Analyst's Post.

Good evening!  I’m Rosana and this week I have been the analyst of my group. To do my work well, I’m going to answer the following questions:

1. What was the best part of the activity? The best part of the activity was when we finished the task, because we were very exhausted and stressed and we need time to study.

2. What was the worse? The worst part was when we didn't know how to present. We were arguing during twenty or twenty-five minutes, and finally we could decide it.

3. What was the best moment of the week (in the work of the group)? The best moment of the week was when we were searching the advantages and the disadvantages and we realized that each one found the same that the others. We started laughing, between jokes, and finally we continued with the work.

4. What was the worse? The worst part of the week for us was when we couldn't get to agree about the presentation, because we don't like to discuss and this little problem almost gets that we discuss.

5. What have you learnt? We have learnt the different types of leadership, and what are the advantages and the disadvantages of each one. Besides, we also learnt that, although a leadership can seem bad, it has got his advantages too. And the same with a leadership that seems good, later you can find that it has got his disadvantages.

6. What do you need to conserve -as a group- for the next weeks? Although there aren't more weeks, I am sure that we need conserve what we have learnt, because in a future we can need it when us be teachers. Of course, each one will have to decide what kind of leadership she wants to use in her job, and now we know what are the best and the worse things of each leadership.

7. What do you need to improve –as a group- for the next weeks? We need to learn that we have to divide the work in a better way, because we felt overwhelmed and we couldn´t concentrate at first, but at the end we complemented between us.

8. How THIS content is related to other contents in the course and in your degree? The main relation is with the previous task, when our stars had to represent a kind of leadership (authoritarian), and the stars of the other groups the others kinds of it.

And this is all! I hope that this information may be of interest.

See you soon!

Translator post.

Hello everyone, I am Raquel the translator of ''the little ants'', as you know I have to choose five key words and to provide a definition of them, but again as you know this week we have work the advantages and the disadvantages of these six leadership styles, so I have though that all of them are key words, so I have done an exception and I have describes all of them.

1. Democratic: This is a leadership style in which the leader take into account their followers' opinion in the decision-making process, so the play a more important role in the decision than other followers of others leadership styles can do and in this way the results are always more creatives. That's the reason why this type of leadership is the more effective, it have higher productivity and usually it is the best one because it cause less problems than others.

2. Autocratic: This kind of leaders have all the control in the decision-making process and the result are less creative because they never take into account their followers' opinion, they only take into account their own opinion. They are really clear about the thing that should be done, how they should be done, and exactly when they should be done. Also they establish very well the difference between the leader and the followers. It is only useful in a decision-making process when there is few time to decide.

3. Laissez- faire: In this kind of leadership the leader give to their follower all the control to the decision making process. They do not provide direction to the followers, it give to their followers a higher degree of freedom, while at the same time they offering guide and support when they are requested. The leader provide all the material necessary to accomplish their goals but he or she don't participate in the decision-making process.

4. Transactional: This leaders focus on motivate their followers trough out a system of rewards and punishments. Providing rewards to recognize the effort or the good performance, and providing punishment to improve the performance. They identify their followers' needs and given them rewards to improve their efficiency. Transactional style prefer working in teams to focus all their concentration in the task.

5. Transformational: The transformational leadership style depends on high levels of communication because leaders motivate their followers by th communication. The leader is not limited by the perception of their followers. They focus on transform the need of their followers and redirect their thinking. The leader work in the most important issue and delegate smaller tasks to their team.

6. Paternalistic: The paternalistic leaderships works as a father for their followers, taking care about them as a father would do with their children. And he or she receive as a result the trust and the loyalty of them. The relationship between leader and workers is totally solid. They help each other as a family when they have any problem.

To sum, I have to say that it have been the best activity in my opinion because it is really useful in our future as teacher to know how much types of leaderships there are and which we want to be, I think that the best one is the democratic leadership.

Enjoy it!

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!

Curator Post

Hello! I am María Dolores, the curator- farmer this week, I will show the references that my group and I used for this task and also you can see a pearl-tree, there, I would show our task of this week.

This week the task consisted on searching the differences between leaderships, Linda sent us two documents to extract the differences and also a link to Wikipedia. According to this, our stars presented our work.

Here I put a link to go to my pearl-tree where I show you a summarize of our work:

http://www.pearltrees.com/#/N-u=1_1829700&N-p=113430925&N-s=1_11608658&N-f=1_11608658&N-fa=10717305

About the references, we used prezi where we showed our presentation of the disadvantages and disadvantages of leadership.

http://prezi.com/umdojmefzddn/untitled-prezi/

Here I will include the link which Linda sent us to consult the different leadership:

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

Facilitator's Post

Hi readers! I'm Esmeralda, the facilitator of this week. I have coordinated and evaluated the work of my group and this week has been special. We have studied the different types of leadership that a group could have and I have been trying some of them.

 Trying to do it in a good mood, I attempted to order some of my mates what they have to do and when they have to do it, I pressure them a bit and their response was a sense of nervousness, they were frustrated and worried of doing the task as fast as possible to avoid my scolding. This is typical of the authoritarian leadership and I proved that it was not a good way of working because it was difficult to maintain a healthy environment of work.

Regarding to that experiment, I decided that the most adequate way of working was the democratic type of leadership. So, I organized the group taking into account each member of the group. In the 6th of May, I divided the work among the members of the group: Mari, Alba and Rosana worked with the Wikipedia's document that Linda had previously uploaded, while Maria and Raquel, and Blanca and me worked with the other two documents in pairs.

During this weekend we continued working on that documents and in the 12th of May we created a Prezi for our stars in order to present the activity. So, in the 13th of May the presented the activity and they do it quite well!

As a facilitator I have to say that my role was easy because, after a long time working together we have learned to work in a cooperative way.

Moreover, I have to be in charge of the Web 2.0, so here you can see some of our tweets of this week: 

See you!

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.

Curator-Farmer Post

Hi everyone! I'm Esmeralda and I have had the role of curator-farmer this week. The task of this week was to develop our own school and this activity last only one hour! We didn't need any papers for doing it, so I don't have references to put here.

I have summarized the main characteristics of the school that we have created on this pearltrees:

Here you have the link of the pearl trees so you can see it more detailed:

http://pearltrees.com/p/cV_9r

Apart from my role as curator-farmer, the day of the activity I had to present our bilingual school to the class with my partner Rosana. We were a bit lost because we hadn't had so much time to prepare the activity in a more detailed way, but we took it as a challenge and we did it. This week we have had a great time!

See you!