Grounded Technology Integration: Instructional Planning Using Curriculum-Based Activity Type Taxonomies

Technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpck or tpack) – the highly practical professional educational knowledge that enables and supports technology integration – is comprised of teachers’ concurrent and interdependent curriculum content, general pedagogy, and technological understanding. Teachers’ planning – which expresses teachers’ professional knowledge (including tpack) in pragmatic ways -- is situated, contextually sensitive, routinized, and activity-based. To assist with technology integration, therefore, we suggest using what is understood from research about teachers’ knowledge and instructional planning to form an approach to curriculum-based technology integration that is predicated upon teachers combining technologically supported learning activity types selected from content-keyed activity type taxonomies. In this article, we describe this approach to curriculum-based technology integration, illustrating it with overviews of and examples from six curriculum-based learning activity types taxonomies that have been developed to date. We invite our readers to vet and use these materials, which are available on the activity types Wiki (http://activitytypes.wmwikis.net/)