Finding 2: Educators can use new media and technology to connect with international classrooms and allow students to collaborate in new ways.
TPACK Framework
As an educator, I understand that technology is an integral part of 21st century citizenship. Throughout my coursework, I have deepened my understanding of technology integration in the social studies classroom. I now understand that technology is vital to effective instruction on global citizenship. During my New Literacies and Media class, I became familiar with the TPACK framework. Punya Mishra and Matthew Koehler’s (2008) created this model and labeled it technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK). TPACK calls educators to overlap important content, effective pedagogy, and appropriate technology in their instruction. Most importantly, TPACK allows teachers to focus on curriculum as they integrate technology into the classroom. The TPACK Venn diagram and its corresponding supplementary materials served as effective guides for my own technological development. TPACK allowed me to understand my role as an educator in a new way.
My personal knowledge and experience with technology has grown exponentially during my time in graduate school. My Computer Applications and Curriculum Integration class gave me experience with many technological tools that could help facilitate global citizenship education. We worked with Google Maps, Diigo social bookmarks, spreadsheets, ToonDoo, UDL Book Builder, Voicethread, and many other web 2.0 tools. In the New Literacies and Media course, our cool tool blast assignment exposed me to a variety of effective tools that I currently use in my classroom, such as tagxedo, glogster, and audacity. I not only learned how to overlap these new tools with effective pedagogy, but I also began to understand how technology integration aligns with Blooms Revised Taxonomy.
Through my work with innovative technology tools, I become aware of the unprecedented potential for collaboration that new technology provides for classrooms everywhere. During my New Literacies and Media course, I explored this idea through my Project Based Inquiry project. I posed the question, “How can I use primary source material from the American Revolution to connect students with the past through the use of Kidblog and DocsTeach?” I worked with Cheri Lewis and her eighth grade class to answer this question. Although we were not blogging on citizenship in this project, I found blogging to be a powerful tool for collaboration. The Kidblog site added new dimensions to my understanding of collaboration.
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Through my action research process, I found that blogging provides teachers opportunities to connect with foreign classrooms. I concluded that blogging would be an excellent tool to facilitate global citizenship education. My unit plan depended on new media and technology as a way to foster intercultural contact. I planned that students would develop their own perspectives on global citizenship through virtual interaction with students around the world. In order to facilitate this collaboration, I gave teachers options for connecting with foreign classrooms. For example, I suggested the following sites: Global School Net, Epals, Flat Classrooms, and TIGed. Overall, I think that new technology gives students access to valuable intercultural learning experiences, which play a necessary part in the development of 21st century citizenship.