TPaCK Lesson Planning

      As many of you know, I'm an educator in an informal setting so lesson planning is pretty lax in my world. Adapting the ideas of a formal lesson plan is a pretty big challenge for me and it makes me more thankful that I don't have to do it! This week for class we were supposed to use a TPaCK game to see how we would combine different items together. The game is an adaptation that Dr. Leigh Zeitz of the University of Northern Iowa built. The game can be found here. Dr Zeitz has a blog in which he details many of the resources I've used to build the lesson plans I created. That blog can be found here.

The first assignment was just to play around with the game and build a concept around the items you topics you rolled. This is where you can find my resulting chaos.

Building even more on one of those concepts I attempted to create a whole lesson plan for my fake 5th grade music students. The fun can be found in my lesson plan titled Sound Bite.

I would love to hear your feedback. How can I clean up my lesson planning? Do you really like to plan lessons? Comment below!

TPaCK and Toddlers

The idea of TPaCK is finding the happy middle ground of merging content knowledge (what is being taught), pedagogy (how it’s being taught), and technology. When you have the correct balance you have a happy point known as Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge*.

But how does fit in with teaching and working with children when we have been told that electronics and toddlers don’t mix? Technology has always been the enemy of well rounded babies! The good news is new research and guidelines on technology use and young children have been released. Technology is no longer an evil in a child’s life but merely another tool in learning about the world around them.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recently came up with new guidelines and how to implement technology with younger children. The new guidelines and a decent breakdown of what they are can be found here. In short using it to enhance communication experiences with family while sitting with an adult is the best for the very young. The TPaCK model here would be: Technology is Facetime or another video chat program, Pedagogy would be repetitive words and direct communication, the Content Knowledge is communication skills including verbal and nonverbal communication aspects. As they get older watching videos with a strong education value with an adult is an extended use of technology use for children.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children have created a great guide to effective uses of technology and what technology to use with children from birth to 8 years old. The guide can be found here.

So the TPaCK model can be used with children under the age of three but it is still advised to limit the exposure to technology and to use it around familiar people that the child will be comfortable exploring their world with.

How do you integrate technology with the littles in your world? Let me know in the comments.