Journalist's Post.

Hello! I'm Rosana and I'm the journalist of the task that we did on Monday.

Unfortunately, I can't tell no story because this task was done in the same day, so I only have some photos of that.

On Monday, our stars had to act as authoritarian bosses and they were sending us to do things all the time. We had very little time to do the task and, beside of this, I was selected to exhibit alongside Esmeralda. For all this, I couldn't take a lot of photos, so I will leave here two photos, in which you can see some of my teammates doing the task, thinking how it would be our center and bringing our ideas to paper.

For me, the work that we did on Monday was very nice, except for the orders of the stars, because they made us a little nervous.

To sum up, I would like to say that I hope the activity was done right and that we are working hard for the next task. 

Thank you, and see you soon.

Facilitator Post

Hello readers! I’m Alba and I’m the Facilitator of this week. My role has been coordinating the work of my group. This week has been a bit strange because we had just the time of the class for doing the task; designing the schools of our dreams but with a characteristic. We had to work under the supervision of the two stars of the group, Blanca and Raquel. At the beginning of the class, Linda had talked with them and said them that they had to be autocratic leaders, and all the decisions of the group had to be made by them. The others members of the group did not understand everything at first and they were a bit angry but after they accepted that it was part of the task. Me as facilitator tried to coordinate the work but it was impossible, because Blanca and Raquel were very hard and did not lend me to run the situation., due to their role of dictatorial leaders.

Despite this, I think that the group worked very well and the girls accepted the situation in the best way. From my point of view is a very good activity to understand the different types of leaders that a group of work can have. And after we discussed our impressions about the activity we realized that always is better a boss who is able to work in group and to listen the others opinion, although he or she manages the way of working, he has to know that other scan have other good ideas too.

Now we are working in the task about the disadvantages and advantages of each type of leadership and we hope that we can do a good exposition.

See you.

            

Stars Post

Hello once again, we are Raquel and Blanca, the stars of our group. We must say that today, at the beginning of the class, Linda (our teacher) told to the stars of every group to leave the class. Then, she said that the task of the day was to create a broad school. She also told us that the stars had to be directive, less care or democratic. In these different types of personalities of being in charge of a school, we had to be directive.

When we arrived to the classroom, we told to the rest of our group what we had to do. We had to do a broad school and then explain to the whole class how it will be. We gave a lot of orders to our classmates and they became a bit angry because of that. Finally, they told us that they preferred to be more democratic and take into account the opinion of every person of the group and not only the one of the stars.

Linda also told us that in the presentation of the broad school, the stars had to choose two people of our group to present the task. Then, we decided that Esmeralda and Rosana do that.

Our broad school was the following one:

It is a bilingual school whose name is “Ágora”. It is composed by: one headmaster, one director of studies, one representative of town hall, one pedagogist and one psychologist. In the school, it will be 340 students of Primary Education (from 6 to 12 years), 20 teachers of the different subjects and 2 support teachers. The time table will be from 9 am. to 14 pm. with a break will be of half an hour. It will have a dining hall where the people of the school foster healthy habits. In the school will be activities in the afternoon such as technology, dance, football, jockey, tennis and swimming and travels, for example to museums or to a summer bilingual camp in holidays. The competences are: approval and evaluation of the educational project, participation on the selection of the headmaster, decide about the students’ admission, value of the center running and decide about the scholar system and evaluation of the student’s performance.

To sum up, we think that this activity has helped us to understand how are the different kinds of personalities of the people that are in charge of schools. When all the class talk about the reactions of the members of the groups, we realized that the best type of personality is the democratic one, because every person of the group can give his/her opinion.

See you soon!!

Analyst Post

Hello everyone! I'm Alba, the Analyst of this week. And as you know I have to put the marks of my partners. I had really enjoyed my task because I didn't have any problem with any of them, so I put them very good marks because they deserved it. We worked very well together and for this task we had only a few difficulties printing the cards, but we solved it immediately.

The task of this week was doing questions about the LOMCE according to the conceptual maps done the previous week, and once you had the questions, put them in cards.  We met one time and because this work was easy to divide, we did the rest of the task separately. We worked by couples and divided the topics. Although this can be seen as an easy task, we wanted to make very good questions, so we spent many time doing it.

The best part of the activity for us was correcting the cards with Give me 7 and voting our classmates's cards. We really enjoyed seeing their work and learning from their questions.

For us, the worst part was printing the cards because we had a little problem with the size, but we solved it very quickly.

We have learnt many things about the LOMCE, LOE and the changes between the two laws. I consider very useful to know about the subjects, the role of teachers, the autonomy of schools and so on.

We have to conserve that we work very well together, and we do not have many problems among us, and it is important to continue working in this way.

Although I think that we work well, for me we have to improve that in determined moments, we are a bit stressed beacuse we have too much work and we do not know what to do, we have to learn how to keep calm.

Evidently, this content is very related to many things in this course, specially with the part of the curriculum of the subject 'Planificación de la Acción Educativa' but in general it is related with most of our subjects.

Of course there are many social connections with the politic of our country nowadays, beacuse LOMCE is a very recent law and like everythings, it is being very controversial and critized by the citizens, so it is essential to know it closer.

In my opinion, it is being a very good experience for learning more things about the current law in education and the running of spanish schools nowadays. Something essential for us when we become teachers. All the groups are working very hard, and I have to recognize that after all, we are a bit afraid of this game, but we know that with effort and work we can reach it! We are very motivated to keep on working and learning. 

Best regards

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.

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.

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. 

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

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!