TPACK and Global Learning

What is Global Education?

Global education extends the walls of the typical classroom. It exposes children to other ideas, communities, cultures and children from around the world. Global education is a teaching tool that provides a real world, authentic, learning experience at a global level.

Global education can reinforce the learning that students have acquired about cultures and promote understanding of diversity, including other histories, other customs, and new world perspectives. Similarly, in this learning environment, students are also able to examine the commonalities that tie them to the rest of the world.

Teachers can participate in global education through the use of technology that allows their classrooms to connect to other classrooms globally through collaborative projects. What results from this process is a more well rounded, prepared and exposed citizen of the world.

Participation in a global collaboration provides an authentic and safe learning environment for culturally diverse students to learn more about themselves and others throughout the world. These opportunities provide more than just learning about specific course content; they include opportunities to instill manners, learn a different language, research a new location and its people, familiarize with another culture, understand unfamiliar barriers toward success or education, or think about the political and religious implications on communication, education, and success.

What is TPACK?

T: Technology

P: Pedagogy

A: and

CK: Content Knowledge

Basically, it is the framework for what supports global education. It is the, “understanding of the complexity of relationships among students, teachers, content, technologies, and practices” (Archambault and Crippen). Without any of these areas, the global learning environment will diminish. Technology makes knowledge available at the stroke of a key, pedagogy encourages learner collaboration, and content knowledge is shared and built upon. “As we build communities of teachers and students who collaborate globally to learn within real world contexts and issues of importance, we have the greatest hope of making this world a better and more positively sustainable place now and in the future” (Teacher's Guide to International Collaboration on the Internet).

How do Teachers Design and Develop Instructional Practices that Integrate TPACK to Engage Learners within a Global Learning Environment?

Generally speaking, student engagement is the backbone of all real learning. Generally, if teachers use collaborative pedagogy that encourages active student engagement and technology to teach content knowledge, there is an increased chance that students will want to learn and feel included in the process.

It is important to note that one of the most vital components of a teacher’s pedagogy is the ability to foresee pitfalls in the learning process and plan activities that minimize these disturbances; however, this is, at times, difficult because student’s knowledge, especially in the realm of technology, often surpasses that of the instructor. The National Technology Plan released in January, 2005, went so far as to admit that “today’s students, of almost any age, are far ahead of their teachers in computer literacy. They prefer to access subject information on the Internet, where it is more abundant, more accessible, and more up to date.” Imagine the difference now in 2011.

We can engage students in global learning through global projects.

For example:

· engage students to discuss common topics among their global peers

· write about something they know and are interested in and share via e-mail with other children

· write essays about the laws that exist in their life and respond to other’s writings from around the world

· share their favorite stories or their favorite activities to another “buddy” in another country through technology

· create a type of game and play it online with their new global friends, such as describing a picture and that the partner must draw

· read a fairy tale (ex. the American Cinderella and the Chinese Cinderella story) and then compare and contrast the stories with oral, written, or visual depictions of their findings

· let students “explore” a globe or map or watch a news story to determine which country or culture they would like to learn more about, and then participate in some of the more specific activities listed above.

Tools and Websites for Educators:

Video and voice communication tools:
www.skype.com

Educator ideas, lessons, and strategies:
http://www.globaleducation.edna.edu.au/globaled/page1.html

Global projects to join:
http://www.globaleducation.edna.edu.au/globaled/go/pid/3533

Citations:

Archambault, L., & Crippen, K. (2009). Examining TPACK among K-12 online distance educators in the United States Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 9(1). Retrieved from http://www.citejournal.org/vol9/iss1/general/article2.cfm

Cooney, et. al. (2011) Wiki Page: Retrieved from https://etcgroup2.wikispaces.com/Global+Learning

National Educational Technology Plan 2004: Toward a new golden age in american education--how the internet, the law and today's students are revolutionizing

expectations. (January 2005). Ed.gov. U.S. Department of Education website.

Retrieved from

http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/os/technology/plan/2004/index.html

United States Department of Education (2009). Teacher's Guide to International Collaboration on the Internet. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/teachers/how/tech/international/index.html