case study 1 examplar

The activity
This is a report of a forum set up for student teachers. In brief a joint blog was set up to enable students to share resources, discuss ideas and ‘chat’ during their PGCE course. This was regularly but not intensively used messages (n = 365 over a 32 week period), a feature of the messages was their length (mean length n = 430 words) , their more formal style but also a balance between administrative, social and teaching and learning functions.

What did I know about the topic (in my case learning to teach)?
On the face of it I did not think there was much in the way of subject knowledge I needed to think about to set this up. However on reflection my subject knowledge in this area included awareness that professionalism invovled a willingness to work with others in a community of practice and the idea that learning to teaching is not confined to acquiring new knowledge and skills but gaining a sense of ‘ identity’ as a teacher. This is a challenge for many new teachers.

What did I know about the technology?
I knew that the technology would allow anywhere anytime access and I knew that it would enable a more reflective style of communication. The software was fiddly but I knew enough about creating entries and administering entries to get started. I knew the organising of permissions is very unsatisfactory within the software.

About pedagogy?
I knew there are constraints in all settings on levels of collaboration and cooperation between learners. Blogging would need to be modelled in some way and I knew the importance of assessment led activity as there were too many demands made on student teachers to engage in activity outside of what was required. I knew that the structure was important but that the students should be encouraged to go beyond what they formally had to do or this would be a superficial form of collaboration. I knew that students might get confused between being personal and being excessively personal, raising issues as to what was appropriate in the forum.

So was this an example of TPaCK?
I think the activity demonstrated good TPaCK as it was based on a developed concept of learning to teach, paid attention to the pedagogical understanding of how new teachers behave and used knowledge of the technology to do what was not available otherwise. However not all was satisfactory, participation was uneven and if doing this again I would offer, with permission, more exemplars of how blogs could be used.
How did this compare with the wider literature?
I only had time to read one article, this was Irwin, B. and Hramiak, A. (2010) A discourse analysis of trainee teacher identity in online discussion forums, Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 19, 3, 361-377, a study of pre service teachers in Sheffield. This rehearsed similar arguments to mine for using blogs but took a more sociological angle on learning to teach. I know their other work has looked hard at the constraints on teachers in using new technology in comparison in this study the use of technology appeared more accessible. Methodologically I was uncertain that content analysis could be used in to gauge ‘sense of identity’ and felt that interviews would have been more suitable.