As many teachers have experienced, deciding to use more technology-related tools and materials in your teaching can be overwhelming. Where do I start? How can I find a way to use technology that is more rooted in what I’m trying to accomplish with my students? How do I let go of the reins and introduce technology in a way that I can moderate my students’ progress?

In the journal article, Instructional Planning Activity Types as Vehicles for Curriculum-Based TPACK Development , Judi Harris & Mark Hofer, professors in the School of Education at William and Mary in Virginia, state that a teacher’s ability to integrate educational technology is greatly influenced by three factors: teacher content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and technological knowledge. If you imagine a Vinn diagram where each of these factors overlap with one another, this area of expertise can be referred to as TPACK.

While each of these factors independently can be areas for professional development, the confluence of all three of these areas results in a special type of training and skill base that greatly plays into how a teacher goes about deciding how to use technology in their teaching.

So great, now that you’ve got your TPACK hat on, what next? Thankfully, Harris and Hofer have provided some guidelines to help out. They suggest that the best way to go about integrating technology is not to start with the technology first, but last after learning goals and teaching approaches have been defined. They offer a step-by-step process that gives teachers a context to determine when to use something like a blog, a wiki, a podcast or other means of technology in a meaningful and purposeful way:

1. Making practical pedagogical decisions about the nature of the learning experience

2. Selecting and sequencing appropriate activity types to combine to form the learning experience

3. Selecting formative and summative assessment strategies that will reveal what and how well students are learning

4. Selecting tools and resources that will best help students to benefit from the learning experience being planned

To help in this selection process, Harris and Hofer have defined different activity types that help categorize what type of learning and learning approaches are to be accomplished for a given topic. This helps to break down the process and give teachers a systemized way at looking at aspects of content, teaching approaches, and the use of technology in a more coherent manner. What’s even more interesting is how you can move students from gathering information to higher order activities of synthesis and interpretation by combining a series of these activity types and how technology can create the means of getting to these higher order processes in the form of an iMovie, or a podcast, recorded interview or other forms of content created and reviewed by students.

You can read the full article, including a list of activity types and suggested teaching and technology approaches on a wiki the authors have created. There are also activity types specific to science , math, K-6 literacy, and other subject areas.