Featured User #3: Meet Pedro A Tamayo
Meet Pedro A Tamayo, an economics professor from Madrid. Learn about basic economics concepts in Spanish! ShowMe has truly gone global 🙂
Visit Pedro’s awesome ShowMe Portfolio:
http://www.showme.com/ptamayo
Keep up with Pedro through Twitter, Facebook, Blog
Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I teach Economics at the Spanish distance University (UNED), to students of different areas like Social Work, Law, and Public Management. My teaching activity is fully based on e-learning, that’s why I try to select the best tools to develop content for my students. When not working, I like to read novels, watch movies, and try new tech gadgets.
How do you currently use ShowMe?
I’m trying ShowMe as a tool to be used massively next course into an Economics teaching & learning open community, Facebook based, we are designing. Its simplicity to use and to embed, with its powerful explaining capabilities, make it perfect to review complex ideas and to show graphical explanations of economics concepts. And so we will contribute to enrich the open community of ShowMe.
Do you have any advice for someone new to creating a ShowMe lesson?
Try to make it simple, as if you were using a piece of paper to explain a single idea or concept. And make it short, a five minutes recording as much.
What’s the coolest ShowMe you’ve seen (aside from your own, of course)?
I think all ShowMe lessons are cool because each of them has something to explain. I value very much the power of simplicity when explaining something, as if you were in front of a whiteboard into a classroom. If I have to choose someone, I like very much those recorded by kids, because they show a great creativity when explaining something to others or to themself, much more creativity than adults.
What do you think are some of the biggest challenges teachers face?
To engage students. It’s a challenge that we can afford using properly new tools, and new approaches, competing with the informal learning they have access to.
Where do you see education technology headed?
I think that education technology and its future development is headed to foster open learning and teaching, and to change the places where we teach in. Learning is no longer only an activity closed into bricks schools or universities, and there are very interesting movements in that way, as the Flipping the Classrom experiences are showing.
