Media for teaching and curriculum implementation

Hi! I'm Ainara,  the journalist this week.

This week we have learned the importance and necessity of media for teaching (how we can introduce mass media at educational process) and curriculum implementation. 

     On Monday, we paid attention of the skillful class of our professor Linda, who explained to us why we use, media for teaching: to develop abilities of the pupils and teachers, to cause and facilitate the learning. Media for teaching help to the students to obtain more data and understanding in a certain context. The objective to use the average is, to integrate the curriculum and to improve the learning of the students, influencing in its context so that it is favorable for the learning. 

Two parts in means are distinguished: Physical- Instrumental (hardware) and Formative- Cognitive.  The first part is formed by the material parts of media, for example the screen, the keyboard, the mouse of a computer… and the second part is formed by information structure code, and it is symbolic.  

Later we saw some definitions of curriculum for example curriculum is what happen in the classroom, is everything influences in education process: rules centers, laws ; TPACK perspective, when we want to use the media in the curriculum is important to relate technological knowledge, content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge.  

At the end of class we saw the three elements of the curriculum: People & Institutions, Design and Media- technologies.  But Linda in class has explained more: People & Institution, which are influenced by five very important factors: Evolutionary variables (chronological and mental ages), Psychological variables (the mass media can be adapted to the incapacities of the students), cultural variables (change in different places, are languages, believes…), Social- economic situation (how much money you have?) and Educational system variables (Centers dispersion, ratio, teachers training, infrastructures…).

    On friday, we continued to curriculum elements explanation with the Curriculum design which the most important is the planning: assessment, objectives, contents, and didactic strategies, programs…. We must be coherent with these elements. And the last curriculum elements: media-technologies which you only use if the environment and design are clear.  We must make sure that the following principles are fulfilled to use media technologies:  efficiency, affordances, flexibility, availability, motivation, code and cognitive strategies.

Thus we have finished the explanation of the curriculum elements and Linda it has communicated to us the task that we have to do the next week.