Stars - Alba Velasco and María Mula

Hi everyone, we are Alba and María, and this week we have been the stars of our activity. The task has consisted on doing a presentation explaining the advantages and disadvantages of six types of leadership: authoritarian, democratic, paternalistic, laissez-faire, transactional and transformational. Here you have some of the main characteristic of each type:

 -Authoritarian: It can be effective in work environments where decisions need to be made quickly but in fear of followers being unproductive, authoritarian leaders keep close supervision and feel this is necessary in order for anything to be done.

- Democratic: This style of leadership encompasses discussion, debate and sharing of ideas and encouragement of people to feel good about their involvement. However, in situations where roles are unclear or time is of the essence, democratic leadership can lead to communication failures and uncompleted projects

-Paternalistic: The relationship between these co-workers and leader are extremely solid, although like a parent would have to, sometimes the employer must spank the employee.

 -Laissez-faire: Laissez-faire leaders allow followers to have complete freedom to make decisions but it can sometimes result in a lack of productivity, cohesiveness, and satisfaction.

 -Transactional: Transactional leaders are effective on work team. On the other hand, the main disadvantage is that they are more concerned with following existing rules than with making changes to the organization.

 -Transformational: The main objective is to work to change or transform his or her followers' needs and redirect their thinking. In addition, transformational leadership can reform organizations.

With this activity, we have learned that there are many types of ways to guide a team. In addition, some of them are more effective than others and we have discovered that our type of organization (in The Little Ants) is democrative, we have got good things but like always we have to improve in other aspects of organizating our work. We have liked a sentence of one of our classmates: “a leader must form leaders, not followers”.

See you next week!

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

Hi everyone! We are Maria Dolores and María and this week we have been the stars of “The Little Ants”.

This week the stars had a big responsibility, because we competed for an important prize, so our effort was so important. We divided the topics and each of us developed three of them, then we passed our summaries and we studied the six topics.

Our task have consisted on participate in a game, which it was like a “parchís”. If we remember, the two weeks before holidays, we were working on the LOMCE and its changes in relation with the LOE. Linda, our teacher, gave us six topics to work. Firstly, each group had to do two conceptual maps, with two of these topics and then, explaining the permanencies and the changes between both laws. Secondly, every members of the class met to establish a common conceptual map of each topic. Then, we had to obtain or elaborate eight questions of each conceptual map.

These questions have been the protagonists of the task we have done this week. The game was structured in the following way: two stars of each group had to represent the rest of the same. The rest of our classmates were the public, including our partners.

All stars of different groups were together, although it wasn´t possible that two members of the same group were close, obviously. Then, Linda gave us a “piece” which would move our position in the panel. Our piece was a pair of heels. The rules of the game were the following: firstly, a star said a number between five and ten. Linda counted the question until she arrived at the correct, and then, she asked the star the correspondent. If the participant guessed the answer, she could roll the dice, and her piece would be moved on the panel. If she failed, her/his dice would stay in the same place.

The game was developed during one and a half more or less. We finished in the fifth position and T8T were the winner, they played very well! Although, we have to recognize that the luck played an important role.

However, it was so funny, and we learnt a lot of things about LOMCE, because we listened different answers of our partners. At first we were very nervous, but we when we saw that we were going to spend a good time we felt calmer.

Stars Post

Hello everyone! We are María and Alba, the stars of these weeks of The Little Ants and we want to show you our conceptual maps. First of all, we have to say that we decided to do a very complex map with related concepts in order to show all the ideas reflected in the documents about the current law of education LOMCE and its changes respect the previous one, LOE.

Each group has to work in two different topics respects LOMCE and its changes. Our topics were the Organization of Primary Education and Administration and Governance at Local and/or Institutional Level II.

In our conceptual map about the Organization of Primary Education we showed from the organization of the school year, the classes per day students have, the differences of admission requirement among private and public schools, the geographical accessibility, to the role of tutors, how them oriented their students, the addition of a second foreign language with the LOMCE… This work has helped us to understand better the reality of schools nowadays, how they work, and also the adaptations to the students’ necessities.

Our second topic was based on “Educational administration and governance”. We have divided our mindmap in two areas. The permanencies and the changes.

The first point is based on on the curricula. We want to explain that the original curricula emerge from the state, then it pases to the authonomous communities and finally it arrives to schools. Along this process, the curricula suffers a Our second topic was based on “Educational administration and governance”. We have divided our mindmap in two areas. The permanencies and the changes.

-          On the first hand, inside the permanencies we find a very important topic through which develops the rest of the points, Educational Institutions.

The first point is based lot of changes, so we can deduce that it deteriorates somewhat.

The second point mentions the areas of educational institutions, which are pedagogical and curricular organization, organizational management and management of resources. In addition, educational institutions can induce experiments, forms of organization and working plans (this is the third aspect).

Then, we find that educational institutions have The School Board and The Teachers Assembly.

 Finally, the three following points explains the plans of schools (values, objectives, etc.).

-          On the second hand we find the main changes. We illustrate school autonomy, which develop pedagogical resources and the changes in the curriculum (common contents, different teachings and minimum teaching ) and the influence of government.

Last Monday, the day of the exposition, we had to work with other teams and supervise that they put their marks correctly; we really enjoyed working with Give me 7. We thought they did a very good work in their conceptual maps so we let them to mark their own work very high.

This week we had learned many necessary things for us when we become teachers, and we want to continue learning. We are encouraged to work very hard; it is the only way to reach our goals!

Best regards.

By: María Mula Pérez and Alba María Velasco Martínez

Curator-Farmer Post

Hello everyone! I’m Alba, I’ve got the Curator-Farmer role this week so, I’ve been compiling all the references used by the team in the differents activities fot this week: the 20 tips for doing a presentation, Creative Common and the exposition about Float and Sink. Also I helped the girls with their assignment because we always dividing the work in order to do it easier and more dynamic. I summarize all the work in a Pearl Tree, you can see it here.






http://www.pearltrees.com/#/N-s=1_10864049&N-reveal=5&N-fa=10717305&N-u=1_1829700&N-p=105808717&N-f=1_10864049



And here you’ve got the references used by the team.




http://creativecommons.org.nz/


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



http://www.accuconference.com/resources/effective-presentations.aspx



http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/120Adensity.html



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



Best regards, see you next week.

Stars Post- Esmeralda and María

Hi! We are Esmeralda and Maria, the stars of this week. The last Monday, we presented an exposition about a topic of primary school, one of the properties of the water- density and objects which float, and objects which sink.

Our topic, as we have already said was about water. On one hand, when we explained why objects float, we put a cork and a leaf on the surface of the water and we could see how they do not sink due to its low weight material. On the other hand, we could see how a coin and a stone sink when we put them on the surface of the water.

In our presentation we decided to do some experiments because we think that it is an effective method for children to learn in a more interactive way. Sometimes students have to accept what the teachers told them without any reason for believe it. So, if we prove as the same time that we teach them it will be easier for them to memorize and internalize this content.

Here you can see the presentation we used last Monday:

http://www.slideshare.net/TheLittleAnts/float-and-sink

Also, you can find each photo of our presentation on flirck.com. We have uploaded it because maybe some of you find our photos interesting so, you can download and use them.

During the presentation, we used a set of slides to illustrate our ideas. We used some tips in order to make the slides more attractive to the class. For example, we tried to use only one sentence in each slide and we tried to put only one image in each slide but including their respective creative common licences. Moreover, we acquire new tips about how to make a presentation properly. Summarizing:

- Images must occupy the entire size of the slide in order to make them more impressive.

-When we do some experiments is better to accompany them with professional images. 

-At least, it is better to use big letters than use bold letters.

Finally, with this activity we learnt that doing a presentation is a good way to show children why learning is not boring. In addition, we learnt a lot of other group's presentations; for example we discovered that it is very interesting teaching through a tale and also that we can do a type of game in order to facilitate the internalizing process of the content.

We hope you enjoy it! 

Esmeralda and Maria. 

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!