Introduction

This website has been created as a resource to be used by you in the design and making of your own educational videos. The resource will cover everything from technological requirements to offering a toolbox of resources to support you in taking those first steps in making well designed and impactful videos for your teaching. 

Our second goal, in establishing this website, is for you to use this as a space to form a community of practice where you can share your ideas, questions and projects with like minded ed. tech. enthusiasts. 

We believe that the TPACK model can be used to explain why a resource like this plays an integral part in developing the necessary expertise to enable you to utilize technology effectively in teaching.

Figure 1: TPACK framework illustrating the overlap between various areas of knowledge that educators typically draw from in their teaching with technology.

TPACK is a framework proposing three knowledge areas relevant to teaching with technology. These areas are Technology, Pedagogy and Content Knowledge. Mishra and Koehler (2006) illustrated the overlap of these areas in a Venn diagram to emphasize that teachers do not just draw knowledge from separate areas such as content or technology when they teach but rather use their knowledge in an integrated way to better engage their students. Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PC) refers to knowledge that educators possess on how to best teach specific content to students. Educators have knowledge on both content, as subject specialists, but also knowledge on how to best teach or transfer this knowledge to others. This differentiates educators from those that might only have content knowledge by being subject specialists eg. scientists or mathematicians.

The overlap area of Technological Content Knowledge (TC) can be seen as the way in which technology influences how content is taught. An example of this is how the use of digital graphing software has almost entirely replaced the art of learning how to draw graphs by hand. The third overlap represented in Figure 1 is Technological Pedagogical Knowledge (TP) and acknowledges the effect of technology on pedagogy. An example of this is the growing tendency of digital games, apps, online tests etc. that are being integrated into teaching.

The final overlap between all these areas is Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK). This area of overlap, illustrated in Figure 1, is the unique knowledge that educators hold that allow them to effectively employ technology in their teaching.

By using this website you will learn how to make your own videos and therefore expand your Technological knowledge. However, more importantly it will also allow you the opportunity to combine all of your competencies within the different knowledge spheres to reach the TPACK overlap ensuring that you make use of technology in the most impactful way in your teaching.