WEEK 3. TPACK RETROSPECTIVE: NEW AND USEFUL CONCEPTS. #soyer1718

Looking back at the TPACK project the whole class had to do, we can get many important concepts that we will be able to use in the future as fully-flegded teachers. 

TPACK: First, let's take a look the name itself, TPACK, which stands for Technological, Pedagogical And Content Knowledge. This TPACK is is a relatively new phenomenon in the field of effective teaching, it mainly focuses on how teachers, when implementing technological tools to their teachings, can reach a higher level of effectiveness. TPACK considers aspects such as understanding how technologies make contents easier or more difficult, knowing pedagogical techniques that implement technologies to foster teaching, or how technologies can be used to either create new epistemologies or reinforced the previous ones. This framework is the result of the interconnections of the three aforementioned cores of education. So now we are going to check those elements individually. 

Content Knowledge: It is the teacher’s knowledge about the subject he teaches or is about to teach. This dimension surrounds elements such as theories, concepts, knowledge, ideas… but also practices and methodologies to help students develop that knowledge. This dimension is of paramount importance to teachers, mainly because if the teacher does not have a base of content knowledge, the information given to the students may be inaccurate, confusing or just plain incorrect.

Pedagogical Knowledge: It consists of the teacher’s deep understanding about the methods and practices used in both teaching and learning. There are elements such as how to effectively organize classes and evaluating students, understanding the processes that happen in children and how they construct knowledge, how they develop skills…To fully dominate this dimension, teachers must have some extent of cognitive, social and development theories understanding and learn how to apply them to their students.

Technological Knowledge: This dimension mainly focuses on having a deeper understanding of how the technologies of information work and using that understanding to enable people to use technologies on a daily basis in their everyday lives. Technological Knowledge also focuses on how people, thanks to the aforementioned understanding, use technologies in order to achieve their goals, they know when technology can be either useful or counterproductive in order to achieve their objectives. However, we have to bear in mind that there is a possibility that this definition of Technological Knowledge becomes outdated.

Context: Lastly, we believe that another important element of TPACK that must be adressed is the context. This element, as the name suggest, is the collection of situations and features of a classroom, the characteristics of both teachers and students, the materials and tools avaliable in the classroom, and so on. Every single class is unique, and so, we must fully understand that the context is never the exact same in two classrooms. To understand the position of context in TPACK, we can see it as a circle outside the whole scheme that surrounds every element of this framework.

This five elements are, in our opinion, the main core that must be initially understood in order to even begin to do any research of TPACK, if the basis of this complicated structure are not interiorized, it is impossible to achieve the implementation of TPACK in classrooms.

That is all for now.

- 1­^st­­ Transalator, Yassín Hammalil.