Analyst Post

Hello! I’m Blanca and this week I have the role of Analyst. I have to evaluate the work of every member of the group and make a reflection about the task. This week we started the part of the subject of Educational Resources and the task, as you know, consists on the changes in the Spanish Educational System.

This week we have to compare the two lasts laws, LOE (Ley Orgánica de Educación) and LOMCE (Ley Orgánica para la Mejora de la Calidad Educativa). At first, I found this task a bit difficult because it was the first time that we deal with this kind of laws. We saw it in the subject of Planificación de la Acción Educativa, but with this task we really understood how it is.

On the one hand, the best part of the activity was to analyze, examine and vote three conceptual maps and do a new one with all the information. With this, we realized how to be critical, new perspectives and ways of thinking and madding conceptual maps. We also learn that this subject is more than learning content; we have to develop new competences by our own with assistance of our teacher. For these reasons I think it was the best part of the task.

On the other hand, the worst thing is that it was a bit difficult to put the marks of the conceptual maps of the classmates because each member of the group thinks about different aspects. But finally we take into account everything and we carried out with our work. Moreover, we should encourage more comradeship among classmates to be better in class.

With this task, we have learnt the main differences between LOE and LOMCE. We understood how was and actually is the educational law of Spain and the main characteristics. It is a very important thing for our future as teachers because we will use it all along our work. We also learnt with this task and with the other ones, how to work cooperatively and with autonomy organizing our own ideas of the differences between the laws with conceptual maps. I think it would be very easy to us understand the laws with conceptual maps which contains the important information. But one thing I want to remark, how we are going to use all these knowledge we are acquiring in our future work as teachers?

I think we need to conserve our dedication and implication with every task. We do our best to improve every week. In my opinion, I think we are very united with an objective: learn as much as we can!

As far as I am concerned, we have to improve the presentations of our tasks because we are always nervous. We have to speak louder and put more enthusiasm in everything we do. Although our work is well done, we can improve!

The content of this task, as I said before, is related to the one we learn on the subject “Planificación de la Acción Educativa”. Then, I have to say that the law is going to be present all along our future as teachers, because we need to know the framework in which we are going to develop children’s knowledge and our own knowledge too. We are going to deal with this content the rest of the degree.

In my opinion, there are some evident social connections of this content in the recent protests we saw in television because of the new educational law, LOMCE. This situation entails people who is in favour or against of it. For example, I think it is a bad implementation that they remove music from the subjects of Primary Education. It seems to me that it should remain compulsory.

I have found this post in a blog of a school which consists on what I have explained before: http://ampapaulofreire.blogspot.com.es/2014/03/manifestacion-por-la-musica-en-la.html

Greetings!

Differences between LOE and LOMCE

Hello everyone! 

This week we have started with the part of this subject called, ‘’School Organization’’. So, during these five weeks we have to developed this work which is based on the Educational System in Spain, this week the winners of the game will have a price, 1,5 plus in the portfolio, for the first winner, and 1 plus for the second winner. This first week we have worked with two laws, LOE which was the previous law and LOMCE which is the current. We have known better the laws, LOMCE didn´t change all the aspects which were in the LOE at all, but it does some changes for example in the part of administration schools have more autonomy in order to elaborate their curriculum. Also about the previous law, LOE, we have studied the differences between them and also we have studied some things which have not changed respect to the topics.

To show these changes, we have had to do two conceptual maps about our topics, Linda sent us some basic tips, and there she wrote each group and two of the topics which we had to do. Our topics were number 3, organization of primary school and number 6 administration and governance at local and/or institutional level II, below of there appeared the main aspects which we had to treated in our conceptual maps.

According to this, the stars of each group had to present the conceptual maps in class. In the presentation we have to evaluate all the conceptual maps and only two groups can win, and that group will have their prices.

But in the class of Monday was different for our group because we were divided in two and some of us went with “Hide and Sick” and other with “Give me 7”. While other group had to evaluate other conceptual maps about a topic we had to be supervisors, this means that we have to see that they evaluated other conceptual maps in an objective way. Some of us treated one of our topic, organization of primary school, but on the other hand, the other members had to evaluate other topic, the primary school, which we didn´t know very well, despite of this we learnt some aspects of this new topic because we were awake to evaluate three of the conceptual maps. In short, half of our group were the supervisors of "Give me 7" and the other part made a global conceptual map with "Hide and Sick" about the Organization of Primary Education. Here you can see it:

We have done a big effort to do two conceptual maps clear and beautiful because the groups which reach this prize will have easier in the exam and they can be more relaxed.

To make our conceptual maps we used the next web page 2.0 which had all the tools which we wanted to use and it was adapted to our desires.: ExamTime.

https://www.examtime.com/es

Here we show you our conceptual maps, we chose fun colors, red and green to make them, red color to number 6, administration and governance at local and/or institutional level II and green to number 3, organization of primary school.

https://www.examtime.com/es/p/693136

https://www.examtime.com/es/p/678772

Journalist - María Mula Pérez

Hi guys! I am María and this week I have been the journalist, so I am going to relate the realization process of our work.

                                                                          
On Monday we started organizing the tasks.     The first aim was understanding what was       exactly our work.

When we had the first ideas and references to start the activity, we divided our work and we initiated the creation of our video! At first, we were a little lost, but each one used her imagination to give different points of view, ideas, etc.

 Esmeralda and Alba had an excellent "brain storming" so we decided used their ideas to realize our video. They use to be original and that day they was really inspired!. Rosana is the best managing computers, she is really well on it! I helped her to realize the video and later I elaborated with Esmeralda the "slides". Blanca draw our "little ant", and although she draw it a lot of times, finally she did an excellent work! In addition she is very responsible and tidy.

Mari and Raquel form an excellent team to complete and to apport new ideas, and Raquel has been our video voice-speaker.




Then, we joined every parts and we got a only structure. We had got it!

Finally, our last meeting to conclude with this activity was on Thursday. We tried to improve our video and to review it. It was the best day because we had fun!

On Monday we presented our video, and we participate in Eurovision! 

The results weren´t the best but we observe the other videos and we learnt a lot with them, so we will try to improve it for the next time!.

I hope you like it!

Curator- Farmer Post

Hello! I am María Dolores, this week I have got the curator-farmer role, the task of this week was about the things which we have learnt during the course. For this reason the references are the same as my peers put in last posts, we used the information which we found about the last tasks because the video which we had to do was like a summary of the content which we used during the course.

We only use “moovly” where we made our video to the presentation. There, we used the tools which this web 2.0 offered us.

Here a put a link which I expose my pearl tree of this task:

http://pearltrees.com/p/cP37T

And here the only reference which we used:

http://www.moovly.com/

Analyst Post - Esmeralda Martínez López

Hello everyone! I'm Esmeralda, the analyst of this week. I suppose that you already know in which consist my work but I will explain it again. I have to make a reflection about the task of this week and also I have to evaluate each member of the group. This week the reflection is about the whole course of the subject because the task was to make a video summarizing our knowledge.

As a general idea, I am really happy about our work as a group because this week we have worked very hard. Firstly we tried to find the deep content of each task that we had done. So we made a relation between the purpose of the tasks and the competencies that we developed doing them. We used the TPACK framework to integrate all the tasks because it is a model of modern education which combines, in an excellent way, technology, pedagogy and content. If we put away root learning and textbooks our work as future teachers will be more dynamic and interactive as well as students learning.

On the one hand, the best part of the task of this week was when we valued the knowledge that we have learned and when we realized the competencies that we have developed. The purpose of this subject is more than learning content, the purpose is to develop competencies which help us to solve problems outside the scholar content using the knowledge that we had acquired.                                                          

Thinking on that, we took a teacher's view to investigate the main purposes of a good education and we made a reflection about how each of the tasks helped us to reach these purposes. Regarding to that reflection, we arrived to the development of competencies and we tried to explain them in our video in relation with each task.

We learned that the objective was not only the final result, it was also the procedure. We arrived to a final result but we passed for some steps before reaching the objective. We had to understand the task and to investigate how each of the tools worked in order to use all of them in our work. With these steps, we learnt autonomy, cooperative work, how to learn on our own, how to investigate about a specific topic, how to organize our ideas, etc. And it not only works for this subject, it is useful for our work as teachers. We have opened our mind and we have understood that we have a lot of different ways of teaching apart from the traditional one. It is time for us to innovate, to discover new ways of teaching, allowing children not only to learn by heart but also to investigate on their own. Why can't we be innovative teachers? Why we have to work with old methods when there are a lot of new methods to discover? Why children have to learn for passing exams rather than for realizing as a person? And the most important thing, if we have the opportunity of changing it, why don't we do that? It's our moment, we can do it!

On the other part, the worst part was the day of presenting our videos to the class. It was a difficult situation for us because we had the worst scores of the class and we were frustrated about it because we really do not thing that our work was so bad. In fact, we worked a lot on it; we though carefully the idea that we wanted to transmit and we tried to explain it in our video as clear as possible. But then, we talked with Linda and she explained us that the grades were not based on the quality, it was a question of preferences and maybe, our work was more boring than others or something similar. So we will work hardly on it to improve as much as possible. We realized that our work had several things to improve and we will try to do it better at the next task.

To sum up, this week the work was great because we realized how much we have improved these months. However, it was a bit frustrating because of the results. We will do it better the next time, sure!

Facilitator Post

Hello everyone! I’m Alba and I have the Facilitator Role this week. This week has been a bit hard because as we said in the post and in order to finish the part of Educational Resources of the subject, we had to do a video summarizing all the things we have learned along the course, it hasn’t been an easy task because we have done many different things with a lot of new concepts, new resources… so it was complicated  to sum up everything in only 1’30 minutes.

 First of all, when Linda said us what we have to do, we started to do a brainstorming of the basic things and competencies we have developed in this part of the subject, and we wrote all the ideas, everyone suggest interesting things and ways to do the video, and we started to work.

 I have to say that I am very pleased with the work of the group, we really worked very well. As usual, we divided the task, a couple think about what we have learned, others about the best way of reflect everything in short-time, and Rosana, our expert in new technologies, started to learn how to use Moovly, and then she explained it to us.

For me is very important to have a good relationships between all the members, because we spend a lot of time together and is basic to get well with everybody, and I can say that we are so lucky because we haven’t got problems between us. If any difficulty or tension appears we know how to solve it. This course is being a very good experience for us, doing the summary we realized that we have learned a lot of resources and we have acquired how to use interesting and useful  tools v for us when we become teachers.

 We only had a problem with the blog, we saw a comment of Linda, our teacher ,telling us that we had use different writing in the whole blog, and we decided to change it immediately. Also she said us that we haven’t got tags in the posts, so as responsible of the Webs 2.0 I searched in the Net what was that and after telling the group how to put it, we corrected it. As Facilitator of the week, I am very happy because everyone  knew their role and did their duties perfectly, we just want the better for the group, it is a pleasure works with them. In some moments when we have to change anything wrong like the last week with the comic, we always find a solution together. The good relationship between the members of a group is also crucial because teachers in schools do not work by their own and with an individual objective, they work together for the best education possible to children in school, the same happens in this course, we have got a common objective and we know that cooperate is the best way to reach it, and if you do it with a smile, and respecting your partners and the different points of view, much better!

 Finally I want to say thanks to my Little Ants for their good predisposition to work, we can with everything.

Best regards.

Stars' Post.

Hello! We’re Raquel and Rosana, and this week we have the role of stars. During the last week, we had the video of the presentation: Raquel is the voice of it, and Rosana did the sections of the video.

When we arrived to the classroom, all the stars went to the teacher’s table and put their videos on the computer in order to be ready at time. We thought that the presentation was similar to the others, but we surprised when Linda told us that she had put all the videos and each group had to evaluate to the others one, like Eurovision. Then, Linda put the videos in order to we can evaluate in the best way, being critical, although some scores wasn’t critical. When all the videos had been seeing, Linda asked us to say a summary of our video, and Rosana said: 

“We had a video telling a story about the content that we had acquired during the course, and to sum up, we did a summary of the competences.” 

After that, the stars of each group had to be the representatives of their group to say the scores of each video. When Linda chose the group that had to talk, the stars got up and say, for example in our case: 

“Hello Linda! We are Raquel and Rosana from the group The Little Ants; and our scores are... Three points for Step by Step! Four points for T8T! Five points for Education Rush Hour! Six points for C’mon Tutankamon! Seven points for Hide & Sick! Eight points for Brainstorming! Ten points for Teachleaders! And... Twelve points for... Give me 7!” 

And each group said the same, but each one with their scores, of course.

Stars: Rosana Sánchez Robles y Raquel Lorenzo Franco.

Translator Post

Hi, readers! I’m Blanca and I have the role of Translator this week. It’s nice to write once again in our blog about the last task “What we have learnt during the course in School Organization”. This role consists on explaining the five most important words of the week. It has to include the definition of each concept with my own words and based on academic resources. The words I have chosen are:

Competence: A competence is a learning that we can apply to resolve problems that happen in live. It is necessary the knowledge related to each subject to develop the education. The main competencies which can be highlighted are: personal, social and ethical competencies.

The personal competence is all this information that is important to us as future teachers; we also should be teachers in a TPACK framework.

In social competence we have learnt working in groups respecting other ideas, dialoguing, dealing problems…

The ethical competence consists of respecting other cultures, religions or don’t influenced children with our own thoughts.

Context: is a set of circumstances or facts which surround a particular event, situation, statement or idea. Related to education, the two most important backgrounds are social and the economic context. There are some problems in the public school, such us the money, the economic context, the cultural context (which consists on respecting other cultures, religions, etc) and the age (which is composed by the mental and the chronological age).

Knowledge: is a human faculty which results from interpreted information and from understanding information, concepts, experiences or individual interpretation through experience, association or education. In an organizational context, knowledge is an important element in the intelligence and the competences of people.

Moovly: is a web tool which is used to create videos, presentations being attractive to children and adults. With this tool, we forget about slides adding for example: voice, sound, music, etc. It has a timeline interface with which you can synchronize everything you put on the video. Then, when you have finished, you can publish it on YouTube, Facebook, put it on a website or download it. The presentations 3.0 can be done with animations of the same web, Moovly. With it, it is easy to convert the traditional presentations into creative videos.

Objective: is the proposition of a goal or purpose to be achieved, and that, according to the area where it is used, has some level of complexity. It is one of the key players in the planning process. A goal can be achieved individually or otherwise, as a group, for the formation of a team. In both cases, efforts and will be moved by prior arrangement to achieve the objectives.

Finally, I would like to say I have learnt a lot during the semester of this subject and that with this final task, I realized how much we have acquired. At first, it may seem that you have learned a lot, but it is with this type of activities when you understand the development of creativity, the passion of teachers, the importance of education and above all, the way you want your students to learn in the future.

Greetings!

Our knowledge

Hello! We are The Little Ants, the task of this week is about what we have acquired through the activities which we have done during the course.

First, we have to take into account the social and economic context, for example: that the main problem in the public school is the money, the economic contexts, the cultural context (respect other cultures, religions, etc) and the age (mental and chronological). At first the subject seems a bit difficult because we had to do a lot of activities and in different ways which we had never done, but instead of give up we saw it like a challenge which we had to pass.

Secondly, we have to set our objective, what we want to reach, when and how.

The main problem is that the teachers forget the objectives of teaching and that the main thing is the students.

Then, we choose the tools what we are going to use, we have to take into account the economic contexts of the school and the different competencies. A competence is a learning that we can apply to resolve problems that happen in live. It is necessary the knowledge related to each subject to develop the education.

It is important to mention that TPACK is the base of the modern education; to reach an effective teaching is important to know the knowledge of technologies, pedagogy and content. Technology gives students a lot of resource.

Teachers do a bad use of textbooks they can survive without them. Textbook limits students’ knowledge and creativity. They show just one reality they represent the power of editorials and political ideas and children grow up influeciated by them.

Mercedes Ruiz also shows us that are other ways of learning such us creativity, innovation and the important of language. Educators must be open-minded a teacher is a story teller.

Through this methodology we have developed some competencies: personal, social and ethical competencies.

The personal competence is all this information is important to us as future teachers; we also should be teachers in a TPACK framework.

In social competence we have learnt working in groups respecting other ideas, dialoguing, dealing problems…

The ethical competence consists of respecting other cultures, don´t influenced children with our own thoughts.

As students of primary school, we value all these things, because these things will be very useful in our life. We have realized that in our future as teachers want to be teachers in a TPACK framework, innovating and using more resources than textbooks because we have the control of our classes and we can teach through the resources that we want. To do this is important to feel that we can achieve all the things that we want. 

In this task, we have gone deep in the contents of each task, so that, we have looked for the background and the competences we have acquired.

We have to say, that in the presentation of the videos, we saw the work of each group and then we put the scores being critical.

Here, you can see our work of this week: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44Cxt6bzCQM

Definitely what we have learnt is that “TEACHERS CAN CHANGE THE WORLD”. 

Journalist Post

Hello!! I am Raquel and this week I am the journalist of my group, ‘’The LittleAnts’’. I am going to tell you the story about our work during this week.

On the first day, we didn’t know very well what we had to do, because Linda explains the task every week, and with this explanation we can have an idea about it. However, we have to decide how we can do our work in the best way and once we have chosen it, we should decide the tools that we can use. So, first of all, we were discussing about it, and finally we decided to make a comic to show our work, because we think that it is a good way to send this message about textbooks.

In addition, we decided about what the message of our comic would be, and we wrote the dialogues between the characters of the comic. We were also looking for some photos with creative common licenses on flickr to make our comic, although we found some photos, we really thought that it would be better if we took our own photos, or in this case to make our own drawings and then digitize and upload them to flickr to achieve exactly what we wanted.

On the second day, as I have just said, we thought about the possibility of making our own drawings and digitizing and uploading them to flickr, so on the second day we made all drawings that we needed and upload it to flickr. We were exploring about the tools that we could use to make our comic online, we tried different ways; however, we didn’t know how to do it. So we didn’t do it online, we carried out both comics, the first one in English and the second one in Spanish. We knew that probably we would have to change it, but we couldn’t do anything.

One the third day, the first thing that we did was to show our work to Linda, because we knew that we should do it online, and as we imagined Linda told us that we couldn’t show our work in this way because we had to do it online. Because of that, we had to change our hole work, the first time in English and the second time in Spanish.

On the fourth day our starts showed our work.

Although we had worked twice, now we are very happy, because we have done our work in the correct way, and as far as I’m concerned it has been a nice and interesting experience, because we know these things about textbooks, however, we ignore it in our daily life and when we reflect on it, as we have done with this task. We really realize that there are more resources, that teachers are doing a bad use of textbooks and that they base their classes on them, and we have to change it. We have to fight against this power of editorials and the politicals ideas which are represented on textbooks, we have to achieve an education based on the power of the teacher’s methodology, on their ideas to use different resources to interact with their students and also to get that they learn on their own.

I have also commented in our twiter about the task and finally, I have commented in a blog of my classmates, in the Brain Storming's blog,

http://7brainstorming.blogspot.com.es/2014/03/feli-as-journalist.html#gpluscomments

and in another blog that I have found, which is really interesting, and also it talks exactly about the same aspects of our task of this week.

Curator-Farmer. María Mula Pérez

Hi! I am María and this week I have been the Curator-Farmer of our task, and I put here the link of my pearltree about "the dark size of text books". I have tried to reflect the main disadvantages of text book. On the other hand, the second pearl is based on "comic", which has been the tool used by us to complete this activity. I hope you like it!

http://pearltrees.com/p/cOSOL

And here I put the references we have used:

https://aulavirtual.um.es/access/content/group/1134_G_2013_N_N/Grupo%201/About%20textbooks/elbonia.cent.uji.es-Carta_a_los_editores_de_libros_de_texto.pdf

https://aulavirtual.um.es/access/content/group/1134_G_2013_N_N/Grupo%201/About%20textbooks/WikipediaTextbook.pdf

http://elbonia.cent.uji.es/jordi/2011/07/18/lecturas-sobre-libros-de-texto/

Michael W. Apple. Official Knowledge, 2nd edn (2000), London: Routledge, pp. 42–60. Retrieved from: https://aulavirtual.um.es/access/content/group/1134_G_2013_N_N/Grupo%201/About%20textbooks/apple_cultural_politics_and_the_text.pdf

In conclusion, thanks to this activity we have learnt to use a variety of multimedia products as well as online programmes.

Analyst Post.

Hello, I'm Rosana, and this week I have the analyst's role. I know that the same sentence isn't important, but I would like to remember that the analyst's role consist in evaluate the work of the group.

The first thing that I would like to say is that, this week, the group have been working very hard and that I'm pleased with them. I could say a lot of thing about this task, but I must answer the questions, so here goes!

In order to the first question, I want to say that the best part of the activity has been show you our way to understand that the text books are not the only way for teaching and, of course, they aren't the best way to teach children. I passed a long time thinking on what we wanted to represent, because for we, is very important that the people know that children need different ways to learn. On the other hand, I strongly believe that the worse part of the activity was when we showed our comic to Linda and she said us that we had to do the comics in a online program, the comic had to be 2.0. Then, we had to change them and the work was very hard, but I finally get it.

With this task, we have learned that not only the text books are important, but there are a lot of resources which teach children in a better ways. So, they can learn by discovery. Besides, we must improve the time that we spent thinking about what we want to present, to do, to say; because we pass a long time with it. Possibly, it's the reason we are so slow to accomplish tasks.

To sum up, for the next week we should conserve all the knowledges learned until now and, of course, we must continue working hard, more each day, because it's the most important for do a good work.

Translator Post

Hello everyone! This week I have got the Translator Role. So, I have to summarize the five most important words of the week. We have to do a task called “The Dark Side of Text Books”, and we decided to do a comic to present this interesting topic. According to this, and after seeing a lot of webs about textbooks and their problematic, for me, the most important words are the next:

•  Editorials: They do business with education through textbooks; families spend a lot of money buying them each course and for us this is immoral according to the economical situation in our country. Most editorials are just worried about earning money and they do not think in children and in their education.
• Teachers: The problem of textbooks is not caused only by editorials. During many years, teachers used textbooks as the only resource in school; most of them cannot survive to their lessons without them and is a big problem for the society. They have to be able to use other resources, especially ICTs; they offer many advantages as less weight, more information and reduced cost.
•   Ideology: The textbooks are in many times influenced by the political situation of the moment or the type of editorial which create it. It is very worrying because children grow influenced by the way of thinking of others and not by themselves. It is an error because they do not have open-mind in most cases and in the future we do not have citizens with their own ideas, they just follow most powerful people.
•  Children: They are the most harmed with this situation. With textbooks they really spent a boring time in schools, they do not learn to think by themselves, the reality is just what the textbooks say. Their teachers do not offer them an enjoyable time outside the schools learning by experience for example, or the pleasure of discovering any interesting knowledge by themselves, for this reason, they are not comfortable at schools, and most of them do not like it. They should enjoy learning but the reality of schools is quite different.
• Textbooks: Nobody knows why textbooks is nowadays the most important resource in education, maybe because of the laziness of teachers who do not want to think a bit in their methods of teaching. But, and because other reasons, children are limited in their way of learning and discovering a lot of interesting concepts, textbooks think for them so, why they would do an effort?

I must say that I have learned a lot of with this task, I really like what I have discovered about the situation of textbooks and this has helped me to change my perception of schools reality. I think it is very useful for me when I become teacher in order to improve my methodology with children, not limitation myself to the typical lessons we are used to, I’m looking forward to put all this knowledge in practice! We have many things to learn and this is just our beginning as future educators.

 I hope you have enjoyed our work, best regards.

Stars Post

Hello! We are the stars of the group “The Little Ants”, María Dolores and Blanca. At first, for this task, we thought that we would expose on Thursday but we didn´t have enough time, so the exposition took place on Monday.

We had to do two comics, one of them in English and another in Spanish. Using Chogger Comic Strip Creator. There, appear a dialogue between a book and children of different status, these children realized that textbooks are not as good as a lot of people think.

We had a mistake of grammar, in a cartoon we put: “we only can learn by head”, and the correct is “we only can learn by heart” as Linda said us.

We decided to choose the comic because we think that is the best and dynamic way to teach that children can acquire more knowledge apart from textbooks, for example on internet or doing dynamic activities such as go to the zoo to study different kind of mammals.

It was a bit difficult for us to find a web page 2.0 to develop what we wanted was to make it from our own drawings. Finally, we found this page which is adapted to our wishes. We chose this tool because it allows us to create the squares from photos or own drawings and it was more professional than the others we found.

We saw the links which Linda suggested and there, we have learnt that in many nations debates over the content and format of school textbooks are sites of educational and political conflict. We have understood that the editorials follow the instructions of the government and politicians, so they show the different ideologies.  The solution is not the digital text books because the children just memorize and the editorials have digitalized typical books but not in the best way as we can see in the article “Carta a los editores del libro de texto”. The problem, it seems, is that educational administration is unwilling to continue paying their textbooks on paper because it has spent a fortune on computers for children and schools. The traditional criticism of the textbook as Jordi Ardell argued can be classified in: ideological (with problems with the hidden curriculum), didactics (many of the practices of textbooks are memorization exercises), epistemological (the book is the only source of true knowledge), deskilling (nowadays, the books say what the teachers have to say in class) and economics (it produces unsustainable prices and poor quality)

In conclusion, we had a good and different experience about the presentation because in this task we didn´t have to explain a lot, our work was reflected in our comic.

Facilitator Post

Hello, I am Esmeralda, the facilitator of The Little Ants during this week. My experience in this role has been good, maybe because the members of the group get on well and it was easy to work (and to be a bit bossy) with them. This week, we have been working on the dark side of textbooks. As I have to be in charge of the Web 2.0 group's life, we have been using the HT #librodetesto on our Twitter so here you can see some of our Tweets: 

Also we put some tweets during the task that Mercedes Ruiz proposed to us: 

As well, after the presentation we received some interesting comments from our classmates that help us to improve our works. 

Also you can see that Mercedes Ruiz (@Londones) wrote us some very interesting tips and comments with some reflections to think about that really motivate us to improve and continue learning: 

The role of each person of my group during this week was:

Journalist: Raquel. She had taken some photos and videos during the week and she has commented on blogs of other groups.

Analyst: Rosana. She had to evaluate the work of each member of the group. She also had to make the reflection of the task of this week answering some questions related with the topic.

Translator: Alba. She had to find the five key concepts of the task and she had to define them looking for extra information.

Curator-farmer: Maria. She had to organize a mind map and she had to put these ideas in a PearlTrees. She also has to compile the references of the resources that we have used.

Stars: Blanca and Maria Dolores. They had to explain to the whole class the reason of why we have choose the format of comic for doing the task and they had to present the comic.

Facilitator: Esmeralda.


This week the format that we decided to use for this task was the comic. We had different tasks to do so I decided to organize the group in order to do not waste the time. Maria and Raquel thought how to create and do the drawings of the comic. Rosana and Blanca started to look for one tool of Web 2.0 that allows us to update our own images to do the comic. Alba, Maria Dolores and me started to look for some resources to catch the main ideas of the disadvantages of text books and we started to do the outline of the comic. When we finished our individual tasks, each person of the group explain the others the conclusion that she had arrived, so all of us know the main ideas. Moreover, we decided together the ideas that we will put on the comic.

I am very happy with the development of the task because all the members of the group had their activities on time.

Also, I had to solve some problems. For example, we started to work with one tool for doing the comic but we were not really sure about if this tool will be the correct tool, so we talked with the teacher the next day and she told us that we must find an online tool to upload our comic. We continue looking for other tools and finally we found the adequate one.

I have to mention that we had a special visit the last Monday on our class, which was Mercedes Ruiz' visit. During that session we also talked about the disadvantages of text book and she proposed us some alternatives: we not only have to pay for text book as the unique tool to teach, we can invest our money in buying different books with colors, forms, papers with different forms and textures, etc. After her visit, we decided to include some of her ideas in our comic so we tried to improve it.

I hope you had enjoyed the final result of our comic and the post! See you!

The Dark Side of Textbooks

Hello everyone! This week we had worked in one interesting task about the disadvantages of text books in schools (in classrooms). We (can find) found a lot of problems that books cause in Education. Parents and teachers in general aren’t conscious of the troubles that they originate for children. First of all, families spend a lot of money in text books. Our country is in a difficult economical situation and we think that is immoral spend so much money in the buy of textbooks. Also, text books have got an ethical influence, it depends on which editorial have published it, it has got a message or other (they can tell the same topic from different points of view). Governments influence text books too, they pay for editorial to publish one thing or other, depends its ideology. For example, in a non-democratic country, text books haven’t send message as freedom or democracy, so the children only learn just one reality, not provide them a whole vision of the world. With text books teachers don’t give students a complete education. In Spain, most teachers not works as professionals of education, just as readers of text books. Practices in education are based just on text books, they not allow the children to discover the world by themselves by experiments or using other resources, like for instance, internet.

To criticise textbooks we are prepare a nice comic, in which there are some characters, such as: a textbook, some editorials and some children.

In this comic we have designed a dialogue among the characters to criticise this resource, talking about its advantages, its bad uses and also talking about the power and the influence of editorials because the worse thing of textbooks is that according to its editorial , because as we have said before editorials talk about the same topic from their different point of view. As far as we concerned, textbooks are a good resources to teach children, however, there are more resources to teach, resources that children need to be more creative and to learn how to learn by themselves and how to investigate. Because if teachers only use textbook to teach they don't improve this thing to the children, they only teach children basic thing, and to memorise it to learn, and as we are studying in our degree to achieve a good learning children need to connect the new information with the content that they already posses, and with the others resources children learn to connect both contents. We hope you enjoy it!!!

http://cho.gr/RVukg

http://cho.gr/2FckK

We have to learn how look beyond text books and investigate in materials for doing more enjoyable the class for the children. We have to motivate the students researching new types of paper, textures, colours, etc.

Mercedes Ruiz's class

Hello everyone! On Monday we had a very special visit in our #SOyER1314 class, Mercedes Ruiz (@londones). She demonstrated us how is possible teach the children in a very different way as the usual. 

As resource, she used just a skirt, gloves and a hat, with this she told a story, it was very interesting. With the gloves, one blue and one red, she explained the reality of our country and the political situation in it. We liked too much her class, we realized that the teacher is also a story-teller and she has to innovate other ways of teaching in order to do dynamic classes and motivate their children. After she sent us a funny task, we really enjoyed doing it,we took a photo outside the class and chose a slogan for it. 

Our slogan was ‘Together for the same  goal’, we think is important to work in groups and support in others, mainly with all have the same goal, in our case, being teachers.

https://twitter.com/LittleAnts95/status/442972975105863680/photo/1

Here, you have some photos about the making off:

 

Mercedes also explained us that a teacher has to know how to work without text books, just use it like an extra help, not focus their lessons on it, the students only learn from a point of view with it, and no think by themselves, just memorise for the exam and after, they forget all the knowledge learned.

To finish, we want to say thanks to Mercedes Ruiz for her lesson, we will never forget it, she helped us a lot to open our mind and understand the necessity of being good teachers and professionals in our work. Also we want to say thanks to our teacher Linda for bring us this opportunity, it was fantastic and very useful for us.

Best regards.