Reflexion !

When I started with the blog, I wrote a brief explanation about Why I choose to be an English Teacher? I remembered it was difficult to put into words my feelings and expectations about my future profession but now, I realized that what I said is true.

I wrote about children and their ability to remember you, not only for what you are teaching, but also for what you are. During our practices, I realized about this.

After all our preparations about what we were going to teach, how we are going to do it, and other questions we asked ourselves; the most important thing was the relationship  we established with our students.
I felt completely pleasant, happy and enthusiast when children said me: “Me re diverti Seño, me re gusto la clase. 
Nos vemos el Jueves?” or “                                                                     Seño te voy a extrañar”.

                                     The way in which they demonstrated how they felt with us or how important was what we said, make me realized that 

a teacher is really what I want to be.  

TPACK !

Nowadays, we are involved in a 

technological society. 
It happens because technology become in an important resource for everyone. 
That´s why I think that a possible question  we as teachers may be ask ourselves is: 

How to incorporate technologies into our classes?

Technology is another resource to teach, which is very popular in children those days. 

It´s clear that technology is not the answer to all he questions and the solution to all the problems we may encounter in our teaching process. However, it´s a way to enrich our classes taking into account our curricular and pedagogical needs. This is what the TPACK model presents to us.  

According to this model, we need to take into account and follow three important decisions:

• ·         Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) referring to the knowledge that allows you to organize and adapt the content in the best way to be taught, selecting the type of activities we want to do, the final outcome, assessment strategies, and so on.

• ·         Technological Content Knowledge (TCK) referring to the knowledge about how content and technology influence on each other, deciding on the topic to be covered and the objectives to be achieved by the students. It implies knowing what type of technology is the best for teaching the content and how to use it effectively in the classroom.
• 
  
• ·         Technological Pedagogical Knowledge (TPK): this is the knowledge about how education and technology influence each other. It implies knowing what type of technology is available at the moment, and how it can be adapted for educational purposes, choosing and looking for the appropriate technological resources that will help us to achieve our aims for the class.  

So, the integration of these three items results in Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge or TPACK model. 

You can develop different activities for the different subjects taught at school, incorporating technologies and using CLIL. For example: make presentations on power point, prezi or other resources presented by the teacher, where students have to present/explain about a topic related to what they are learning (science, social studies etc). In other levels, you can encourage students to discuss about different topics online by email, chat, foros, blogs, etc. 

So, it´s important we can incorporate technology into our classes, but we should be conscientious, at the same time, about the decisions we make about why and how we are going to use it !

21st Century Literacy

 Literacy needs a set of abilities to understand and use the symbol systems of a culture for personal and community development. 

However, nowadays, the daily routine of people is influenced by technology.  So, in this technological society, the concept of literacy is expanding to include the media such as TV, radio, magazines and newspapers, internet and electronic text, mobile phones, chat rooms, etc. All this technologies become in an essential part of people´s lives.

What does being literate actually
mean today? 

Nowadays, traditional literacies become more difficult to succeed in our technological society, so as a consequence new literacies emerged. They are:
Informational literacy related to read with meaning, using the information, provides by the web, in different formats depending on the context.
E-awareness which says that learning is related to the awareness that one is living in that new era.
Technological literacy related to the confident and critical operation of ICT, recognizing the value of formal and informal learning.
Digital literacy which involves instrumental and strategic skills as well as the ability to think creatively and share information or knowledge in multiple formats.  
Media literacy which represents a complete understanding of the ways in which traditional mass media and digital media function. 

The emergence of these new literacies has to be not only to the big influence a computer has over people, especially, young people, but also to the 21^st century jobs. These require creativity, the ability to solve problems, leadership, teamwork and persuasive communication skills. In other words, new work environments require competencies and skills that are only developed online. 

So, this new technological culture sets standards for ways of being and living, which also influences over the student-teacher relationship. That´s why is important that today´s teaching programs include media education as a crucial element.
When teaching 21^st century students, we should teach them not only about the use of the media but also about its strategies, which may be manipulated and as well as informative.

Another important situation to take into account is that many times children know how to do, but they don´t know how to explain what they do. Their language is characterized more by action than by reflection. That´s why the teacher is expected to teach and educate students in order to prepare them for their future professional life.  However, one problem is that, frequently, children do not think in their future since they explore in the present.
According to that and to finish this post, I chose a phrase, which reflects this new generation´s interests, from the book “Children learning English as a Foreign Language: 21^st Century Students and 21^st Century Skills” by Roberto Balaguer Prestes.

“This generation seeks out a sense of the practical in what its does, and prefers that what it learns can be explored and applied. Because of this, its learning is closed to the model of “just in time” than that of “just in case” that is typical of traditional education. This generation prefers to learn what is applicable in the presence and not what may be usable in the future”.