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=**Portfolio Homepage** = Context Statement Our Lady's College is //a Catholic Secondary College for girls administered by Brisbane Catholic Education. Founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph in 1964, the College takes as their motto and challenge, “Ad Altiora” (Ever Higher). We follow the example of Saint Mary of the Cross MacKillop and hope to inspire in our girls the spirit of justice, compassion, integrity and service. Our College has a friendly and caring environment that values tradition, excellence and community.//

//As Assistant to the Principal - Administration, my role involves the oversight of the curriculum offerings across the college, the timetabling, reporting processes (both student reports and mandatory government requirements) and curriculum development for senior, junior and VET offerings towards an Australian Curriculum in a 1 to 1 laptop environment.//

//I currently teach Religious Education in Year 10 and senior Mathematics classes (both Mathematics A and B).//

Belief Statement The process of learning is a "messy",(Koehler & Mishra, 2008) task involving a knowledge of content specific to various fields of expertise, a knowledge of a range of tools and the experience to use the right one for the task, and a deep knowledge about the best way to pass on this information so that it is useful to others.

The process of learning involves an interaction with the learner and the content itself. Central to this interaction is the knowledge of appropriate and effective building methods which are derived from a knowledge of the learner and their needs and learning styles. Once we understand the balance of what there is to learn and how best do you learn it, we can employ the tools on hand that best facilitate that knowledge building.

Obviously a knowledge of the available tools and their strengths and weaknesses for particular tasks is necessary to allow them to be efficiently used. The nexus of having the right tool to teach this particular person this specific content allows for an effect and rewarding learning experience.

But learning is more than just this. It is also about having inspiration, creativity and purpose on hand so that the learning experience has reason and context for the learner. It's a little bit like having a toaster, bread and the electricity, but not actually being in the mood for toast. I believe that the role of the teacher is to make their students hungry and to make the toasting an enjoyable experience and the toast satisfying. They have to be able to sell the meal, teach the students how to savour the flavours and, eventually, cook for themselves.

Teachers must have the experience to know what works. Their pedagogical knowledge is essential to be able to choose the correct process for the particular group of students. Most of these processes transcend the limits of particular content areas (such as general investigative processes) but some are quite specific to topics (training high divers or musicians etc) and the knowledge of using the best pedagogy for a situation can be the difference between engagement or disengagement for some students and the difference between compliance and inspirational creativity for others. As previously stated, the nexus of content and pedagogy is the goal but teachers are, "designers of the total PACKage!" (Koehler & Mishra, 2008).

I believe that it is important to inspire teachers to want to take their place in the cultural change, (Loveless, 2008) that is sweeping our profession. I certainly try to be inspiring for my staff in the use of ICT. Having the right tool for the job makes a huge difference. It allows us to produce excellent results with the materials and can make the task more enjoyable. There are times, however when the tools take the possibilities of an activity to a whole new level. For example, surgeons have always had surgical instruments to assist in their tasks, but the miracle of microsurgery has only come about because of the technological breakthroughs. Similarly, the thoughtful use of technology and the development of technology for specific purposes can also have a transcending effort on the teaching and learning process.

The careful and balanced use of embedded technology to support carefully planned pedagogy will ensure that the learning of content is maximized. Indeed, the selection of the technology because it lends itself to the desired pedagogy and content, and the selection of the pedagogy because of the available technology is at the heart of effective TPACK. In essence, I feel that we should be educating our students to be as fluent with as many varied forms of technology as possible now that we have overcome the issue of access. (Resnick, 2002)

Digital technologies allow for fast access to information, communication to small or large groups, organisational assistance, disability support – the list goes on forever. Digital technologies will continue to develop incredible ways of transforming our content, pedagogy and the combination activities between these. Teachers can no longer afford to ignore the benefits of using these valuable tools. They must seek ways of training students to be highly skilled in the use of ICTs. (MCEETYA, 2008)

In the examples provided in the components, I have tried to practically demonstrate my beliefs. My use of different analogies in this writing conveys the belief that there is a perfect analogy to describe particular situations but you don’t have to keep using it when the situation changes. Similarly, the abundance of technologies allow teachers to use the perfect tool without being locked into just one.

In Component One, the students get their notes from a shared OneNote location, sometimes a wiki, sometimes from a Prezi presentation and, while the activity could really be completed in student workbooks using a black pen, the benefits of using Blogger for the activity allow a reflective dimension that would be lessened by any other technology. The use of glogster.com for the “textual features” activity would similarly have been less effective if another method was employed. The use of these technologies give the opportunities to bring these biblical ideas into a technologically modern context.

In the second component, students could simply work as usual and receive the results they deserve, but the connectedness with the content, the community of learners all doing “their bit” for the good of the class, and the satisfaction of knowing that what was once a weakness in a student’s learning, is now a reliable asset because of their wiki presentation to others would all have simply not happened – and not been missed.

In the staff presentation, using the traditional Powerpoint presentation could have allowed for my speech to have been presented but the messages about assistive technologies, collaborative possibilities, creativity and the differences between prezi and powerpoint would have been lost. The result? – a less than inspiring talk about using the right technology to inspire your students. Instead, I hope to present a range of possibilities that are relevant to a range of people in my audience - hence the example using prezi to point to TED.com to demonstrate Gapminder.

I believe that my examples provide evidence that technology is selected carefully to support the pedagogy and to make the learning more meaningful for the students. The technology allows me to achieve far more than the teaching of the content. TPACK is not so much about fixing problems, but making what was once not possible, happen with confidence.

References - click here

Support Statement For support statement from line manager - please click here