ANALYST IN "THE GAME".

This week I am the analyst so I have to evaluate the teamwork and answer the following questions related with the practice: “Changes in The Spanish Educational  System Overview: The game.”.

· What was the best part of the activity?

The best part of the activity was the moment of the game, no doubt. Our star had prepared very well the content; therefore, we wanted to see them in action. When it was our turn, my team and I were very nervous and excited. In that way, we always  celebrated our victory! We trusted them, in fact, the stars did not fail any question, but the luck did not accompany us. Therefore, from my point of view, the game was really fun and entertaining. In addition, I think that everyone had a good time!


· 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.  This time, the problem was to choose the stars. Obviously, no one wanted  this role.. So, we spend too much time making the choice, and in that way, it was a difficult task. So, after speaking it in common, we come to a conclusion:  we will follow the order.  In addition, we believe that this was the most logical and sensible proposal. Therefore, we do 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 stars, as I said. This week, they had to respond to some questions which they have prepared during the week. All team members asked ourselves how the game will be, and thus, when our star had to respond to the questions, we were very nervous and anxious to see her/him. This week has been somewhat unexpected, which we think is innovative and dynamic.
As a group, we support our stars, especially when their turn came.


· What was the worse?

The worst part were the nerves. We were really nervous because it was a very important game. When the turn came for our two stars, my group and I expected with illusion and desire a correct answer! This moment is very frustrating, especially for our representatives (stars).  The stars knew that they had a great responsibility, so they were even more unsettled.


                           
·  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 game 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. This is an aspect that should be transmitted to next weeks.
By this I mean, we have worked hard to reach this stage: "The game". In addition, our stars have taken much interest and have studied a lot to pass the game successfully.


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

We should improve the decision-making. I say this because my group and I have taken a long time to choose the star .. This task was different, so it scared us a little. It is also true that we are many members in the group. Thus, it is more difficult to make decisions. There are many different opinions .. But I think we've taken the most logical choice: We have followed the order of the roles.


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

This practice has been very important for us. For example,  in other subjects we are constantly trying these laws: in "Diversity" or in "Action Tutorial". So, that contest is related to other matters in the course. Therefore, knowing the law helps us.
Also, as future teachers, we must know this aspect . Because when we teach our students in a future, we have to know the law to teach correctly, to make good decisions, for a better understanding of the teaching process, to know every aspect of a school..

Natalia Martinez Alcazar (ANALYST)

Analysis of the Questions for THE GAME

This is the third week we're involved in the last part of the subject: Scholar Organization.

As we told you before, all this process that we are carrying out is for a final purpose: THE GAME.

Our last task has consisted on build of the questions for being included in the game. So, then, my group, according to the mind maps we made previously and with all the knowledge we acquired about the Educational System, built these questions with the topics we considered the most important.

So, as far as I concerned, it has been a good week, because of finally, we got the hang of it.

As always, time is against us, and that's been a problem we tried solving it with a good organization, trying to organize ourselves in the correct way, contributing each one and going all out.

For this, we divided us in two groups - a good method that we have been using during several weeks-, and each group was in charge of 3 topics. once it was completed, we had to pool all the questions and choose among them the most appropiate (something hard to do because we gathered a lot of different questions in the end).

Another important thing was the design of the cards. It was a task for the graphic designer of the group, Javier. Here you can check  them out:

 

The second part of the task consisted on, once the cards are completed, recovered all of them by topics and reviewed them taking into account the spelling, format, content, design...  That was the best part of the of the process because it was useful for seeing how the rests of the groups carried out the activity, putting our points of view in common and learning from our mistakes.

Analyst: Alicia del Carmen Lova Ortiz.

Analyst´s Work This Week "Changes in The Spanish Educational System"

This week the analysts have been Mariano, and me, Irene. Perhaps we could consider this activity as one of the most complicated in terms of content.
Undoubtedly this practice has been difficult to do because we had to search for information about the different aspects and topics that the teacher had assigned us, in our case 2 and 5, and compare them with LOE and LOMCE . And after that , we had to synthesize all that information into a simple outline with the main ideas. We learned a lot , and now we have a clearer idea of the two laws .

 

On the other hand I believe that the subjects we're seeing in the first course, have been adapted to the new articulated by LOMCE developed with the aim of forming autonomous people with critical maturity.
It also provides a higher quality in the education system, in order to develop our culture. For this reason I believe that subjects try to encourage our creativity, our ability to communicate, so that the student is an active element in the learning process.

In conclusion, I would like to say that the best thing we have done this week, it would be to split the group. Three of us were in charge of making the point 2, one person had to unify all the information in a conceptual map and the others had to do point nº 5. I really think we should go on with this methodology, because this makes the work faster and easier than if we had to look at all the information at the same time.
But, I would not highlight this week as one of the best weeks during this course, because we have had different activities to do, not only in this subject, in others too, and this situation has stressed us. Perhaps we need more time to prepare better our activities; otherwise we will swim against the tide at the end of this semester.

 
 
ANALYSTS: Mariano Castillo & Irene Martínez
 

Analyzing "What Have We Learned in #SOYER1314?"

Like every week , we have been working in groups for one of our last practices called "What have we learned in # SOYER1314 ? "

From my point of view as an Analyst, for the best part of the activity  I could say it has been able to make a brief summary of what we have learned in this period in the course and the amount of things that will store from now on in our backpack of knowledge.

The worst part in my opinion was to work with the new program called Moovly because at first any member of the group knew how to use it , so for all of us it was a completely new tool. But I must also say that slowly and investigating how this worked , things became more and more easy.

It's been a pretty tough week , an activity that carried a great job but on one hand the best moment of the week I think it was the time when we had to record the voice in off for our video. We were all a bit overwhelmed but I have to say that our star of this week, Mariano , always know how to see the good side of things. thanks to him I think everything was much easier

On the other hand I think the worst moment was when we thought we would not have time to finish it by the deadline but with a little effort, everything went as we expected.

we have learned how to use new tools and how to synthesized in only 1.30 min what we have learned in each practice of this course

To keep as a Group for the next weeks we need to rely on the work of all members of the group .

And to improve as a group for the next weeks we need not to always think about oneself and try to think as a group. At times we work brilliantly as a group but there are times , even if rarely , this does not happen .

And finally I think that all the content we have learned in this course are related. By this I mean that all the tools that we have learned to use such as Blogger, Twitter , Moovly ... will help us to became what we want in our future : good teachers !

From the analyst of this week: Ana de Lara Torrente

Analyzing the Dark Side of Textbooks.

If you visit different classrooms, you probably notice that most of the teachers use a standard textbook. The reasons for this are many, depending on the design of the curriculum, the directives of the political administration, the level of competence on the part of teachers…etc. Textbooks can provide several advantages in the classroom: they could be helpful for beginning teachers and could provide organized units of work; a textbook gives plans and lessons; everything is spelled out. As good as they may appear on the surface, textbooks do have some limitations.

Usually textbooks fail to stimulate student interest. It is not unusual to refuse textbooks because they are large collections of data, for large amounts of students. Scholars may find it difficult to understand the relevance of so much useless information to their day-to-day lives. The textbook is usually designed as the one and only source of information, but can become outdated in just a few years (thanks to the national administrations, mainly). They are expensive, easily damaged, heavy and uncomfortable to carry around…. Textbooks are a hot topic every few years: with the entry of a new government, usually a renewal of education plans happens, and textbooks are replaced by law (juicy business for the big publishers!!). This is a huge economic burden for families, who have no reasonable alternative: buying textbooks is compulsory.

One of the first concepts for our infography

So for this “Dark Side of Textbooks” we decided to do an infographic about those issues. We doubt between the different formats that we could choose to represent this concept, but in the end decided to use an infographic. It is a static visual scheme, therefore it's nothing "dynamic" and for some people does not have the same appeal as, for example, a video. Best part of the activity was the design of the infographic and the search for information to fill it, and the very best moment was when we found a concept that could easily be used and was pretty original, as is using the cover of the album "The Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd. Obviously, the infographic can lose its strength if you are not learned about this cover, which is a cultural icon of our society like, e.g. the “Abbey Road” cover from The Beatles or the Campbell's soup cans  pictures from Andy Warhol.

The problems were the usual (which we also have in other subjects). As we are a large number of people is difficult to accommodate the schedules and preferences for work in group. And sometimes there are disagreements about how to perform the work or the role of each member. So one thing we need to constantly improve for the next weeks is integration and teamwork. Also, we should keep our originality and imagination when it comes to homework and not get carried away by the "easy way" when to perform it, even if it means we go the extra mile.

Textbooks Workcloud -so trendy!

This topic is related with almost all of the subjects in this course and degree. As textbooks doesn't take students' background knowledge into account, teachers does not adapt lessons to the interests and capacities of students. Psychology, sociology, scholar organization and ITCs…etc. are necessary for us to be able to get an optimal environment for teaching/learning without blindy following a textbook. We must be able to create our own personal textbooks, but mainly in our minds, with our knowledge, tailored to each situation.

In conclusion, we have learnt that textbooks (and any of its alternatives such as websites, digital encyclopaedias, and so on) are only as good as the educator who uses it: is just one tool, and perhaps a very relevant one. Sometimes, teachers over-rely on textbooks and don't consider other resources for their classroom. The teacher should not become a mere reader of knowledge written by others. No textbook is perfect, but it is one powerful resource for you to use wisely as a guidebook, or like a "storyboard". The teacher should not become a mere reader of knowledge written by others.Even a bad example can become something we learn a lesson from. As future teachers, we'll need to make many decisions, and one of those is if and how we want to use the textbook.

Analyst: Javier Marín Garcerán

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

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)

Analyst of the TPACK practice

In this first week I had the role of analyst, so I was in charge of evaluate the work of the group. For this, I'm going to answer some questions:

What was the best part of the activity?

The moment of expose our work to the rest of the classmates, I think it has been the most grateful part because it was the moment in which our star, like a represent of all the group, showed very well the work we made during all the week.

What was the worse?

The worst part of the activity has been how to carry out the activity. For us, it has been a very complicated matter, because we didn't found the adecuated way to express all the information in the poster, what materials use or what would be the correct style...


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

I think it was the time we spent in class all together, trying to coordinate and organize us, working as a group.


What was the worse?

Undoubtelly, organizing the work has been the most difficult task. Firstly, because it is a new way of work to which we are not used. Secondly, because this has been an activity which needs so much time to make it properly, and due to time, it was difficult for us to carry out like a whole group.


What have you learnt?

This first week of the subject not only has achieved the expected goals, I think it has helped us to discover new things and new ways of learning.
Besides having explored the concept of TPACK and making a conceptual map, we have created our groupal blog and our twitter account, and we have also learnt (or at least tried), to organize a groupal work, dividing it in smaller individual tasks, as well as distributing the time.


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

Maybe the reason is because it is about something innovative and dynamic, but the truth is that all the components of my group are deeply involved into the subject, motivated and eager to improve and make new things. This is something essential for the functioning of the group.


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

A lot of things. Working in group is not an easy task, because it entails effort and a good understanding among all the components of the group. That is the reason why I consider that all of us need to convert all our individual goals into a common objective, improving our communication and even being critical with ourselves, because it is the only way to improve day after day.


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

First, the concept of TPACK, a different methodological approach, which we'll work with in a future as teachers. Second, how to create a proper mind map, that it is going to be useful in the rest of the degree, and even as teachers.

Here you can find a high-resolution image of the TPACK we used in our classroom exposition. Feel free to use it in any way you wanted to: