The Tech Savvy Teacher

For my science challenge, I used principles we learned about TPACK to better present a lesson I could teach to a third grade class.  The content I focused on in my lesson was from the Utah State Core Objective 2.  In this objective, students learn how to classify living and non-living things in an environment.  The criteria that the UEN Website gives to classify an organism as living is that it has to be able to grow, move, and reproduce.  

The pedagogy aspect of this TPACK lesson comes in that to be able to teach effectively, a teacher must use their environment to their advantage.  Taking pictures of the environment around or in the school takes only a little time before you can again gather your class to discuss their findings.  The technology used in the lesson was to use digital cameras to obtain data and information.  The great thing about using pictures as data for an experiment is that the data does not change.  It is a constant variable that the class is able to refer to during discussion and it helps the visual learners in the classroom make a connection with data that they can see.  Putting it all together was not as difficult as it seemed to me at first.  I think that that is an important lesson for me to learn as a future teacher.  Even though I do not have an extensive background in using technology, I can still apply technology techniques to make the learning atmosphere of my classroom up to date.  The students feel ownership for the data if they are able to take the pictures of the data themselves.  I really enjoyed seeing and applying what I have learned about TPACK into creating a lesson that is realistic to use in my future classroom.