A model for Immigrant teachers: TPACK

Every teacher’s concern may arouse from the difficulty to create task and activities that are appealing, and also include any of the available technological resources that our digital learners are used to work with. How can I teach them? What’s the most successful way? These are questions that I, as a Digital Immigrant, always ask to myself.

In order to increase our learners’ motivation and to make the content more accessible to them, we can start thinking of a new way of approaching teaching:  TPACK. What is it? You may be wondering…  It is a framework that combines 3 different areas that are the core of every lesson nowadays: Technological, Content and Pedagogical Knowledge.

 When planning our lessons, we need to have a clear objective in mind. The WHAT of our daily practices is related to the subjects we have to deal with and this represent the Content knowledge. In our case, it is English. This type of knowledge combines with the Pedagogical one. The latter refers to the tools that teachers used in their classes so as to present the contents and make them more accessible. So when teaching, we should consider that our teaching proposals (group work, debates, modelling, direct instruction, etc.) enable learners to properly acquire the contents.

As far as this, it seems to be the traditional way of teaching, in which the contents are carefully planned and activities and task are designed in accordance. Nevertheless, a new type of knowledge is called to be developed and it is the Technological Knowledge. If teachers want to keep up-to- date and make their lessons interesting, they need to integrate technology in their classrooms, and it is a great responsibility for them to start learning about these new educational resources and apply them to support their pedagogical strategies.  There are a considerable number of tools that can contribute to the learning process: laptops, projectors, smart boards, cameras, iPads, etc.

The interrelation of these three types of knowledge is what we call TPACK, a framework that help us realize the importance of selecting the appropriate contents, applying the correct pedagogical strategies with the support of the right technological tools, but always bearing in mind that we should adapt this model to the different contexts we may be working in.

Source:

- http://www.tpack.org/

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FagVSQlZELY