TPCK Chapter 5: An integrated framework for educating world language teachers

I’m lucky in that my department at Mt. Blue High School is a very tech savvy department.  I have close colleagues to learn from and bounce ideas off of, when it comes to technology.  However, if I were asked to name teachers (other than from the English department) who utilize technology a great deal in their classes, then I would answer “the world language teachers”.  One of our world language teachers is also a half time tech integrator and another teacher is that department heads up the tech department at the high school.  Their department is one that is constantly trying new tech strategies with their students and pushing themselves further to stay up to date with technology.

Email (though some would consider it an older strategy at this point) is still an important way to communicate with students and share information and files.  World language teachers at Mt. Blue use GarageBand and i-Movie to administer tests that assess students ability to speak various languages.  This is a much more productive and efficient way to complete this task compared to the way they use to assess this.  I’m thankful to the world language teachers for sharing this technology with students because now when those students come to my English classroom, many of them already know so much more about these programs than even I do. They are teaching me how to use it!!

This chapter mentioned that teachers need time to acquire knowledge about technology and suggested this be done “within a low anxiety environment”.  I believe this to be a crucial element to getting more teachers to embrace teaching with technology.  I’ve seen workshop days when teachers just get overwhelmed and discouraged at the strategies being shared with them, just because the environment they were in wasn’t conducive to learning.  Breaking teachers up into their comfort levels with technology is one way to keep those environments more “low anxiety”.  (This also helps those of us who are more comfortable with technology feel less frustrated and allows us to still learn new strategies at our own pace.)