Abstract:

Nowadays, technology education has an important role on citizens’ formative process because it involves important aspects as development problem solving competencies and teaching-learning strategies, among others, which facilitate the everyday environment appropriation. In 2008, The Ministry of National Education (MNE) of Colombia published the document “Be competent in technology: a requirement for development”, in which are presented the main orientations for basic and secondary education. In this document the components, competences and competencies for students formative process are proposed, however it does not give a guidance of classroom activities implementation nor tools for competences and competencies selection according to the Educational Institution (EI) context. This generates little interest of teachers to include these orientations in the curriculum design, making it a subjective process highly dependent of their opinions. Additionally, it has been shown that actual teaching strategies are based on contents transmission and fail to take into account the students interests and characteristics.

This paper describes a proposed solution to the problem presented above by designing an educational strategy for the formation of competences in technology. This strategy is based in the model of Project Based Learning and takes into account the educational community characterization from the data collection. Among the factors that the strategy includes, there are: the interests and perceptions about technology of the students, parents and teachers; the students learning styles; the EI resources; and the approach according to the Institutional Educational Project. The data collected allows selection of relevant competences and competencies according to each EI context and customize the activities to be implemented.

The model of the educational strategy proposed is structured by phases and stages based on the Mitchel Resnick's creative thinking spiral. This strategy is focused on solve a context problem of the students and is composed of five phases: problem identification, design and planning, execution or implementation, evaluation and improvement and socialization. These phases include different stages, which are chronologically and sequentially organized in order to achieve the learning objectives in technology.

In order to build, evaluate and validate this strategy model, a collaborative work with technology teachers from some EI was developed. In this work some aspects were discussed: adaptability to different EI context, relevance for technological competences development and flexibility to include it into the curriculum. It is worth pointing out that the previous teachers experience was relevant for the definition of particular elements, like: implementation time, type of activities, possible projects and the pertinent actions to link different elements of the phases into the classroom.

Finally, the strategy model built is being adapted for five IE in Colombia and its first implementation is projected for 2015. In addition, with the aim to evaluate the impact of this strategy in the development of technology competences, there are going to be used tools to qualitatively and quantitatively measure their progress. Furthermore, the evaluation results will allow to feedback the strategy and make the necessary changes for future implementations, contributing to the possible redefinition of the orientations proposed by the MNE.

Keywords:

Technology education, Project Based Learning, educational projects, technology competences.