"Tools That Are Cool For School"

The article is called "Too Cool for School? No Way! Using the TPACK Framework: You Can Have Your Hot Tools and Teach with Them, Too" and it is by Punya Mishra and Matthew Koehler from May 2009.

The overall message of this article is explain that even though technology is innovative and popular, it doesn't necessarily always make it an educational technology. The authors discuss ways to alter and change technology to make it fit and work better in the classroom and benefit both teachers and students. One statement from the article that is important is the idea that "technologies have the potential to fundamentally change the way we think about teaching and learning." The article also discusses the idea that "as educators, our job involves teaching (pedagogy) students specific subject matter (content)." The authors also bring up other important ideas about teaching that I found very interesting and helpful as I begin to prepare for my future as an educator. The article states that "teaching is not a process of picking up a few instructional techniques and applying them," but that "teaching requires the transformation of content in ways that make it intellectually accessible to students." All of these statements regarding teaching and technology are very interesting to consider.

However, the most valuable part of the article is the tools that are described on how to repurpose technology in the classroom. The article suggests that there is a need to repurpose technology because “most technologies that teachers use typically have not been designed for educational purposes.” This is very crucial to understand and I think that if teachers want to incorporate technology into their classroom, it is important to use the right tools that will work best for their students.

The article describes three examples of technology that can be repurposed for educational ends and they are micro-blogging, visual search engines, and music DJ software. The idea of micro-blogging is to complement face-to-face discussions in a classroom and participants share short messages—140 characters or less—with each other using a micro-blogging website. Next, the idea of specialized search engines are used to help students understand intertextuality, which is the concept that texts often refer to each other in complex and intricate ways to create webs of meaning, and students use these search engines to find web-pages containing a target phrase they have chosen. Last, freely available DJ software, such as trakAxPC, can be used to teach mathematical concepts such as ratios, fractions, and percentages. According to the article, “what makes this a powerful lesson is that students actually get to manipulate the trakAxPC software to help them describe and explain ratios and percentages” and also “this is a powerful way to bring mathematics alive to students in an intrinsically motivating manner.” Through this article, I really was able to learn a lot about being realistic in my classroom and finding ways to use technology that will actually benefit my students and their learning.

In the end, the article ended with a powerful statement that said “teachers need to develop a willingness to play with technologies and an openness to building new experiences for students so that fun, cool tools can be educational.” I will definitely use the tools that were given in the article in my future classroom to guide my students with different discussions and to follow along with the different subjects we are studying like grammar, literature, science, and math to name a few. Through this article I have learned that it is not enough to just bring technology into the classroom, but you must intentionally find ways to make it very useful and beneficial and then that is when your students will really be inspired and be changed in their learning.