Abstract:

The purpose of this study is to develop a training course of educational programming language for elementary school teachers that contribute to improvement of teachers’ instructional professionalism.

We refer to the procedure about the development of a teacher training program for smart education. Thus we could develop a five-phase of procedure to develop a teacher training course of educational programming language for elementary school teachers: ADDIE (Analysis-Design-Development-Implementation-Evaluation). The analysis phase: to interview in-service elementary school teachers and experts to analyze the information about the environment, learners and challenges. The design phase: to determine learning objectives and content in the training course, and to structuralize and integrate. The development phase: to develop content and supportive material which would be consulted by educational experts. The implementation phase: to carry out the actual teacher training course. Last, the evaluation phase: to assess the teacher training course, then modify and complement it.

In the development phase, the TPACK framework is analyzed for organizing the training course content. TPACK is technological pedagogical and content knowledge and integrates concepts of pedagogical knowledge (PCK), technological knowledge (TPK) and technological content knowledge (TCK). In short, TPACK is how teachers’ understanding of technologies and pedagogical content knowledge interact with one another to produce effective teaching with technology, thereby maximizing the teaching-learning effect. Scratch is one of the educational programming language that is designed for the purpose of gaining experience in computer programming through a graphical environment. Scratch is a good programming language for beginners trying to first programming and most of Korean elementary school teachers have less experience in programming. Because of this, we adopted Scratch as a digital technology to use in the teacher training course.

The discussions made during the process of the course development will provide suggestions for future development of training courses for teachers in the use of digital technologies.

Keywords:

Teacher training course, Educational programming language, TPACK, Technological pedagogical and content knowledge.