'Star' experience

Hello, my name is Ángela and I had the role of being the ‘STAR’ this past week.

We had to work on TPACK and we did some research on the internet in order to learn a bit about it. My role consisted on looking for information on the internet about that topic, having my collegues’ help, and just trying to understand  it in order to be able to explain it to the rest of my classmates.

It has been such a pleasure being able to explain what I knew about TPACK, because in the future we will have to explain lots of things to our students, and what’s better than having the opportunity of practicing how to do it now in class and being able to take into account our mistakes in order to get better for our future as teacher?

This past morning I had the opportunity to explain to my classmates what my group and I had done about TPACK, and at first I was a bit nervous because I did not really know how the activity was going to develop but as soon as I started to talk, all my nerves went away. I had to explained it several times but it was very useful for me because I was able to learn in a better way what TPACK was and I was also able to learn that in our future as teacher we will have to explain things not just once or twice, we will have to repeat the same thing over and over. By having different classmates as ‘listeners’, it made me think about the huge diversity of students that we will have to work with, and from my point of view, it is very important for us to start learning and thinking about it.

I hope all of you liked my exposition, and as it has been the first time for me being the ‘star’, I am sure that I have made mistakes, but I will try to fix them out by the next time.

Thank you for your attention!

PS: down below you can find everything that I talked about on my exposition. 

What is TPACK?  

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) attempts to identify some of the essential qualities of teacher knowledge required for technology integration in teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted, and situated nature of this knowledge. The TPACK framework extends Shulman’s idea of Pedagogical Content Knowledge, to include technological knowledge. Three fields of knowledge comes together to produce TPACK.

-          CONTENT KNOWLEDGE: it is the subject matter, what teachers know, the information they teach to their learners, that’s why teachers must know the concepts, facts, theories, mental models, analogies, frameworks and procedures they are teaching.

Later on, teachers had the content, but they needed to know how to teach all those concepts, so pedagogical knowledge emerged.

-          PEDAGOGICAL KNOWLEDGE: Pedagogical knowledge means all the methods we have to follow to teach; that is how we teach. This includes, the class planning, class rules, grouping the students to do group works, routines and different disciplines techniques and teaching strategies.

With the combination of Content Knowledge (CK) and Pedagogical Knowledge (PK), Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) was formed. This mixes the things the teachers have to teach and the ways they have to teach them.

Because students are using technical tools on a daily basis, this influenced the way teachers teach. Furthermore, in 2006 Technological Knowledge (TK) was created.

-          TECHNOLOGYCAL KNOWLEDGE: it is our knowledge of standard technologies (blackboards, books) and advanced technologies (internet, video, cameras, ipads).

Technological Knowledge mixes with Content Knowledge, so then Technological Content Knowledge (TCK) is formed. It means the knowledge of the relationship between technology and content. And when Technological Knowledge mixes with Pedagogical Knowledge, Technological Pedagogical Knowledge (TPK) is formed. It emphasizes the existence, components and capabilities of various technologies as they are used in the settings of teaching and learning.

Finally, at the intersection of those three elements is Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK). True technology integration means understanding and negotiating the relationships between these three components of knowledge. A teacher capable of negotiating these relationships represents a form of expertise.

The TPACK model is applied in the context of a specific teaching-learning situation. The TPACK context is a complex phenomenon, it interacts with other elements to determine learning outcome, which depends on the teacher and on his/her ability to use technology, it offers potential obstacles as well as potential opportunities, because technology can be considered and obstacle but also an opportunity, and it has social and psychological elements, which affect the achievement of individual students. 

 How the course of our degree can help us to develop TPACK.

Generally, the course of our degree is organized in ‘Aula virtual’. It is almost used for everything because in there, teachers upload tasks for us to hand in, the lessons planning, power points, words and some other documents that are used for the development of every single lesson, official call for the exams, calendar and timetables, syllabus, etc.

However it is not only about the ‘Aula Virtual’, because for every activity we have to do, technology is needed. For example, for our works or homework, we look for information on the internet most of the time, as it gives us new knowledge needed to develop all those activities and of course, most of them require our knowledge of technology. We sometimes need to look for scientific articles on the internet in order to develop and learn the scientific method used in it and teachers usually use different programmes to explain us the content of each subject.