The Analyst

Hello, it´s Holly here, and this week I was our groups Analyst.

To start off, we had a lot of fun doing this activity (this week was the TPACK activity); most of us met up at Uni to do it and in the process, while we also learned a great deal about TPACK, we had a few laughs. I would say that this was actually the best moment of the week; the fun and laughs we shared while we were working, searching for information, drawing the TPACK model on the whiteboard, etc. To be honest there hasn’t really been a bad moment in this week’s activity, we never got stressed or had any fights, and we found it pretty easy to understand the Model itself. Regarding the activity, the best moment was when we sat down to watch a video about TPACK and it was dead silent, and the woman talking in the video wasn’t British but Irish or Scottish; I couldn’t quite make it out, it just kind of made me laugh. Another great moment was when one of us put some music on while we were working on the poster; it never once got annoying, it actually really motivated us and we were all dancing and moving to the rhythm while colouring and drawing on the poster. Once again, there were never any bad parts in this activity.

I am glad we have the chance to work on this model because 1. I don’t think any of us had ever heard of it before and it has been a challenge, and 2. It´s been a good experience to work on due to the fact that it has opened our minds to a whole new way of teaching with new technologies; and more importantly HOW.  Well, all of us have gone from not knowing what TPACK even stood for, to knowing exactly how to explain it in our own words, what it consists of and how we can use it and apply it to our own teaching methods in the future.

Although we haven’t all been able to meet up and share our opinions on things, most of us did, and that is something I think we should conserve as a group because it makes things a lot easier when there are more of you to work and talk about the topic. Another thing worth conserving is the fun; like I said before, we had quite a bit of fun working on the activity and still managed to get it all finished before the week was up.  That proves that although you have to work hard, you can still have little breaks in-between and have a Jamming session (dance session) with your friends.

Furthermore, the content of this activity, you could say, is related to every subject that we are coursing right now at University. Why? Because everything we are doing has to do with the methods of teaching, being the technological methods, the pedagogical methods, or the actual content of the subjects; that is TPACK! We, as future teachers have to know the content of the subjects we will be teaching, how to teach those concepts and what tools to use to transmit these concepts to our pupils. Some examples of where we have learned about these things before are in “Developmental Psychology” and in “Planificación de la Atención Educativa”.

Finally, there is in fact an evident social connection with this content; well, going back a few years, children never had the opportunity to use computers or mobile phones in the classroom because they didn’t exist or because they didn’t have the cool, interesting and useful apps they have nowadays; well, now it´s normal to see a classroom full of kids all on their I pad’s or Tablet´s while the teacher talks them through what they have to do. Many teachers like to use technological methods in their classrooms because it really is a better way of teaching, and the plus side is the students actually enjoy it and learn a lot from it; unlike the old days of the teacher-book-student method, where the teacher had the teachers book, the children had the students book, and from that, they just read and done a couple of activities; it’s no wonder they were bored in class. The introduction of new technologies in the classroom has been a huge success in the educational industry; the only thing now is that they have to find the right teachers to use them properly, because it´s no use  having teachers make students use up-to-date technology when the teachers don’t even know how to use it themselves.