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TPACK Scenarios

Scenario A: A 5th grade physical education teacher begins her lesson by reviewing the objectives and essential learnings found in the LPS Curriculum Guide. Among those essential learnings, students should master movements needed to participate in sports and understand the basics of physical fitness. To meet these standards, the teacher has designed the following activities. Prior to exercising, the students enter their heart rate into an online form, which is accessed on a handful of laptops on the bleachers. The online form quickly totals up and averages the class’s “resting” heart rates.
Also before the day’s activity of playing basketball, the teacher demonstrates techniques.   Using a laptop, LCD projector, and Flip Camera, the teacher demonstrates the skill of making a free throw shot using video captures of the students from previous class period. Running the video, narrating the steps, and stopping it at key points, the teacher instructs all the students in the proper technique for shooting free throws.
After this the students break up into random groups and play basketball. At the height of the action, the teacher blows a whistle, inviting the students to take their heart rate. This they do and quickly re-enter the data into the online form anonymously. This teacher totals and averages, and during the cool down stretch, announces the new information comparing the class’s heart rate before and during exercise. Students are prompted to hypothesize why the heart rate went up and how long it took to go up. Students are asked to make predictions about activities and what their heart would do, such as during running, walking, sitting, etc. Class ends with a quick video (captured via the Flip) of students playing basketball from that period and actions are positively noted and highlighted.
Scenario B: High School Social Studies, American History II, 9th graders.
Using the LPS Curriculum Guide as a starting point, our subject  has decided that the learner objectives to:
  • Gather, analyze, and reconcile historical information, including contradictory data,
  • Analyze and categorize the relationship between economic factors and social and political policies as they influence historical events,
  • Use both chronological order and the duration of events to detect and analyze patterns of historical continuity and change
which will be the focal points in the World War II unit. His class begins with students filing past the teacher, who greets them all by name. Students glance to the whiteboard and see that a “netbooks out” note is penned in. They grab their assigned computer and boot up while waiting for the bell. The teacher fires up his projector, and there, on the whiteboard, is a URL pointing to their day’s reading assessment. The teacher uses an Online Form to pose a series of questions from last night’s reading. The questions cover a range of question types, from recall questions to sequencing of events, allowing students to show their comprehension. It takes just a couple of minutes for the kids to respond to the questions, especially the multiple choice ones. Students know that this is a formative assessment, and will be used by the teacher for grouping and re-teaching purposes.   The last question in the form is an open-ended response designed to be a quick write/ writing to learn opportunity. This teacher has previously used clickers, and believes that while they are effective, they are too limited in the range of responses available to the students. Besides, he’d prefer to use fewer pieces of hardware, and the netbook computers will be in use the rest of the period.
Next, he breaks the kids into their groups to continue their projects. One group of kids is analyzing the speeches made by world leaders for rhetorical elements. They are doing this by getting .mp3’s from various sites , downloading them into a sound editing program like Audacity, and providing analysis and commentary within the speech itself. The final products, if they are good enough, will be posted to the class wiki. Another group of kids is getting historical newspaper headlines and articles from June 1944 and comparing the coverage in them of D-Day. As needed, kids are translating the articles from French, German and Russian using Google Translate. They quickly note the difference in the amount, accuracy, and tone of the event’s coverage, sparking debate, analysis, and hypothesis. They capture their notes in a word processor, and must come to a consensus on their notes before the end of the period.
Other students are writing first person diary entries of key world leaders, referencing textual support from their class materials, primary resources from academic databases, and their textbook. They use a writer’s workshop model in moving toward publication on the class wiki.
The final group of students has taken over the teacher’s projector and is proposing alternative landing sites for the D-Day invasion. To punctuate their theories, students consult Google Earth, tide charts and moon phases from Wolfram Alpha, and historical maps. They gather the Google Earth image projected on the dry erase board, and like high school football coaches, draw arrows, plot movements, and project victories. These students are making  files of their proposed battle plans, and supporting their theories with links, citations, and textual references. Files are posted to the wiki for review and feedback.
The teacher? He’s circling the room, having individual conversations with students on the results of the formative assessment. He banters with kids, asking clarifying questions to groups and providing feedback on their progress to date. With a few minutes to go in the period, he asks the students to consult their project rubric and complete an online exit slip in the form of an email to him, analyzing progress to the learning goal. These, in conjunction with the formative assessment, he’ll use to revise tomorrow’s lesson. With a minute to go, kids log out, power their machines down, and return them to the cart. There is a clear sense to the kids that the period went by too quickly, and students discuss how they’ll get on the wiki tonight to develop their work. One remembers that he has a great grandfather who was in World War Two; maybe he’ll call him tonight about Skyping into the class….
Scenario C: In an 8th grade Language Arts classroom, the teacher is a huge fan of the Beat Movement in American Poetry. To celebrate the period, the teacher has set up the following assignment: Students are to write a poem, and then use free, online podcasting software to create an audio file. The requirements of the podcast (audio file) are the following:
  • Must use an intro piece of music to precede the music.
  • Must include three or four sound effects.
  • Must include a closing piece of music to follow the narration.
Students will then play their podcasts in the classroom, while bringing in cookies and juice. Lights will be dimmed and students are encouraged to play the part by wearing black turtlenecks and berets. Students will listen to each other’s work and applaud and snap their fingers in appreciation.
Scenario D: In our 7th grade science class, the teacher is teaching one of the students’ favorite units, the grasshopper dissection. For this lab, the students are to meet the essential learnings specified by the LPS Curriculum Guides:
1.1 Recognize that there are levels of organization within multi-cellular organisms: (Target)
• cells
• tissues
• organs
• organ systems
Students are really excited to explore the grasshopper, and they love using the scalpels. They huddle around the teacher, watching him model the cuts and procedures, which they then run back to their stations and reproduce. Students move back and forth to get to the same place that the teacher is at. As they proceed in their dissection, students take notes under the two line method (Cornell notes) wherein they jot an observation and then post a reflection /categorization of the notes. All throughout the dissection, students are asked to consider if they are seeing tissues, organs, or organ systems. Student groups must discuss the question, come to a consensus, and share their answer with the class. A lot is going on—physical dissection, note-taking, small group discussion, and whole class instruction. Time is flying, and off task behavior is minimal due to the snappy pace of the lesson and the amount of engagement with the lesson. The exit slip for this lesson is a note card with a picture of an opened up grasshopper, and students need to quickly jot down whether they see a cell, tissue, organ or organ system. The teacher will collect this data to get a sense of where kids are at, and will plan students’ groupings, focused Tier One re-teachings, and intervention as needed.
For homework, students are to really stretch their brains and define the levels of organization within multi-cellular organisms. Some students are using graphic organizers to answer that prompt, some will use a multi-paragraph essay, and some are drawing annotated pictures. Students must use their own words, and know that this essential learning will be on the unit test.
Lesson adapted from Littleton Public Schools TPACK game
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Return to TPaCK And SAMR Page
TPACK Scenarios
SAMR Exploration