Translator Post

Hi, readers! I’m Blanca and I have the role of Translator this week. It’s nice to write once again in our blog about the last task “What we have learnt during the course in School Organization”. This role consists on explaining the five most important words of the week. It has to include the definition of each concept with my own words and based on academic resources. The words I have chosen are:

Competence: A competence is a learning that we can apply to resolve problems that happen in live. It is necessary the knowledge related to each subject to develop the education. The main competencies which can be highlighted are: personal, social and ethical competencies.

The personal competence is all this information that is important to us as future teachers; we also should be teachers in a TPACK framework.

In social competence we have learnt working in groups respecting other ideas, dialoguing, dealing problems…

The ethical competence consists of respecting other cultures, religions or don’t influenced children with our own thoughts.

Context: is a set of circumstances or facts which surround a particular event, situation, statement or idea. Related to education, the two most important backgrounds are social and the economic context. There are some problems in the public school, such us the money, the economic context, the cultural context (which consists on respecting other cultures, religions, etc) and the age (which is composed by the mental and the chronological age).

Knowledge: is a human faculty which results from interpreted information and from understanding information, concepts, experiences or individual interpretation through experience, association or education. In an organizational context, knowledge is an important element in the intelligence and the competences of people.

Moovly: is a web tool which is used to create videos, presentations being attractive to children and adults. With this tool, we forget about slides adding for example: voice, sound, music, etc. It has a timeline interface with which you can synchronize everything you put on the video. Then, when you have finished, you can publish it on YouTube, Facebook, put it on a website or download it. The presentations 3.0 can be done with animations of the same web, Moovly. With it, it is easy to convert the traditional presentations into creative videos.

Objective: is the proposition of a goal or purpose to be achieved, and that, according to the area where it is used, has some level of complexity. It is one of the key players in the planning process. A goal can be achieved individually or otherwise, as a group, for the formation of a team. In both cases, efforts and will be moved by prior arrangement to achieve the objectives.

Finally, I would like to say I have learnt a lot during the semester of this subject and that with this final task, I realized how much we have acquired. At first, it may seem that you have learned a lot, but it is with this type of activities when you understand the development of creativity, the passion of teachers, the importance of education and above all, the way you want your students to learn in the future.

Greetings!

Translator Post

Hello everyone! This week I have got the Translator Role. So, I have to summarize the five most important words of the week. We have to do a task called “The Dark Side of Text Books”, and we decided to do a comic to present this interesting topic. According to this, and after seeing a lot of webs about textbooks and their problematic, for me, the most important words are the next:

•  Editorials: They do business with education through textbooks; families spend a lot of money buying them each course and for us this is immoral according to the economical situation in our country. Most editorials are just worried about earning money and they do not think in children and in their education.
• Teachers: The problem of textbooks is not caused only by editorials. During many years, teachers used textbooks as the only resource in school; most of them cannot survive to their lessons without them and is a big problem for the society. They have to be able to use other resources, especially ICTs; they offer many advantages as less weight, more information and reduced cost.
•   Ideology: The textbooks are in many times influenced by the political situation of the moment or the type of editorial which create it. It is very worrying because children grow influenced by the way of thinking of others and not by themselves. It is an error because they do not have open-mind in most cases and in the future we do not have citizens with their own ideas, they just follow most powerful people.
•  Children: They are the most harmed with this situation. With textbooks they really spent a boring time in schools, they do not learn to think by themselves, the reality is just what the textbooks say. Their teachers do not offer them an enjoyable time outside the schools learning by experience for example, or the pleasure of discovering any interesting knowledge by themselves, for this reason, they are not comfortable at schools, and most of them do not like it. They should enjoy learning but the reality of schools is quite different.
• Textbooks: Nobody knows why textbooks is nowadays the most important resource in education, maybe because of the laziness of teachers who do not want to think a bit in their methods of teaching. But, and because other reasons, children are limited in their way of learning and discovering a lot of interesting concepts, textbooks think for them so, why they would do an effort?

I must say that I have learned a lot of with this task, I really like what I have discovered about the situation of textbooks and this has helped me to change my perception of schools reality. I think it is very useful for me when I become teacher in order to improve my methodology with children, not limitation myself to the typical lessons we are used to, I’m looking forward to put all this knowledge in practice! We have many things to learn and this is just our beginning as future educators.

 I hope you have enjoyed our work, best regards.

Translator Post

Hi, I'm Esmeralda! I'm the traslator this week and, as many of you know, the traslator's task is to  find the five most important terms that we have learnt during the task of this week and I have to define each term with my own words. Well, we have been working on the topic "TPACK in education" so the five terms that I have chosen as the most important are TPACK, content, technology, pedadogy and integration.

In order to define each of these terms I have based my research on an specific article that the teacher gave us. Then, I will put the reference of the other article in the end of my post because maybe, it is interesting for some of you.

  Maybe, the most important term of the task is TPACK. 

- TPACK stands for Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge and it is also the interaction between these three bodies of knowledge. TPACK is described as a frame where the goal is the integration of the use of technology (both analog and digital) in training future teachers. The use of TPACK has as a result an effective teaching on the part of the teachers.

- When we talk about Content Knowledge (CK) we referred to the subject matter that teachers must know so that they can teach others in an adequate way. Each subject has a different specific content.

- Technology Knowledge (TK) refers to the knowledge of differents technologies and the aplication of this technologies to the educational context. We can distinguish between (1)traditional pedagogical technologies (a pencil); and (2) digital technologies, such as computers.

-Pedagogical Knowledge (PK) consist of the knowledge on the part of the teachers of the appropriate processes and methods for an effective teaching and learning. 

-I will define the term integration in relation to the TPACK framework. We talk about the integration of the three bodies of knowledge which form the TPACK. It means, integration consists of putting together the content, pegadody and technology on an specific educational context in order to create an effective teaching. 

This is the reference of the article that the teacher gave us and I have used it as the base for definining the main terms:


Roselmina Indrisano, Lee S. Shulman, Matthew J. Koehler, Punya Mishra, and William Cain, Storey Mecoli, Mary Elizabeth Matthews, Michelle Carney and Roselmina Indrisano, Laura M. Jiménez and Kristin K. A. McIlhagga and Laura Callis. (2013) “JOURNAL OF EDUCATION volume 193, number 3, 2013 Pedagogical Content Knowledge”

I have also used other sources, here you have the references: -Royce Kimmons. (2011-03-22). "TPACK in 3 Minutes". Retrieved from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wGpSaTzW58

 -Schmidt, D. A., Baran, E., Thompson, A. D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M. J., & Shin, T. S. (2009). Technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK): The development and validation of an assessment instrument for preservice teachers. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 42(2), 123.

I hope you enjoy it!