TPACK

 TPACK

Early in 2001, Pierson began to use the concept of TPCK. Pierson’s TPCK referred to “Technology assisting PCK”. It was a multifaceted set of knowledge and skills required by a teacher to teach a specific subject for a specific grade. In 2005, Niess negated Pierson’s definition of TPCK and suggested that TPCK was not only a kind of knowledge and skill but also a kind of dynamic knowledge including developing subject knowledge, technology knowledge and teaching and learning knowledge and a kind of creative thinking on how technology-supported teaching and learning. Niess changed TPCK from a static concept to a dynamic one (Xu, Liu, Wang, & Zhang, 2013). At the same year, Koehler and Mishra also put forward the concept of TPCK (Koehler & Mishra, 2005b) on the basis of Shulman’s PCK (Shulman, 1986, 1987). In 2006, Koehler and Mishra introduced TPCK in detail in the published article “Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge” (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). Technology knowledge began to be clearly listed as teachers’ knowledge and TPCK was regarded as the conceptual framework of teachers’ knowledge structure.

Thompson and Mishra (2007) changed TPCK into TPACK. The new name, TPACK, doesn’t just mean adding a vowel “A” to make it easier to pronounce. Its deeper implication is to emphasize the necessity of three kinds of knowledge, content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and technology knowledge, to form a whole through interaction. In other words, TPACK also means Total PACKage.