I entered the MET program at UBC with the vague idea of wanting to learn about pedagogy while combining my love of teaching with my interest in technology. This “vague” idea was given a framework in one of the first courses I took in the MET program. One of the first assigned readings introduced me to the TPCK framework (also known as TPACK); in this article, Mishra and Koehler (2006) represent Content Knowledge, Pedagogical Knowledge and Technological Knowledge using overlapping circles in a Venn diagram, and argue that effective teachers need to maximize the area where the three fields overlap.
The authors describe the areas of overlap as areas where knowledge of each field enhances the use of the knowledge of the other field. Thus allowing the teacher to develop the most effective ways of presenting content to students (from a pedagogical and technological perspective).
This ePortfolio is an exploration of how my own TPACK diagram has changed over time. Which learning events and courses helped me develop the different parts of the TPACK diagram, and the extent to which it is now showing an overlap between the different knowledge fields.
These learning events were classified based on how well I felt the content and the assigned projects allowed me to develop the different parts of my TPACK:
- did this course/assignment explore something that can be clearly classified as “Technological Knowledge” or “Pedagogical Knowledge”?
- did this course/assignment allow me to try adapting newly acquired “Technological Knowledge” and/or “Pedagogical Knowledge” to the presentation of my “Content Knowledge”? (ie. improving my teaching materials)
Some courses helped me develop more than one component, and thus are featured in more than one part of the exploration of the framework. There were also other courses which, while valuable and interesting, did not seem to fit well into the framework I chose for this reflection. These are courses like ETEC 500 (Research Methodology in Education) and ETEC 520 (Planning and Managing Technologies in Higher Education) – I found it difficult to classify these, but their artifacts are listed in the UBC Artifacts section of this site to ensure that the whole program is represented.
