Journal 3

“Too Cool for School? No Way!” By Punya Mishra and Matthew Koehler
What are the affordances of cool new technology tools? One affordance is clearly the generation of a lot of jargon repurposing quality teaching into the transformation of content so it is intellectually accessible. The teacher must TPACK her lunch in order to do so. Indeed!

The two gentlemen who wrote the article say the technologies have the potential to change the way we think, but the good teacher doesn’t get carried away—she maintains a handle on Pedagogy and Content. The article explores three examples of technology that they feel can profitably be transformed for educational promise—microblogging, visual search engines, and music DJ software.

Microblogging complements face to face discussions in a classroom, but shouldn’t be isolated from actual classroom routines. I guess there should be a “discuss twittering corner in the classroom”. Is this a place or a time? The article wasn’t clear.

They tell us visual search engines allow students to formulate hypotheses about influence, transformation, and popularity. I tried some of the engines out, and the concept of formulating ones own search engine is intriguing, but I’ll probably stick to google.

Finally, the DJ software has to be inviting. When kids are creative, higher level thinking blossoms. I feel one of the biggest challenges in life is to take what one has learned and use the skills or confidence in another area of endeavor.
This is exactly what teachers need to do today, using old bodies and minds to wrap around new technologies and envision those affordances. Mishra and Koehler call for a willingness to play and advocate acquiring a fluid knowledge of technology instead of training on a fixed target. When teachers build new experiences for students, the new tools can’t help but be educational.

1. What are affordances?
The term is used for human machine interaction and in industrial design and refers to potential uses. It means more than just benefits, because not all benefits may be perceived. It’s a very useful concept, although I was distracted by it in the article until I looked it up on Wikipedia.

2. How does this quote pertain to this article? “She played the right notes, but failed to play the music.”
The TPACK framework is the hypothesis that educators need a particular schema of knowledge. That is a confluence of Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge. Mishra and Matthew draw Venn diagrams to represent the overlapping of these areas of knowledge. The pictorial representation is obvious, but doesn’t say a whole lot. “The notes are there, but I don’t see how this will make a better teacher.” The better teacher is the “music”. A good teacher is someone who turns students on. Period. Technology may be one means of turning on kids, but it’s not the only one.