ITEC 2011

I could use many words to describe my experience at ITEC this year, but I am only going to choose the most important one....life-changing. Spending three days with like-minded educators that share the same passion for technology and education gave me the inspiration to continue pushing for technology integration at my building. But, the more life-changing experience happened in a break out session where I met Dr. Punya Mishra. He introduced TPACK, Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge, a theory of education technology integration that takes into account the teacher's understanding of content, pedagogy and technology. I have included a short video, describing the basic belief system of TPACK. In the session that I attended, TPACK and Creativity in the Classroom, Punya Mishra discussed the importance of creativity, not only the creation of something new, but the idea of repurposing a tool for a new task. For example, what teachers are doing now with technology; we are taking web 2.0 tools that may not have been designed or even thought of as useful in education and making them common tools in our room. In my opinion, this is what makes technology so engaging & useful. We can make it into whatever we want it to be for us.

Now onto to the life-changing part...I will be graduating in May from UNI and have been searching for a doctoral program that fit my ideologies & my needs as a working mother. I found just that at ITEC and am in the process of registering for the hybrid online doctoral program at Michigan State. This program is ran by Mishra & a colleague, Dr. Robin Dickson. This program is just what I have been looking for. It is well-respected, focuses on technology and a majority of it is online.