5. Marine Pollution: Lesson plans using Mindmeister and Thinglink

How does the use of technology make this lesson more inclusive?

Making a Mindmeister will help visual students to understand the topic better. When working with Thinglink students are able to choose if they prefer to record their voice or write a text, this is really helpful to include SEN students with speaking or writing difficulties. When reading the articles student with reading difficulties are allowed to use Natural Reader, this is a great tool that supports students with reading and writing difficulties since it transforms text to speech easily

To read more about our work, please visit our PLEs: Valentina’s PLE and Roxana’s PLE

Theoretical frameworks

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy, devised by Andrew Churches, is an updated version of the original Bloom's Taxonomy and creates a hierarchy of learning activities in a digital environment. As stated by Sneen, the purpose of Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy is to inform instructors of how to use technology and digital tools to facilitate student learning experiences and outcomes. The focus should not be on the tools themselves, but rather on how the tools can act as vehicles for transforming student thinking at different levels.

This framework posits the existence of 6 levels of cognition expressed through verbs: remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate and create. These levels are dependent, which means that students will not be able to create if they do not understand first.

During the lessons plans above students will go throw all the stages:

• Remember and Understand: Students will read some articles about pollution. they will need to remember and understand the most important information provided.

• Applying: students will create a map mind in lesson 1

• Analyzing : students will have to answer some questions in lesson 2 that requires to analyze the information

• Evaluation: they will have to evaluate all the information that they have to draft the main idea that they want to communicate in the thinglink activity.

• Creating: Students will create an interactive image of a whale where they will add speech or text that a whale could say if it would be able to speak, to convince people to protect them.

The TPACK Framework

The TPACK Framework was introduced by Punya Mishra and Matthew J. Koehler of Michigan State University in 2006 and attempts to identify the nature of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge. The acronym TPACK stands for Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge. The overlap of these three categories helps students in their learning process

Pedagogical Knowledge (PK) – Teachers’ deep knowledge about the processes and practices or methods of teaching and learning. (Koehler & Mishra, 2009).

Technology Knowledge (TK) – Knowledge about certain ways of thinking about, and working with technology, tools and resources.(Koehler & Mishra, 2009).

Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) – Transformation of the subject matter for teaching. (Koehler & Mishra, 2009).

In our lesson plan, students have to use Thinkling to create an interactive image that gives information about what people should do to protect whales. Without technology knowledge, without pedagogical knowledge and without content knowledge this activity would be impossible to do.

In this sense, the activity can be said to be considered an example of TPACK (Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge)