The prospect of using technology in my future classroom to enhance my teaching is pretty daunting, mostly because I have no idea what kinds of tech services and resources are available or how they might actually increase student learning and productivity rather than just being a gimmick or a distraction. While almost every student has a smartphone in his or her pocket, which can be used in a mind-boggling variety of ways to create meaningful and engaging educational experiences, I have observed too many classes in which students simply ignore what's happening in the classroom in order to text their friends or play games. A ban on cellphones in the classroom wastes the opportunity to use the tech readily available to us, but as teachers we need some help in harnessing the power of tech to help engage and inspire our students. SAMR and TPACK are both frameworks to help teachers think about how technology can be integrated into pedagogy, and they are useful in different ways.
SAMR is a stage-based model that stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition. It is usually laid out in a linear way, like a ladder. There are four stages, beginning with 'substitution' and the bottom, and progressing to 'redefinition' at the top.
Redefinition: tech allows us to do completely new things, impossible without it
Modification: we can use tech to redesign the task
Augmentation: tech allows us to do the same task, but with improvements or additions
Substitution: tech is used to do a task in pretty much the same way we would do without it
This linear model sees redefinition as the aim of using technology in the classroom. Technology provides us with the power and freedom to completely redefine what can be done in the classroom, opening up a whole world of learning opportunities that just didn't exist when most of us went to school. The future is here, and teachers can and should move with the times and embrace the opportunities that today's tech provides.
The problem with this linear model is that not everything needs to be redefined - sometimes the lower stages are enough. Striving for innovation in every task puts unnecessary pressure on teachers to overhaul their teaching when it may not have a whole lot of benefits. Additionally, different teachers and students have varying comfort levels with technology use, just as they have different levels of competence teaching and learning without technology. Carl Hooker re-imagines the SAMR ladder as a swimming pool in
this excellent blog post, which is far more helpful and reassuring, to the teacher contemplating introducing more tech into her lessons.
This vision of SAMR allows the class to paddle in the baby pool of substitution together before venturing into the shallow end of augmentation. Once the teacher and students are able to make use of technology in a few different ways without distraction or danger, they are ready to be let loose into the deep end of modification, and finally redefinition. This vision of the class and teacher progressing together accounts takes into consideration everyone's inexperience with technology in the classroom. Although today's students may be more tech literate than the average teacher was at their age, they still need to learn about the specific tools and services available for classroom use, and the possibilities that these tools open up. The swimming pool analogy allows for free movement between the stages, and reminds us that technology is not the only way to teach and learn - we need to include pool breaks, too.
While SAMR provides some ideas for what technology can do in a classroom, TPACK show how technology, content knowledge and pedagogy can and should interact.
 |
| Reproduced by permission of the publisher, © 2012 by tpack.org |
TPACK reminds us that there are three important forces at work while we teach - our knowledge of the content area and what we want students to actually know; our skills in teaching and designing learning experiences for the students; and our knowledge of technology. Ideally, we should aim for an overlap of technology, content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge; that is, we should be designing tasks that effectively use technology to teach relevant content. This idea helps to keep teachers grounded, and reminds us that using technology in the classroom is a waste of time unless it is connected to the content we are dealing with and/or some pedagogical aim. Technology should not be an end in itself in the classroom - it should be a tool that furthers the learning of our students.
While the complete integration of content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and technological knowledge is a noble aim, I find TPACK less helpful than SAMR for actually imagining what technology can do in the classroom. It provides aims, but less guidance about what achievement of those aims might look like.
TPACK and SAMR as frameworks for technology use in education have their uses in different ways - while TPACK illustrates the interplay between different aspects of teaching, and provides teachers with an aim for integrating these elements, SAMR shows us some possibilities of how we can use technology to support student learning. Regardless of which framework we are using when thinking about introducing new technology into our classrooms, it is important to remember that tech tools are only as good as the purposes we are using them for, and that pushing technology into a class before we are comfortable with it will not result in the enhanced learning experiences we are hoping for.
