The Great Debate

Paradigms are shifts in education.  Paradigms allow us as educators to sit around and debate the changes in education and analyze these shifts for the positives and negatives.  There is always a new way of doing something in education and each time a new idea arises, a debate over its validity and value can emerge amongst professionals.  While the recent paradigm shift toward TPACK may seem important at this time, that doesn't mean that educators will cease to debate its merits before deciding it needs improving or proves to be inadequate as technology and teaching change or evolve.  Before we know it a new paradigm shit will happen.  We know paradigm shifts will happen because critical theory constantly asks any professional to criticize and evaluate their actions. 

To use technology or not, how to use technology and where....more debates for technology and education.  How do we know that technology is effectively being used?  How do we know that students are learning properly using technology?  How do we know anything, unless we take a step back to criticize our methods through the application of critical theory.  We should be asking ourselves if the technology is being used properly, fairly, and in the end examine our ethics.  This great debate over the usage of technology brings us to the importance of developing morals and an ethical code.  Ethics are the code the teachers live by when teaching.  Just like doctors follow the ethical code "Do No Harm" when it comes to their patients, teachers have an ethical responsibility that we are not doing harm to our students education.  The TPACK paradigm show teachers the importance of not only understanding content and how to teach content effectively through our pedagogy, but it emphasizes the importance of understanding the value of technology and how to properly use and implement that technology.  Ethics force teachers and really look at what and how they are teaching students...technology is a tool not the answer.