Department of Education, University of Alcala, Spain
Wednesday 8th July, 12h00 to 13h00, Room A1-065
Title of Talk:
Preparing teachers for the 21st century: An intersection of UDL and TPACK
Abstract:
The educational system should provide a common education background for the diversity of students recognizing and meeting the individual learning needs of each one of them. This is a big challenge for some teachers who may be uncertain about what inclusion entails. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a teaching approach that can guide teachers to design a flexible curriculum based on considering and including students’ differences as a starting point. UDL is structured around three principles which have their origin in brain and neuroscience research on one side, and architecture design in the other: a) Present information and course content in multiple formats so that all students can access it; b) Allow students alternatives to express or demonstrate their learning; c) Stimulate student’s interests and engagement for learning in a variety of ways. Although to implement UDL in teaching and learning scenarios is not a requirement, it can be an important factor to help reach the individual learning needs of each student. To effective use technology applying UDL principles it is not only needed technological skills. The concept of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) enclose an integrative base of technological, pedagogical and content knowledge required by teachers to teach effectively with technology. After training teachers for one year on UDL approach, results have shown that there was a gap in teacher efficacy to teach diverse students using teachnologies. For that we suggest an integrative model of UDL and TPACK approaches.
Biography:
Guillermina Gavaldon is a lecturer at the University of Alcalá in the Faculty of Education. She has been teaching in the University of Alcalá since 2001. From 2001 until 2005 she has been enrolled as a teacher in Computing Science Department, Faculty of Informatics, teaching the subjects: Programming Languages, Calculus, Algebra, Compilers Design and New Technologies Applied to Education.
Since 2006 she joined the Faculty of Education teaching the subjects: Technologies Applied to Education, Communication and Social Media in Education, Education and Innovation. Before her background as a teacher she worked as an engineer in public and private firms basically working as Program Analyst, programming with Databases as Oracle, MySQl, C programming language, Cobol, etc.
In 1998 she worked for the company Statistical Data Analysis where she got involved in different European Research Projects dealing with environmental pollution problems. Her duties in these projects were related to the design of ORACLE database systems. At the same time, in 2001 she started to teach in the University of Alcala due to her interest in education. At the University of Alcalá she developed online learning courses for the project of ADA Madrid. ADA Madrid was an Open Project initiative of the Spanish Ministry of Education to promote the use of Information and Communication Technologies by online courses. With this initiative, students of the Community of Madrid (from the six public universities) could access to courses from all these public universities. In that way, students from different academic backgrounds could coincide in the same subject.
Her Ph.D. dissertation was a research on e-portfolios conducted in her own teaching practice by an action research approach. During her research she has tested and analysed several tools and implemented them with her students. She carried out a four-cycles of research through which she acquired new knowledge on how students learn through reflection, peer interaction and feedback. She was able to evaluate the difficulties inherent to an innovation in education. Her interest now is to get a deep knowledge on how to promote a relevant learning within e_learning environments. She is also interested in Forecast Education with Machine Learning, Education Data Mining and Social Analytics technics.