Integrating Digital Technologies in classroom practice is an ongoing ‘project’ or challenge for educators. As someone who has been teaching for 25 years, I am still ‘on the road’ to mastery and shared in class the story of my rather bumpy start on the road. I had the pleasure of working alongside Wendy Zhang, TLEF coop student, and Mary Kostandy, GAA for our “Enhancing Digital Competencies of Secondary Teacher Candidates” TLEF project with the students in Junli’s LLED361 class here in the Faculty of Ed as they continued their journey – thanks to this wonderful group for their interest, questions and critical lens.
Students in LLED 361, Literacy Practices and Assessment, are engaging in readings, discourse and interactivities around the notion of ‘multiliteracies’ and multimodal teaching and learning contexts (including the digital world in which many of our students are immersed). In our session, Secondary Teacher Candidates were asked to consider Backward Design/UDL and effective technology integration models including TPACK , SAMR and TECH (a more student-centered model/approach) and then go on a self-directed ‘treasure hunt’ of the Scarfe Digital Sandbox Blog in search of something they might incorporate in their own teaching context. TCs were then given some time to actually ‘try out’ the digital technology so that they might consider the problems and possibilities. Below are some ‘artifacts’ from our session (Slides and links still to come… patience please! it’s been a busy few weeks in the sandbox ;D Check back by Friday for more)
In closing, we used two different polling applications. Answer Garden and Poll Everywhere.
View our ‘word cloud’ of responses in this ‘answer garden’
View our poll results – “How would you use one of the applications you found in the blog in your own teaching context?”
Some additional Resources:
Interesting article with some research and background re: TPACK
*TPACK feature image courtesy of http://tpack.org
