TEACHER AS A TECHNO-PEDAGOGUE
The education system was now witnessing a paradigm shift from the traditional chalk-and-board teaching methodology to digitizing the pedagogical approach through technical devices. They opined that such a transformation would not only increase the capability of the teachers but would also widen the knowledge base of students so as make them competitive in the international arena. Every teaching content is unique and there are varied interactions between technology and pedagogy, and content, there is not a universal or “one-size fits all” solution to the problem of teaching. Due to the intertwined relationships among technology, pedagogy and content, teachers face a great number of decisions. These decisions shift with permutations of technology, pedagogy, and subject-matter and classroom context. The diversity of possible responses implies that a teacher should be an active agent and to become designers of their own curriculum.
Technology Knowledge
Technology knowledge is knowledge about standard technologies such as books and chalk and blackboard, as well as more advanced technologies such as the Internet and digital video. This would involve the skills required to operate particular technologies. In the case of digital technologies this would include knowledge of operating systems, and computer hardware, as well as the ability to use standard set of software tools such as word processors, spreadsheets, browsers, email etc. Technology knowledge would include knowledge of how to install and remove peripheral devices, install and remove software programs, create and archive documents. Most standard technology workshops and tutorials tend to focus on the acquisition of such skills.
This knowledge makes it possible to understand what technology can do for certain pedagogic goals, and for teachers to select the most appropriate tool based on its appropriateness for the specific pedagogical approach. Technology can also afford new methods and venues for teaching and ease the way certain classroom activities are implemented. The complex and ill-structured nature of teaching with technology leads to the idea of teachers as designers who are constantly engaged in active, interactive, and feedback-given process of problem-finding and creative problem solving.
Techno pedagogue
A techno pedagogue is a person who focuses on the user of technology and whose expertise is in electronic pedagogy methods and theory. A techno pedagogue is not a systems administrator or network administrator. The techno pedagogue is the person who helps to see the practical uses, and appropriate uses of technology to attain their educational goals. This person’s expertise is grounded in educational theory, curriculum development, and course design.
Dozens of methods have been proposed for the development of Techno pedagogy, and they vary in their effectiveness. Among various approaches, an emphasis upon how teachers integrate technology in their practice is more important than the emphasis upon what teachers integrate in their practice. For example, approaches that develop technological knowledge (TK) in isolation, where technology literacy is the goal, fail to assist the teachers in the development of the educational uses of those tools. Similarly approaches that develop only pedagogy or content- or even pedagogical content knowledge-do not capture the scope and unique flavor of knowledge needed to effectively teach with technology.
New technologies are driving necessary and inevitable change throughout the educational landscape. Effective technology use, however, is difficult, because technology introduces a new set of variables to the already complicated task of lesson planning and teaching. The task of teaching with technology requires a context-bound understanding of technology, where technologies may be chosen and repurposed to fit the very specific pedagogical and content-related needs of diverse educational contexts.
In confronting the ways in which technology, content, and pedagogy interact in classroom contexts we see an active role for teachers as designers of their own curriculum. Like all design tasks, teachers are faced with an open-ended and ill-structured problem in the process of crafting their curricula. This requires teacher educators to adopt, identify and select methods to develop technology integration knowledge by starting from already-existing bodies of teacher knowledge in a gradual manner. Technology education therefore should become an integral part of teacher education, moving beyond teaching technology literacy in isolation.
