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!

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!

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.

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.

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!

Stars Post.

The work of star has been divided between María Dolores and Rosana. Our work consisted on presenting the mind map about TPACK.

In the last classroom on 10th February we explained our mind map. At the same time in this work we have learnt what is TPACK, in this way, Technological Content Knowledge attempts to identify the nature of knowledge required by teachers to integrate technological in their teaching. As Mishra and Koelher found, there are three keys of knowledge, they are:

-Technology: the knowledge about various technologies which are applied in class.

-Pedagogy: the knowledge of teachers in practices, methods and strategies.

-Content: the knowledge of teachers about the subject which they have to teach.

The most important is the relation between these components:

-Technology and Pedagogy Knowledge (TPK): teaching and learning can change depend of the use of technologies.

-Pedagogy and Content Knowledge (PCK): the knowledge in a pedagogical way which is use to teach a specific content.

-Technology and Content Knowledge (TCK): understanding on how technology and content are relationated.

As an instance of all this and in relation with our subjects; in the technological part we can find Investigation and ICT and Scholar organization and educational resources. Similarly, Planification of educational action, Developmental and educational psychology, Sociology of education, Scholar organization and educational resources and Diversity of student body and tutorial action are into pedagogical part. And finally, English, Language and literature and Theories and institutions of education belong to content part.

In this way, we can observe that the most number of subjects are into pedagogical part and, conversely, technological part has got the lower number of subjects.

By: MARÍA DOLORES MUÑOZ LÓPEZ y ROSANA SÁNCHEZ ROBLES.

Presentation.

Hello! We are "The Little Ants". This group is formed by seven students of Primary Education in the Bilingual Group in UM. Each person has a role, then we add to each girl with their corresponding role of this week:

- Raquel Lorenzo Franco: Facilitator
- Esmeralda Martínez López: Translator

- María Mula Pérez: Analyst

- María Dolores Muñoz López: Star

- Blanca Puche Payá: Curator-Farmer

- Rosana Sánchez Robles: Star
- Alba Velasco Martínez: Journalist