My Turn as Facilitator: It's okay to be THE BOSS

My experience as the facilitator of the group has been so good. Even I like the experience of have some power, but I haven't been too bossy (I think).
My conclusions, once I've finished my role of the week, are that the most essentials pillars to create a solid group of work is (1) to have a good communication among all the components of the group, (2) to have clear what's the common objective and (3) to know how to deal with problems and conflicts that appears during work time.

This week we have had many tasks to do, so I considered that the best way to organize the work was dividing the group in order to each one had to be in charge of carry out one part.

So, this is how we did it:

- Irene and Mª José were in charge of make the slides explaining the tips for a good presentation.
- Natalia and me did the explanation of how to use Creative Commons.
- Mariano, Javier and Ana made the slideshow of the topic we chose -the Food Chain, but we tried to be original, thus we added some Dinosaurs to the mix-, and also prepared the oral presentation about it.

By this way, everybody knew what had to do, a specific task.
Because of our experience last weeks, we have tried to organize in a better way the time we had to carry out the activity, making the most of the time in class and distributing the work individually.



Facilitator: Alicia del Carmen Lova Ortiz

Curator-Farmer in the practice "TELLING STORIES"

The resources that we have used for this practice called "Telling Stories" are as follows. Firstly they have been organized in APA style. Secondly, they are located in our Pearltree. Please have a look at them!!

 CC, CREATIVE COMMONS, (n.d.).(webpage). Retrieved February 20,2014, from https://creativecommons.org/

 CHAPGAR. J.(n.d.).”Bigger food chains”, “Sheppard Software:we make learning fun.“(webpage).Retrived February,18,2014, from https://www.sheppardsoftware.com/content/animals/kidscorner/foodchain/foodchain2.htm

 DUARTE, N, (2002, February). “We´re creating a new TED.com”. (webpage). Retrieved February 19,2014, from http://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_duarte_the_secret_structure_of_great_talks.html

 DUARTE, N. (2012, October, 22). “Do your slides pass the glance test?”, Harward Business. Retrived February 20, 2014 from http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/10/do-your-slides-pass-the-glance-test/

 DUARTE, N. (2012, October, 31). “Structure your presentation like a story”. (Post). Retrieved February 18,2014, from http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/10/structure-your-presentation-li/

 REYNOLDS,G. (n.d.). “Organization and preparation tips”.(webpage). Retrieved February 18,2014, from http://www.garrreynolds.com/preso-tips/prepare/

 REYNOLDS,G. (n.d.) “Top Ten Slide Tips”,(webpage). Retrieved February 19,2014, from http://www.garrreynolds.com/preso-tips/design/
 


by Natalia Martinez Alcazar. Curator-farmer.

Journalist's Work This Week "TELLING STORIES: Free Resources and Visual Presentations"

This week we have been working in our practice called “Telling Stories: Free Resources and Visual Presentations”. This activity is composed of two different parts although we have divided into three ones; we have made three groups to distribute our work.

The first group had to create a topic to any content on Primary School and the start had to prepare an oral presentation about it with a slide show for supporting and she had to present it for us, our classmates and to our teacher on Monday morning. Those who were responsible for making this activity were Javier Marín, Mariano Castillo and Ana de Lara (the start of this week). They searched for information on the Internet and they also looked up information in some books to create this part; and all the drawings have been made by Mariano Castillo.

The second and third group had to upload a show presentation to slide share with 30 slides on it. In this presentation you can see 10 slides which explain what the Creative Commons Licences are and another 20 slides which show the 20 basic tips for developing a good presentation. The second group was composed of Alicia Lova and Natalia Martínez; and the third by María José Herrero and Irene Martínez. We have searched for information on the Internet (websites, blogs, …) about our different parts and also we have chosen some different photos which all of them have Creative Commons Licences.

Before starting with our practice, Javier Marín offered himself to take the responsibility to draw the storyboard with our opinions and with our contribution of our different ideas.

When the parts were done, every pair had to explain to the star and to other components of the group what had worked and learned so that everyone knew correctly the development and purpose of the practice.

We believe that this practice is a useful dynamic activity because the work have been distributed more easily and each one of us work specific contents instead of a range of concepts and also, because the rest of the contents have been explained to you by your peers, and vice versa which give you an improvement in your skills and capabilities.

Here you can see our star of this week, Ana de Lara, explaining our topic "The Food Chain...with Dinosaurs" to our classmates and our teacher.

 

COMMENTS ABOUT OTHERS CLASSMATES’ BLOGS:
 I have been watching our classmates’ blogs and give me 7 have decided that the best groups which have been working hard this week have been:

·       The Teachleaders. As we saw on Monday morning, their presentation was clear, with a lot of colour and so expressive. Any kind of children could understand the presentation easily. Congratulations!!
 

http://theteachleaderssoyer.blogspot.com.es/2014/02/star-i.html#comment-form

 

·        Hide and Seek. All their images were drawn by hand and slides did not contain too much information so people focused on listening to them instead of reading information, and also, as I said before with the other group, their presentation was easy to understand.

http://hideandandseek.blogspot.com.es/2014/02/hello-i-ammaria-jose-gomez-and-this.html#comment-form

OTHER BLOGS

I find a blog which is so interesting and I would like to recommend you. It is about teaching ideas using ICT. the main activity that you can see on this blog is called "Podcasting", a wonderful way of allowing children to share their work and experiences with people over the Internet. You can see "What is a podcast?", "How do you make a podcast?", "Examples of a podcast"; and many others wonderful things. Let's have a look!

 

 

http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/ict/podcasting.htm

JOURNALIST:  Irene Martínez Bermúdez

Two Translators Telling (old?) Stories

This week the practice was to learn how to do a nice and useful presentation using free resources, so we have chosen 5 concepts that, if used sequentially, can help us to create and develop an outstanding presentation, flowing like if were telling a story.

• Storyboard: a series of illustrations displayed in sequence for the purpose of serving as a guide to developing a story, previewing an animation or following the structure of a film.  Storyboards are an essential tool for making and developing a good presentation, as they allows a visual and mental guideline to follow.

• (Free) Resources: materials (documents, pictures, drawings, music…) that we can use for our work and can be copied, edited, altered, redistributed...always with permission of the owner. Usually those materials should not be used with commercial purposes. Within this concept we can find Creative Commons and many tools and websites (Flickr, Jamendo..) for using resources rationally and legally.

• Creative Commons licenses: is public copyright licenses for the free distribution of a creator´s work. Authors give the right to share or use upon their artistic production. There are four kinds of licenses for protection and flexibility of owners: Attribution (BY), Share-alike (SA), Non-commercial (NC) and Non-derivative (ND). GiveMe7´s blog is under Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) since it´s beggining.

• Tips (for developing a presentation): advices that could be followed for designing, preparing and delivering an effective exposition, e.g. know your audience as well as possible, choose fonts well or make good eye contact, in order to get people engaged by your subject matter and presentation skills.

• Slideshow:  a presentation of a series of still images on a projection screen (or on an electronic display device), typically in a planned sequences. Well-formulated slideshows allows speakers to match illustrated images to a verbal exposition. The development of a storyboard as a first step is key for a clear and organized slideshow, and as with any public speaking, some rehearsal is required to make an engaging and useful presentation.

Related to educational competencies, presentation skills become very useful as the teacher can effectively display information to groups, transforms himself/herself into a good communicator, learn how to use a variety of presentation methods to maintain group focus and how to change tactics midstream if something isn’t working. And all of this using resources with the permission of the legal owners, thereby instilling a fairer use of assets, especially digital ones.

Translators: Javier Marín Garcerán and Mariano Castillo Escudero.

Analyst´s Work This Week:

This week I am the analyst and I have to evaluate our work and answer the following questions related to this practice.

· What was the best part of the activity?

The best part of the activity was discovering what was a Creative Commons license and how to do a real presentation to teach our students in the future so they can understand the topic perfectly.

· What was the worse?

The worst is still the organization of the group because we are many members in the team, so we have to divide and coordinate us in the best possible way.

· What was the best moment of the week (in the work of the group)?

The funniest part of the week has been when we had to meet in order to do the teamwork, I mean, the powerpoint and the presentation for monday because is when we had all our imagination and it was better to be all together to do this part of the practice.

· What was the worse?

The worst thing was to think our topic and to know really how to represent it on monday in order to explain in a correct way our subject to the class but we finally made our objetive.

· What have you learnt?

With this second practice, we have learned that it is very important to know how to do a good presentation to our students and that when we present a project using not our own resources, it should have at least Creative Commons license and we should respect others' work and attributions.

· What do you need to conserve -as a group- for the next weeks?

All of us have worked hard in our part of the work in order to do a good job. We did it with with positivism and willing to transmit all our knowledge and ourpresentation to the whole class on monday.

· What do you need to improve –as a group- for the next weeks?

We, as a group, work all together but in some aspects we need to work separately and sometimes we have some troubles when we have to say what each one does, but we've solved all together greatfully. So, what I would improve would be our organization in this sense.

· How THIS content is related to other contents in the course and in your degree?

This practice has been so interesting for us because in future courses, subjects and even in our real work in some years we'll have to use licensed contents in order to presentate our projects and also we'll need to know how to do a good presentation in order to use it in our classes with our pupils.

We've done our presentation as we did because we thought it was the best way to teach the students the concepts we had to teach according to our beliefs and our topic.

Mª José Herrero Atiénzar - Analyst

Telling Stories: The Food Chain....With Dinosaurs

In our Slideshare account  you can have a look at our practice: "Telling Stories: Free Resources and Visual Presentations", that our Star explained this morning in classroom (despite some technical problems).We are so proud of our work, so we hope you enjoy it!

The Food Chain...with Dinosaurs! from GiveMe7 Blog

Food Chain Storyboard

Take a look at the first draft of our storyboard for GiveMe7 monday presentation about the Food Chain in our Slideshare account:

Food Chain Storyboard for #SOyER1314 from GiveMe7 Blog

Presentation: Steve Job´s IPHONE Keynote (2007)

This week is all about how to make great presentations, so now it´s a good moment to remember Steve Job´s  iPhone Keynote in 2007, and take some notes for our next Monday work. Truly inspiring (for "english" subtitles, watch the video in Youtube´s website).

3. Telling Stories: Free Resources and Visual Presentations - ROLES

3. Telling Stories: Free Resources and visual presentations

(From 17/February to 23/February)

Roles:

Facilitator: Alicia del Carmen Lova Ortiz

Journalist: Irene Martínez Bermúdez

Analyst: María José Herrero Atiénzar

Translator: Javier Marín Garcerán and Mariano Castillo Escudero

Curator/Farmer: Natalia Martínez Alcázar

Star: Ana de Lara Torrente

Translator´s TREASURE HUNT: Cartographic Projections

This fantastic week, I would like to highlight some words that I, the translator of this week, considered the most important ones used to carry out our practice.

The practice of this week was about Treasure Hunt: cartographic projection but it consisting of three different parts: the first one about map projections; the second one about media and the third part about a different example of treasure hunt, so finally I would like to emphasize the following words/concepts:

· Geography: The study of the earth and its features and of the distribution of life on the earth, including human life and the effects of human activity. It includes maps which are a representation, usually on a plane surface, of a region of the earth. 

· Projection: It is a representation of the globe or celestial sphere or part of it on a flat map, using a grid of lines of latitude and longitude. On this practice we have investigated how different projections of the earth can distorsioned the reality. 

· Distortion: Map distortion is something that happens when you try to represent the globe on a flat surface. There are different types of maps, each has a different distorsion based on its shape. 

· Media: The main means of mass communication (television, radio and newspapers) regarded collectively. The problem is that society is exposed to media everyday and also media can sometimes distort reality and alter society’s behaviour. 

· Scavenger Hunt: A scavenger hunt is a game in which the organizers prepare a list defining specific items, which the participants – individuals or teams – seek to gather all items on the list – usually without purchasing them – or perform tasks or take photographs of the items, as specified. 

I hope this synthesis has been useful for a better understanding of Treasure Hunt and cartographic projections because we really enjoyed researching about this topic and I think that is necessary to know it if you want to be a great teacher! 

Thanks for reading us, 

The translator of this week: Ana de Lara Torrente

Curator-Farmers, 2nd Week: TREASURE HUNTS

Whitin this post you can find a complete compilation of resources that we have used on the activity of this week.

They have been organized using Pearltrees, and also we quote all the theorethical references below (in APA style):

References:

Videogames and its influence:

VENEGAS, A. (2013, October 16). ¿Puede el videojuego generar ideología?. ZE(H)NGAMES. Retrieved February 12, 2014, from http://www.zehngames.com/puede-el-videojuego-generar-ideologia/

GARITE, M., The ideology of interactivity (or, videogames and the taylorization of leisure), DIGRA.org, Retrieved February 11, 2014, from http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/05150.15436.pdf


Map projections:

ANDERSON, P., (2013, February 25). Some Commonly Used Map Projection, ICSM, Retrieved February 12, 2014 , from http://www.icsm.gov.au/mapping/map_projections.html

CLEMENTE, J. (2013, March 20). Estudio de la personalidad a través de la proyección cartográfica preferida (Humor en clave geográfica). (Blog entry). Retrieved February 12, 2014, from http://losolmoshistoria4.blogspot.com.es/2013/03/estudio-de-la-personalidad-traves-de-la.html

COURTNEY, R. (n.d.). Tutorial 6: Map Projections. Kutztown University. Retrieved February 11, 2014, from http://faculty.kutztown.edu/courtney/blackboard/Physical/05Project/project.html

Crea tu propio mapa Azimutal, (n.d.) Radio Club de Chile – La casa de todos, Retrieved February 12, 2014, from http://www.ce3aa.cl/pagina-tecnica/48-pagina-tecnica/224-crea-tu-propio-mapa-azimuta

DIXON, S. (2013, April 9). Geography Education. Retrieved February 11, 2014, from http://geographyeducation.org/2013/04/09/why-do-map-projectionsmatter/.html

FURUTI, C. (2013, May 27). Useful Maps Properties. Progomos.com. Retrieved February 11, 2014, from http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/CartProp/cartProp.html

MAP PROJECTION, (2014, February 14). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Retrieved, February 15, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Map_projection&oldid=595499783

PIDWIRNY, M. (2006). Introducction to Maps. Fandamentals of Physical Geography, 2nd Edition. Retrieved February 11, 2014, from http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/154446

UNKNOWN, (2008, January 30). Geography Tutor – Types of Maps and Map projections. TMWMEDIA.com. (Video) Retrieved February 12, 2014, from http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/154446/

Treasure hunt:

Scaventer Hunt. (2014, January 14) In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Retrieved February 12, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scavenger_hunt&oldid=592592050

Curator-farmers: Mariano Castillo Escudero y Alicia del Carmen Lova Ortiz.

Journalist´s Journal: a journey around the jungle

As this week´s journalist I am going to tell the dynamic of our group for this work about a “Treasure Hunt”. This practice is divided into three main parts (Cartographic projections, Media distortions and find another Treasure Hunt), so, after several "general meetings" to discuss new ideas and focus content, we decided to distribute the work in pairs. When the parts were done, every pair had to explain to the star and to other colleagues what had worked and learned so that everyone knew correctly the development and purpose of the practice. For this practice, we believe that this is a useful dynamic for two reasons: first, the work is distributed more easily and each one of us work some contents; second, because the rest of the contents are explained to you by your peers, and vice versa. Therefore, your communication skills are improved.

The first part of this practice was an example of Treasure Hunt related to cartographic projections: we had to choose two different countries (one European and one non-european) and compare their representations in three different map projections (Mercator, Robinson and Azimuthal). So we had to search the web for information about this projections, their differences and conveniences. We chose United Kingdom and Australia, and the differences were pretty clear: a clear example of how media (in this case, maps) can influence the view of the world we have. Second part of this work was find a media that distorts or can distort children´s view about the world or reality. We chose videogames, especially Call of Duty Modern Warfare series, as an example. First-person shooters desensitise and trivialise war. We found a video about a particular stage of Call of Duty MW2, called “No Russian”, in which the main objective for you as player was to shoot indiscriminately at people in an airport, with no further explanation or sense. Last part of this practice was find another example of Treasure Hunt in the web. We found a Treasure Hunt about animals of the world (hence the "jungle" part of the title, bad joke, i know it!);  for this task we ask children to find in which country certain exotic animals live. For this purpose we provide kids with some zoo´s website addresses, where they can find information of such animals.

For all those tasks I searched our peers blogs and another websites, where i left comments. I found useful information for description of cartography maps, videogames and internet treasure hunts in (among others, please check out our pearltree): 

T8T Team's Blog

http://t8tteam.blogspot.com.es/2014/02/more-info-about-maps.html

Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping (ICSM)

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

Mike Seccombe.(March 26 2003)."Propaganda games give a distorted view of reality".Sydney Morning Herald. 

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/25/1048354604340.html

and

Lexington County School District One

http://www.lexington1.net/technology/?page=instruct/hunts.htm

The final goal of this Treasure Hunt is we have to learn how to teach children search for information in the web for specific tasks, and through our cooperation and working methods I think we managed to achieve this purpose.

JOURNALIST OF THE WEEK: JAVIER MARÍN GARCERÁN

STAR'S WORK: TREASURE HUNT. Cartographic Projections

 

PRACTICE 3: TREASURE HUNT. CARTOGRAPHIC PROJECTIONS

•  First of all I would like to say that our group have chosen Australia and United Kingdom to do this activity because there are many differences between them such as one is the northern hemisphere (Australia) and the other is in the southern hemisphere (United Kingdom); their size is different; and the United Kingdom was and still is, one of the world's most powerful nations.

•  Map Projections (Robinson, Mercator and Azimuthal).

-       What is a map? A map is a representation of all or part of the Earth drawn on a flat surface at a specific scale. Maps were devised because they are much easier to use, store, and transport than globes, and they facilitated the development of much larger scaled representations than was the case with a globe.


-     What is a map projection?  A map projection is a method used to transfer the features of a globe, such as the lines of latitude and longitude and the outlines of continents, onto the flat surface of a map. This was originally done with the use of a light to project the shadow of a wire-skeleton globe onto a flat surface―hence the term “projection.” The three major types of projections developed from this method are the cylindrical, planar, and conic.


 Before starting explaining the differences between the three maps, I would like to say that in all of them appears a distortion, so they are not exactly as the reality.

•  Mercator Projection  by Gerardus Mercator (1563 - 1569):

      - PROS: The Mercator projection is one of the most common systems in use today and it was specifically designed for nautical navigation. Being a cylindrical projection, Mercator shows a great deal of the globe and is thus very good for world maps. 

           - CONS: The Mercator projection is very accurate in equatorial areas but at high and middle latitudes begins to appear a distortion. You can see for example this distortion on the poles. One of the worst characteristics of Mercator is that it severely distorts area. If you see the size of Greenland and South America, they are almost identical, so if you only studied the Mercator, and haven’t looked at a globe, you would come to the conclusion that Greenland is larger than South America, and South America is actually 8 times the size of Greenland. This is because the countries in the northern hemisphere appear with a larger size than they really have, and the countries of the southern hemisphereappear smaller than they actually are.

•  Robinson Projection by Professor Arthur E. Robinson(1963):

     - PROS: The Robinson projection was developed to show the entire Earth with less distortion of the area. It looks more beautiful than the others.

     - CONS: In this projection the world appears like an oval; however, the poles appear as lines rather than as points.

•  Azimuthal Projection

-    PROS: These maps are useful for navigation; distances from or through the map centre are true and also the directions from the map centre to any other point.

-    CONS: These maps cannot show the whole earth. Typically these projections show about half of the earth; so they are not good for world maps.

  
 

•  What could be the best projection for being used in a classroom?

We discussed about this question, and we finally decided that Mercator projection is better for children who live in Europe because as I said before, it is very accurate in equatorial areas; and also Europe appears in the “centre” of the map, therefore it will be easier for European children to learn and orientate themselves. But Robinson projection could be better for children who lives e.g. in India. In any case we think that for little kids will be suitable starting with Mercator projections, and gradually learn more complex maps.

•  Search another example of one specific media:

Media (news, movies, TV...) can sometimes distort reality and alter society's behaviour: 

            Our example

-       VIDEO GAMES, specifically CALL OF DUTY MODERN WARFARE SERIES

Video games industry is the biggest entertainment industry in the world (bigger than cinema, music, dvd’s, etc). The worldwide videogame market is worth $93 Billion in 2013. But war videogames (first-person shooters mostly) can desensitize and trivialize war. E.g. the Call of Duty Series, one of the most famous and best-selling videogames of all times, gives children a very pro-Western and black-and-white vision of reality. The heroes of the story are mainly North-American or European (Anglo-Saxons mainly), and the terrorist villains are mostly Russian or Middle Eastern countries related.

E.g. in CALL OF DUTY MODERN WARFARE 2 “NO RUSSIAN” STAGE, players assume control, joining a group of Russian ultranationalist terrorists enacting an airport massacre. You can shoot innocent people just for fun:

PLAY THE BEGINNING OF VIDEO: CALL OF DUTY MW2 “NO RUSSIAN”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zEO7WVvkYg

How can we mitigate its effects: teaching children war is not a game, and pain and suffering is real. We can show them more friendly videogames, talk about how bad wars are, show them documentaries, tell stories about war (but nothing too bloody, of course). And mostly, children AND parents must respect the ESRB Ratings Guide.

 

•  Find on the web another good example of a treasure hunt.
 

-We find on the web another good example of a treasure hunt which name is “Animals of the wold”. This treasure hunt is prepared to do in a primary school with children who are 11-12 years old, in about 1.30h. 

-They have to do teams of 3 or 4 students each one and they have to use computers to do it; so the only inconvenient is that schools have to have an area with computers.

 

-In this activity children have to look for information about these animals that appeared in this URL web sides and they have to answer the following question: “Where are they in the world?” 

 

-At the end of this activity, students learn how to obtain and use information from the web, while improving their comprehension and reading skills among others.

 

STAR: Irene Martinez Bermúdez

 

 

 

 

Facilitator´s work on Treasure Hunt

I am the facilitator this week and I am going to explain how we had divided our work: each one in his/her different role had to do a different activity in order to do an excellent presentation in class for our partners.

Our third practice had three parts: firstly cartographic projections, secondly media distorsions and lastly find a treasure hunt.
We studied the three projections, Robinson, Mercator and finally azhimutal one and the differences among the two countries were big so, we understood each one better. After studying all of this we decided how to do the presentation, all of us decided the way the STAR was going to present it so, it was a work in group, as it has to be.

Secondly we worked the topic of media distorsions with a video game and thirdly we found a treasure hunt.

The last thing I should say is that it has been so fun being the facilitator this week and that our work in group every week is excellent.

As I am the ANALYST this week...

This week I am the analyst so I have to evaluate the teamwork and answer the following questions related with the second practice: “Treasure Hunt: Cartographic Projections”.

· What was the best part of the activity?

The best part of the activity was discovering how a country can change in distance, shape and size of areas depending on their projection ( Mercator, Robinson or Azimuthal). We always had seen  and even worked with maps, but we never could have imagined that each map has a different distortion, which can be detected with the naked eye. So, based on our desire to learn this practice, we work with  more illusion.

· What was the worse?

The worst is still the organization of the group because we are many members in the team and we have to divide and coordinate us in the best possible way and this is sometimes a bit tricky.In addition, each member of the group lives in a different place, therefore, it is more difficult for us to organize. We always opted for divide the work, a fact which sometimes can be positive or negative, because in this way we are working more a part of the practice and the other we can hardly work  in it, but we tried it, so that each member should explain their part to the team in order to everyone have knowledge of the entire practice. Moreover, we had difficulties to find on the web another good example of a treasure hunt, but we tried it some times and we got it!

· What was the best moment of the week (in the work of the group)?

The funniest part of the week has been the representation of the star, because she had to expose the work which we have done during this week in a pleasant and entertaining way. All team members asked ourselves how the exposure will be, and thus, when our star has to expose our practice, we are very nervous and anxious to see her/him. This week has been somewhat unexpected, which we think is innovative and dynamic.This week all the stars of all groups have exposed, and when our star acceded to her turn, we were very proud. 

· What was the worse?

The worst thing was to understand some parts of the activity, because it is very different from the previous, so we had to work harder to achieve understanding of this practice, but with steady work is possible and we know we have done it. At first, my classmates and I were lost because we did not know what to do in a clear way, but between everybody is easier to find out.Thus, we read many times practice and when we understood everything, we started to do it. It was a very long process and sometimes a little frustrating, but it was worth it.

· What have you learnt?

With this second practice “Treasure Hunt: cartographic projections”, we have learned that depending on the projection (Mercator, Azimuthal or Robinson), a map can have different aspects as well as the shape, distance, area... that is, each projection has a different distortion which is noticeable by the naked eye.In addition, we learned the advantages and disadvantages of each proyection. Also, we have learned this very well because we had to put examples of countries, such as Australia and United Kingdom, which we have compared very good. In addition, we learned that anything can distort reality. In this case, we chose a game called "Call of Duty" where we could appreciate that it gives children a very pro-Western and black-and-white vision of reality. The last work that we did was find on the web another good example of it, so we selected "Animals of the wold".

                             

·  What do you need to conserve -as a group- for the next weeks?

All members of the group worked hard their parts to carry out a good job. We did it with great interest and looking forward the weekly practice to be done correctly and successfully. If in a group there are not hard work, desire, illusion and strength, the group will not be very good and thereby the practices will not have a great result. Each and every member of the group work in order to the practice of every week will be prepared in the best possible way and be able to present every Monday successfully. This is an aspect that should be transmitted to next weeks.

·  What do you need to improve –as a group- for the next weeks?

All team members sometimes work better individually and in this respect, all goes well but when we work in groups in certain tasks we encounter some difficulties.Therefore, we should enhance our fellowship, because we have to keep in mind that the group is very large and if we do not work orderly, problems can occur. By this I mean that each and every one of the team members have to be able to do our part to the group's right and good. From my point of view, we should enhance this topic.

·  How THIS content is related to other contents in the course and in your degree?

This practice has been very important for us because for example in subsequent years we will have a class called geography in which we will have to learn the maps, therefore, we will know that there are distortions in the maps depending on its projection. Also, as future teachers, we must know this aspect of the maps, because when we teach our students in a future this, we have to know which map is more accurate and convenient.

    Natalia Martinez Alcazar (ANALYST)

Two useful videos related to Education

I have just found some interesting videos which are related to education. Please have a look at:

• Better learning, better life

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzzjUh2M6sQ

• ChronoZoom curriculum and technology

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2014/02/classroom_tool_aims_to_teach_b.HTML

Mapmaker kits for children (and not-so-kiddies)

An interesting resource for use in school classroom (National Geographic mapmaker kits) related to the practice using maps we´re doing this week:

http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/program/nat-geo-mapmaker-kits/?ar_a=1