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/

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”. 

Translator

Hello! I´m María, the translator of this week, and I think that to understand very well this topic, we would have to know some terms:

- I think we need to know what exactly a MAP, because this word appears a lot of times in this work. A map is a graphic representation of a portion of the earth's surface. The map has metric properties, this means that they can take measurements of distances, angles, etc..

In order to know the world and supported by the philosophical theories, maps today are part of a key source of information for understanding the world.

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapa

- The second one is CARTOGRAPHIC PROJECTIONS.

A cartographic projection is a graphic representation system which provides an appropriate relationship between the points on the curved surface of the Earth and a flat surface (map). These points are located on a network of meridians and parallels. 

Map projections are necessary for creating maps, but, however, all map projections distort the surface in some way. Depending on the purpose of the map, some distortions are acceptable and others are not, there are therefore different map projections.

We have studied the Robinson projection, the Mercator projection and the Azimuthal projection, and we have seen how there are a lot of opinions about what is the best to represent the reality. For this reason, we know that there isn´t a perfect cartographic projection without failure.

http://icaci.org/files/documents/ICC_proceedings/ICC2001/icc2001/file/f24014.pdf

-The third is DISTORTION. This word appears a lot of times in this activity, so I think that it is important to know its meaning. Distortion is the deformation of the original state of something, in this case of the maps. 

Accurate criteria for evaluation of cartographic projections are based on numerical values of local distortion in the variety of individual points in a map.

Distortion refers to lengths, areas and angles, and its value is changing point by point continuously.

-One of the most important terms in this work is TREASURE HUNTS. Treasure hunt is an activity engaged in students learning of English. This isn´t a really complex task, they have to find the answers to some questions which are given in the content of a set of links selected previously by the teacher.

A treasure hunt includes some elements: the first one is a short introduction to explain the topic. Second, it includes a set of questions that students have to respond. The third one, there is a reflexion about all information obtained. Then, treasure hunts gather some links of the websites where answers will be. And finally, it has an evaluation of the completed task.

Treasure hunt is a flexible work model because it is not necessary that all these elements appear on it.

http://www.isabelperez.com/webquest/taller/treasure.htm

- In this activity we also have worked with MEDIA. The communication channels through which news, entertainment, education, information or promotional messages are disseminated. Media includes all broadcasting and narrowcasting medium such as newspapers, magazines, television, radio, billboards, direct mail, telephone, fax, and Internet. Media is the plural of medium and can take a singular or plural verb depending on the intended meaning.

Analist post

Hello! I am María Dolores, the analyst this week, here I show my work.

What was the best part of the activity? The best part in this second task was that we have learnt that in the past there were people who had different thoughts on how was the world, Robinson, Mercator and Azimuthal showed us their projections and their visions of the Earth in different ways. Also we could have seen the impact which has the media on children and the importance of children to distinct between reality and fiction.  Finally, this weekend we have learnt which a “treasure hunt” is; this is useful to teach children in a fun way.

What was the worse? When we arrived on Monday and teacher told us that we had to do another activity, we have to recognize that, at first, we were impacted. But finally, we realized that this was useful for us because we share our work with other member of other groups who had the same role as each member. So, this helped us to understand different point of view of different parts of this task.

What was the best moment of the week (in the work of the group)? The best moment this week was when we compared the different projections, this was interesting. But the most was when we considered the activity which we could teach to children about treasure hunt. We said different activities and it was funny.

What was the worse?  We had some problems to know what treasure hunt was because we didn´t find the definition, and each members of my group said different things. But finally we saw some examples on the internet and we understood it better.

What have you learn? We have learnt the different point of view of each man, Robinson, Mercator and Azimuthal on how they saw the world. It´s interesting see that some countries are different from actual maps which are habitual for us. Also, the big impact of media on children and how can it influence them, for this reason they should distinct between the reality and fiction. Finally, we have learnt what a treasure hunt is; this is a fun way to teach children some content.

What do you need to conserve –as a group- for next weeks? We need to conserve the cooperation which we have, we work very well together and we have rarely had an argument, I think that this is so important to reach a good work.

What do you need to improve –as a group- for the next weeks? May be, the organization is one of the things which we have to improve because sometimes one of us start with a thing which other member have to do.

How THIS content is related to other contents in the course and in your degree?   This course we won´t see anything related with geography but, next year we are going to study a subject relevant with this, so there we may see something related with this three projections. One thing which I have studied in sociology of education was the impact of mass media on children there; we learnt that TV is one of the most important.

There is any evident social connection of this content (news, politics…)?

Here I can connect this content with a politic aspect, for example: in three projections we can see that some countries are bigger than other, the cause can be because the author wanted to stand out some important countries.

Another social connection, is the impact of media in children, they see TV and other mass media which can influence their behavior: as we said on Monday “Sponge Bob” is an important character for them. In other kind of programs is important that children learn to distinct between reality and fiction because in some cases the violence is so common.

Curator-farmer post

Hi! I am Esmeralda, and the role I've had this week on TheLittleAnts's group was the curator-farmer.

 This week our work was about Cartographic Projections and Treasure Hunt. Some of the most important cartographic projections we've studied were Robinson's projection, Mercator's projection and Azimuthal's projection.  My role of this week consisted on organizing the majority of information in a Pearltrees so; here you have the link of my work:

You can have a general idea of some of the most important cartographic projections whit the Pearltrees I've done. Also, you can find the example of Treasure Hunt we were working during the week.

Pearl Trees:http://pear.ly/cJIhL

We researched more information in order to add additional information to the link that the teacher gave us.

References:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3677180?seq=4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_projection

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection

http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/2a.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azimuthal_equidistant_projection

http://www.icsm.gov.au/mapping/map_projections.html

Treasure Hunt refence:  http://paradaeneltiempo.blogspot.com.es/2013/06/cubismo-la-otra-mirada.html

Journalist Post

Hi, dear readers. I am Blanca and this week I had the role of journalist. This role is very interactive, because when the members of the group were giving their ideas for the presentation, were talking about the new task or doing the poster board and the Pearl Tree, I had to take photos and videos of that. I enjoy this role very much.

I also had to comment other blogs from people of the class and a blog from outside the class. These were the comments:

• The first of all was in T8T’s blog:

• The second one was in The Teachleaders’ blog:

• The last one was in a blog from outside the class. The blog is from a girl of Chester and she did a Treasure Hunt with people of her city:

I have to add that the Treasure Hunt I like the most was the one of the group called "C'mon Tutankamon" which consists on an activity with the parts of the house and the media they chose, the power of the photoshop which can distorts the real perception of the kids.

Here you have some videos and photos of the work I have done during the week. I hope you enjoy it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxIj6gvTYOs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAqjO4Xwjds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7jpDI9dwvM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJEARahL1BA

On 11st of February, the group starts the new task of the week in Organization class. The group was giving ideas of the election of the countries. In class, we decided to do the comparition between France and Mexico. 

We continue after lunch in the classrooms of work at the Faculty of Philosophy in order to try to make a progress in the presentation.We started doing the comparision between the different projections, here you can see the facilitator of this week, Rosana.

Here we have our stars of the week preparing their presentation on Tuesday 11st in the afternoon (Alba and Raquel).

Then, we started to express our ideas in the poster board. In this photo you can see a member of the group, María, drawing and doing the final details of the poster.
On Wednesday 12nd of February, the group study a bit what we had learnt these days and think in things we can add to our task.

On Thursday 13rd of February, we continue
our work in Organization class. We have most
of the work done. We asked some cuestions
to Isabel in order to check that our work was
being well done.








The following days we continue with the task in our houses because each member of the group were in our respective cities. In that way, we asked our doubts through Skype or Whatsapp.

On 17th of February, we have the presentation of the groups of the class. The teacher distributed the class in groups depending in the role that each person have:

These are some pictures of poster boards of the groups in class.

Here you have some photos of the presentations about the topic of the week: Cartography maps, media and treasure hunt.

I like very much the topic of this week because I have learnt new things I did not know. An example of that it is I did not know that with the different projections, the countries have distinct measures. In this way, since we are young, we learn in an inappropriate way, in my point of view.

This week we did the task faster, although we hardly had time in class. We already had more practice and I hope that in the next few weeks it keeps better. I also have to add that some projections in the task, such as the Azimuthal Projection, have very few pages where to find information, but I think we could resolve it.

Best regards!

Stars Post

Hello everyone! We are Raquel and Alba, the stars of The Little Ants team this week.

The day of the exposition, we had everything ready to do our presentation: a Prezzi, what to say… when Linda, our teacher, said us something different. We would work with the stars of the other teams, in order to do only one exposition all together. At first, we felt a bit surprised but quickly we understood that could be a great opportunity to work with the different groups and learn good ideas of the other teams. So, we reorganize all the work and put in common with the other stars all the findings about the three projections: Mercator, Robinson and Azimuthal projection. In our opinion all the stars did a very good job and a great exposition, everyone had the opportunity of speak a bit. Raquel and me spoke about Azimuthal projection and we learnt different things we haven’t seen before. Now and after this task, we understand better that any of the three projections is perfect, and all distorts the reality in some way. So, we have to be careful on which type of things we teach to our students due to the poweful influence of media nowadays. Also, we have learnt to open our mind and have the capacity of change our ideas and work in a moment, we think is so good can do this beacause unexpected events can appear and a good teacher has to know how to work with this and has to be able of solve the different problems in his day-to-day.

To conclude, we enjoyed too much our work this week and our experience as a stars. We hope to continue working in the same way and we are ready to learn a lot of  new things!

Cartographic projections, Media and Treasure Hunt.

CARTOGRAPHIC PROJECTIONS

First of all, in this post of the blog we are going to show you the activities which were proposed before doing our task:

A map is the only “perfect” representation of the Earth’s surface. All maps are distorted in four major ways. The four ways maps are distorted is by the shapes, sizes, lines and latitude of the landmasses being mapped. In order to make maps, projections must be made, and different projections require different distortions.

Projection	Robinson	Mercator	Azimuthal
Purpose	Attempt to find a good compromise to the problem of readily showing the whole globe as a flat image. This projection was developed to show the entire Earth with less distortion of area.	Representing the spherical Earth surface on a cylindrical surface that generates a terrestrial plane map when it opens.	Illustrate the “World view” (with respect to this distance and initial direction) of a bird situated at the projection centre an adapted it for migration along orthodromes.
Distortion-Types?	The straight parallels imply severe angular distortion at the high latitudes toward the other edges of the map, a fault inherent in any pseudocylindrical projection.	Mercator projection distorts the size and shape of large objetcs, as the scale increases from the Equator to the poles where it becomes infinite.	This projection has no distortion because it is equidistant.
Distortion-Areas that are most distorted?	Distortion close the poles are severe, but quickly decline to moderate levels moving away from them.	Distances near the poles are greatly distorted making them look much larger.	The distortion of the areas and angles increases when it grows the farther away from the centre of the map.
Problems?	This feature requires a trade-off in terms of inaccurate map direction and distance.	One disadvantage of a Mercator projection is the distortion at high latitudes.	The distances from all other points are incorrect, and areas and shapes get distorted. More than one moves away from the centre of the projection.
Socio-cultural implications of using it as a learning resource	As the distance between continents is wrong, children grow up thinking misconceptions.	It occurs the same thing that in the Robinson projection. In this model, Germany is in the centre of the map.	This projection is the most real and recent. The children learn the true size and distance of the countries. But they do not use this model, because the most used are the two previous projections.

Once this is done, it is important to mention the definition of map projection. This is a systematic transformation of the latitudes and longitudes of locations on the surface of a sphere or an ellipsoid into locations on a plane. Map projections are necessary for creating maps and all map projections distort the surface in some fashion. Some distortions are acceptable and others are not; therefore different map projections exist in order to preserve some properties of the sphere-like body at the expense of other properties. There is no limit to the number of possible map projections. "Map projection" also refers specifically to a cartographic projection.

This task consists in three projections explained above, Robinson, Mercator and Azimuthal projection. We have chosen the Azimuthal projection. With this projection, the spherical grid is projected onto a flat plane, thus it is also called a plane projection. The poles are the "normal aspect" which results in the simplest projected grid for this family of projections. That is, the plane is normally placed above the North or South Pole. Normally only one hemisphere, or a portion of it, is represented on Azimuthal projection. When projected from the centre of the globe with the normal aspect, the typical grid appearance for Azimuthal projection shows parallels forming concentric circles, while meridians radiate out from the centre. If the imaginary projecting light source is inside the globe a gnomonic projection results, if the light is antipodal a stereographic, and if at infinity, an orthographic. The flag of the United Nations contains an example of a polar Azimuthal equidistant projection.

We have chosen the Azimuthal projection because, although it is the oldest projection among these three projections, as some of you know this is the most real projection, it has less distortion than the two other projections which we have studied. Although teach this presentation to the children it is more difficult than the others, we think that it is more correctly to explain it because as we have said before, it is the most real.

The following step is to compare France and Mexico, the two countries we have chosen with the three projections.

1.      Robinson.

According to Robinson's projection Mexico is two and a half bigger than France in size.

The number of habitants in France is 63.952.494 while the number of habitants in Mexico is 118.115.955 so that the number of habitants in Mexico is bigger than in France as well as the size of the country. Robinson's projection is less real than the other projections but, this projection is the most used. He presents a conic projection of his map.

2.      Mercator.

Mercator projection shows that Mexico is twice bigger than France in size. We can locate France and Mexico in Mercator's projections looking at the latitude. France is located in 0◦ meridian and 40◦-45◦ parallel. Mercator's map is the only one where we can find the localization based on the latitude. Also, America is more at the South of the world; France is bigger represented than its real size in order to give to the country major importance.

This projection is better to use in textbooks because it is plane and rectangular.  Mercator's projection overestimates the white man putting Germany as the centre of the world. Also, the continents are closer and the oceans are smaller so that colonialists believed that the distance between continents was smaller than they thought. The map presents a cylindrical shape.

3.      Azimuthal.

Azimuthal projection presents that Mexico is three times bigger than France in size.

This perspective compared with Mercator's and Robinson's projection is the most real and recent. Each country have the correct position on the map, each country have the same importance. Children learn the correct size of each country but this perspective is not used at all at schools.

MEDIA

The following step in this task was to explain how the effects of media distort the reality. We have chosen this picture to illustrate that with the same object, in this case, an egg, depending on the person itself, their way of thinking, their background, the way that they were educated, etc. So that, they have different perspectives of the same object. This is an example of a distortion in our daily life.

In this case, we can see in the picture an egg which is represented in different ways by Picasso and Dalí. They painted the egg depending on their appreciation of reality.

TREASURE HUNT

Finally, the last step to do this task was making a treasure hunt to find answers to some questions given in the content of the links previously selected by the teacher.

Our treasure hunt was:

A treasure hunt is a list of activities which allows children learn and have fun at the same time, it includes different games, tasks, or anything that the teacher considers useful for their students’ learning.

In order to teach the animals to our students, we would do an activity where we give them some pictures of animals and on the blackboard they have got the different categories of vertebrated animals: fish, amphibians, mammals, birds and reptiles. They have to put each picture on its respective category.

For example: One child has a picture of a dog, so he has to put it in the mammals category.

In this way, they can learn the classifications with a fun and easy activity at the same time they will have a good time while they are learning new things.

With this task we have learnt a lot of things we did not know. Now, we realize that we learn in the school things that are not real, such as in this case, the maps. In most cases of the girls in the group, we learnt Geography or History with the maps of Robinson or Mercator, but not with the more real, the Azimuthal projection.

To sum up, we have to add that we enjoy so much this task and we hope you learn a lot of things with us. In the final presentation, we can conclude that it was very difficult to agree because the groups were very big and there were different opinions.

Regards!