Case Study 3 in relation to TPCK and SAMR model

In this case study, five and six year old children from Turkey worked on a year long, cross curricular story writing project. Students would consolidate all the vocabulary they learned  by creating an audio enabled  book based on two imaginary characters. This book would be published, therefore they would be able to share it with their families, their friends and the world. Students were partly able to carry out this ambitious project owing to the fact that they had institutional support: it was a cross curricular project and other teacher  such as practitioners from the art and ICT departments were involved. If we take into account the TPCK model, which describes the competences a teacher should have in order to use technology to enhance learning, the English teacher in charge of carrying out this project had the technological, pedadgogical and content knowledge for this task and knew how to combine them. As regards technology, this teacher had knowledge of technological tools tha enabled students to create this book: the used audio recorders on the computers and created the book using Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 to publish it as and e-book. Another key area of this model is pedagogy. In this respect, it can be said that this teacher had both generic pedagogical knowledge and pedgogical content knowledge, that is knowledge of the pedagogy of foreign languages. This can be seen in the fact that he used to teach English through fun based activities, which are motivating for children this age. It is worth mentioning that the use of technology in this Case Study was not a purpose in itself , it was a mean to an end;  the purpose of this project was to consolidate students learning.

The  use of technology in this project can also be discussed in terms of the SARM model.The SARM model provides a useful framework to help teacher integrate technology in education at different levels. this model identifies four levels at which technology can be used:

• Substitution: Technology is used as a substitute with no functional change.
• Augmentation: Again technology acts as a substitute, but there are some functional improvements.
• Modification: Technology allows for a significant task design.
• Redefinition: tech allows the creation of new tasks, previously unthinkable. 

In this case, I believe that technology has redefined teaching and learning; the teacher played a facilitator role given that she provided the framework to achieve this goal. As regards students, they were able perform a task that they had never done before. On the whole, I believe this project was motivating for students and in some way, because of the nature of the project, for the  teacher since she had  had to redefine her  roles; instead of being the center of the class and the source of knowlege, she had to help students organize their work and make this experience memorable.