Cooking with TPACK

This week I completed the Cooking with TPACK challenge for my EDU 7714 class. The assignment called for someone to pick a utensil, plate, and bowl, as well as a task for me to complete. I asked my dad for help and he picked a regular bowl, plate, and a chopping knife. He also selected #5 out of the bowl which corresponded to chopping veggies for a veggie tray. Based on my tasked, I was extremely pleased with his choice of a chopping knife because it made cutting through the hard veggies very easy. Had he selected a different utensil it would have made for a much more difficult task. The plate ended up working better than I had expected, but I still would have preferred to have cutting board. The bowl also worked, but it would have been too small had I been planning to cut a larger amount of veggies. The only tool I would have added would have been a peeler, because I feel that I lost a lot of the cucumber when I was trying to peel it with the large chopping knife.

Overall, I felt pretty successful with the process and I felt it definitely connected to what we do as teachers in the classroom. It became pretty clear to me that I could repurpose some of the technology (knife to peeler) but it did not come out as well as if I had been prepared with the right stuff. In the classroom, especially when using more advanced technology, we need to make sure that we as educators are prepared with the right materials and the students are also prepared with the correct materials. This video shows that a task can be completed without being fully prepared with the right tools, but it is definitely much harder and can get frustrating. Allowing students to try new things, but also being prepared with the right tools, technology, and materials, will allow them the best chance for success.