology, and how to address certain issues. My take at this point is that many of their strategies will be applied but modified to accommodate the integration with technology and deep integration of collaborative group work. The content being covered is primarily by lecture, through both slide presentations and videos. At that point the students are being exposed to an overview of what the disabilities are, and are then geared to their research to fully immerse themselves in their topic of interest. Experiencing the content will be different in this course as it revolves quite a bit on their research and collaboration. While they will gain knowledge through the lectures and modeling of sorts, the students will mainly be exposed to content through their research. The teacher's role and pedagogical methods will be in-line with facilitating this. So that the students gain responsibility, individuality and collaboration skills as they make progress.