Online Instructional Strategies for Enhancing Teachers' TPACK: Experiences, Discourse, and Critical Reflection

Introduction

The twenty-first century ushered in the explosion of digital technologies significantly changing how people interact, communicate and collaborate. With affordable digital applications, school-aged students have gained access to technologies for use as classroom learning tools. The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE, 2016) Student Standards describes students learning using digital technologies to construct knowledge, identifying and solving problems, engaging in computational thinking, and communicating creatively while collaborating and working in teams. Essentially, they learn in an environment where they “think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors” (Prensky, 2001). They learn by actively doing rather than watching, taking advantage of the capabilities of new and more accessible digital technologies.

These new digital technologies require that in-service teachers be prepared to implement pedagogical strategies in vastly different ways than the predominantly teacher-directed pedagogies of the twentieth century. They must identify, orchestrate and manage activities to guide students in working in teams, using technologies as integral learning tools in the activities. These instructional tasks call for teachers who have knowledge that dynamically integrates the content, pedagogy and technologies (Koehler & Mishra, 2006). This ability describes this knowledge as Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (Angeli & Valanides, 2005, 2009; Mishra & Koehler, 2006; Niess, 2005), or TPACK (Thompson & Mishra, 2007). Clarifying this teacher knowledge, Niess (2005) highlights four components of TPACK as an integration of teachers’:

• 1.

  Overarching conceptions about the purposes for incorporating technology in teaching subject matter topics;

• 2.

  Knowledge of students’ understandings, thinking and learning in subject matter topics with technology;

• 3.

  Knowledge of instructional strategies and representations for teaching and learning subject matter topics with technologies;

• 4.

  Knowledge of curriculum and curricular materials that integrate technology in learning and teaching subject matter topics. (Niess, Ronau, Shafer, Driskell, Harper, Johnston, Browning, Özgün-Koca, & Kersaint, 2009, p. 8)

A dynamic equilibrium among content, pedagogy and technology knowledge develops through teachers’ strategic thinking of when, where, and how to guide students’ learning of the content with the technologies. The process requires far more than simply adding knowledge of a technology to the mix of the content and the pedagogy. Here, teachers’ thoughts and efforts for integrating technological knowledge with content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge unifies the ideas into a new element, such that it no longer separates or differentiates among the different knowledge bases of content, technology and pedagogy. TPACK proposes a complex interaction as:

In essence, a teacher’s TPACK is a transformed knowledge, a new knowledge element, where the different knowledge subsets are no longer separated but instead are immersed into a singular knowledge framework.