Abstract:

In university teaching, the constant search for new strategies and the application of innovative methodologies is a practice always endorsed by the authorities, supported by the community and welcomed by the students. University teachers always advocate updating and modernizing their classes, to achieve the following objectives: obtain higher levels of knowledge acquisition by students, use the newest and most powerful tools available, and provide an excellent service and increase own capacities in teaching.

Likewise, the university supports the constant training of the teaching staff, the increase of the performance of the institution to bring to the community, and the permanent search for improvements that raise their level and position in the academic world. A sample of these activities was a set of organized classes with the Flipped Learning model and the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge at the National Technological University (UTN), Argentina. These classes used accessible, known, agreed and available computer tools in all current communication media, used by the students in the daily life, including videos, animations, chats, etc. Evaluations were made with criteria and descriptors obtained from a combination of those used in traditional evaluations and the scale of rubrics, and allowed the study of the implementation. Although the response was positive in general, and the students had a good predisposition, were several problems. The causes were a deficiency in the simple skills and a lack of previous experiences in the academic use of computer tools and media. They neither had a set of behavioural aspects necessary to face a class based on self-managed learning.

With this reality revealed from the experience, two proposals were generated. First, for students already inserted in the university, were created workshops to show the academic use of communication media and computer tools, and support talks on proactive behavioural aspects of university life that are great help to successfully obtain an engineer degree.

The second proposal aims to generate a change in society by projecting into the future, creating the University Extension Project EU35-UTN10847 "Training and collaboration program for the strengthening of teaching skills with the use of new communication and information technologies", supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports of the Nation, in conjunction with the UTN. The objective is transfer of knowledge through the training of secondary teachers for the insertion of innovative teaching methodologies with the use of computer tools in the city and surrounding areas middle schools. Intensive training workshop classes were created, dictated by the same engineering professors who carried out the inverted classes. The course was intensive, individual, personalized, to obtain products for direct use at the end of it. These courses had the purpose of providing high quality training for teachers of secondary education, and at the same time obtain first-line data on existing problematic situations. The response to the courses was more than ample, covering the quota immediately, which shows a need not covered by training at that level. As a future proposal, is planned the management of a continuity of the training courses, extending to other cities, and a coordination with subjects of first level, and the pre-university courses, for the insertion of workshops and talks.

Keywords:

Capacitation, secondary teachers, project, informatic tools, communication media, university students, knowledge.