Presentation with other groups, by the analyst.

This week we had to make an extra task, when we arrived Monday to class our teacher told us we had to get together with two other groups (SevenUp and ItSchool) and make our three jobs just one. The three stars had to make a joint exhibition with a maximum duration of eight minutes.

As I was the analyst of my group, I look at analyst of the other two groups and discuss with them some things about his work, such as how they had done the job, how would you assess this task...

About what seemed to me to work with other groups, could have been better. We had little time to organize all our content (30 minutes) and the star of each group wanted to do his own work as it was best know each other. This was a major problem organization, which derive in slowness, lack of control, boredom and outdated presentation, which resulted incomplete because we are out of time.

Beacuse this wasn't be a good experience work with other groups this week, but we are sure we will not return this to happen. This error has helped us to correct our way of organization and we are sure that next time we will do much better.

Here you have some photos of the above:

 

 

Thank you very much for the other two groups, despite the problems it was nice working with you.

 

I hope you liked it, see you soon bloggers.

 

Lucía.

Journalist post

Hi. My name is Mari Carmen. I’m this second week’s journalist.

Comparing my role to my last week’s one, this seems much more involving, since I have being all the time taking care of taking pictures and writing down everything we did. Now I’m going to explain you how was my experience during this long week.

After distribute the roles on Monday 16th February in the morning, once finish TPACK expositions, we did our first gathering. We met in the evening at Lucia’s flat. We finished last week posts and start reading, understanding and investigating a bit the work for second week. That night the facilitator divided the work among all us, so that next meet we could go faster.

So, for our second appointment, on Wednesday 18th February we know what to do more concretely. Once we exactly know which information look for, we worked in a quite organized way and we moved forward more quickly. We thought of doing a puzzle, so some of my mates went out and bought cardboard and colors. But unfortunately, next day we were told it wouldn’t be useful to explain Treasure Hunt. We had to restart, and divide task and redo the whole process. We also did a prezzi, and Lucia work a lot for it, but finally we couldn’t use to explain the different projection thing. That evening we also had another struggle. It take us a long discussion to clear up what “media is not neutral” really means. But, finally, we thought in comparing it to Disney Princess. Using their images for learning vocabulary can be a good idea, due to kids fancy on then. But this images also represent a stereotype reality where girls just should look pretty.


Next day, Thursday 19th, in the morning we made our third gathering at the Aulario’s cafeteria. We keep on doing the puzzle and we’ve nearly got it structured. When we arrived to class, Linda explained us what exactly was a Treasure Hunt. So, we thought our puzzle wouldn’t be representative enough to explain it. That afternoon the half of our group was leaving to their home town.  Time was running!! We took the decision of making power point to best display our work. And between classes, we thought and write on a paper what would contain each slide. So that we just have to type it on the computer and add our previously select images.

Then, on Thursday night, María start jointing and giving it some form. We dicided who was going to be in charge of each slide, so that everybody could do something. And finally, after hours and hours of work, on Friday evening we got our work ready for Monday’s exposition.

Monday 20th  arrived, it was time to display our work to the rest of the classroom. But instead of doing it by groups, Linda, our teacher, tell us to make three big groups made of three groups each. She gave us half an hour to coordinate all three groups’ exposition and star’s explanation in one. That broke our plans. We had to mix in a single exposition. We succeed to gather all our info and coordinate it. But we run out of time. It was a pity, because we had work a lot for things that were not even show. But, we have learnt something for it. For next week the word will be TIME!!!


Our blogs' recommendation for this week are:

Kids Activities blog. I find it really interesting for having lots of hand-craf activities to do with children. http://kidsactivitiesblog.com/


And a blog from our classmates' group itsChOOL. Their out look is really nice and comment what happend along the week in a interesting way. http://organizeyoureducation.blogspot.com.es/


Thanks for reading!!

Hope you come back next week :)

'TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE STAR'

Hi bloggers!
I am Carmen Carpena and I am the star of the PowerPuffTeachers this week. This is my first post and I want to share you all my feelings about this experience.
First at all, I want to mention that we had already done the work when we realized that we hadn't done it well, so it was an issue for us.
During the whole week I felt a bit stressed because of the change of work at the end of the week. At the beginning of the presentation I was very nervous because we had to do a powerpoint with others two groups, we had to join all the information and distribute who said each thing. In my opinion, I could have done it better.
I started as good as I could but as the time went by I realised that we hadn't  had enough time to expose the whole work due to that fact I started to get very nervous and, although I knew all the information, I talked really slow because of my nervousness.
From my point of view, the way on which we exposed the presentations this week (three groups together) had a worse result for everybody but it was a useful way to learn how to work with pressure in a fixed period of time.
In the presentation, I talked about what is a Treasure Hunt and what was the matter of the Treasure Hunt that Linda ordered us, I talked about what was the reason Google use the Mercator Proyection and the example of the distortion of the reality which was Disney World, specially the princess.
 I have learnt a lot of things with this work, for example, I have to try to relax before an exposition and to talk faster too.
We hope you enjoy the blog! See you soon!

Helper Post.

Hello followers!

I am María García and my role this week is "Helper".

It sounds extrange but as we are seven members and there are six roles every week there is one of us that has this role, the previous week we called this role Star 2, because we focus specially on helping the star.

Although this role seems to be the "easiest one", it does not true because due to the reason that the person who has not an specific role, is available to help the rest of the members of the group.

So during this week I have helped to prepare the roles of my group. For example, I have looked for information for the star speech, sometimes I have organized the group, or I have made part of our visual presentation, and so on.

It is a good idea that the groups with seven or even eight members, those people that do not have a determinate role, help the whole group in order to prepare everything faster.

See you soon!!

Translator Post

This week I’m going to be the translator. That means that I have to choose 5 concepts about this week’s topic. This week is about Treasure Hunt, but we also talk about cartographic projections, media and its distortion. Here there are the five terms I have chosen:

• Map projection: is a representation of the globe sphere on a flat map, using a grid of lines of latitude and longitude.
• Cartography:  is the discipline dealing with the conception, production, dissemination and study of maps in all forms.
• Media: is the collective communication tool that is used to store and deliver. It is either associated with communication media or communication businesses such as: print media and the press, photography, advertising, etc.
• Distortion: is the alteration of the original form of a signal representing an image, a sound, a waveform, or other information.
• Treasure Hunt: is a non-complex activity in which the participants have to answer some short questions with given information, and then one big question without the information.

REFERENCES:

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

http://www.cartography.org.uk/default.asp?contentID=720

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_%28communication%29

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/distortion

http://www.isabelperez.com/webquest/taller/treasure.htm

Julia.

Working as a Curator-Farmer!

 Hello again to everyone! I am Inma and this week is my turn to be the Curator-Farmer of The PowerPuffTeachers. Comparing this role with the previous I had the last week, I have realized they are completely different roles and in every role you have to do an important part of the work that is necessary to complete the whole work. Every role has the same importance than the others so we have to go all out to do a good work. Moreover, I think this role is very interesting because I had to use new technological tools I have never used before.
Here you have the mindmap we have made with all the references we used to do this second week activity called Treasure Hunt and Cartographic projections.
That´s all folks... Hope you like it and more and better next week!

The boss but not bossy.

Hello bloggers!

I’m Ana Góngora and this week I have one of the most challenging and difficult roles: THE FACILITATOR.

Here I am going to show the roles of the rest of my partners:

1.      Facilitator: Ana Góngora

2.      Analyst: Lucia Grau

3.      Translator: Julia Egea

4.      Helper: María García

5.      Curator-farmer: Inma Álvarez

6.      Journalist: Mª Carmen Molina

7.      Star: Carmen Carpena

As the name confirms my work this week was to facilitate the work of all the members of my group. I’ve tried to improve in every way the processes made by the previous facilitator (if that could be done) so on Monday I’ve decided to distribute randomly the information and with that we could start working on Wednesday and so we did. Now I’m going to show you who was in charge of look for what:

Carmen was in charge of looking for an example of Disney films that could determine or distort the vision of the student. We link Disney princess with the vocabulary primary school children learn.

Inma was tol to find a treasure hunt related to primary education. She also searched information about Google Maps and the projections they use.

Julia had search information about what is a treasure hunt and choosen one that she likes most.

Mª Carmen found two countries that differ from one projection to another (one from Europe and other from outside)

Lucia had to search information about Robinson Projection.

María was in charge of looking for information about Azimuthal Projection.

Ana (me) had to look for Mercator projection and answered the questions of the small table.

But the worst part was yet to come…when we thought we had finished the hole work and ready to show to Linda (our teacher), she explained again the activity and we realized that we had misunderstand almost everything so it was time to start from the beginning AND IT WAS THURSDAY! Do you know what’s that mean? We had to spend almost the entire weekend redoing a Power Point and organizing everything but thanks to our helper that could be done and everything were ready on Monday.

This Monday we have been surprised with a new way of showing the activity. We have been joined with other two groups and the three facilitators have joined and shared our ways of organize our own groups. My big group of three groups was composed by 7up group and ItSchool group.

The 7up group was led by Isa Angosto and she had told us that her strategy was to distribute the information in the whole group (no matter what the role was) and then joined two times at the university. There were problems with the meetings because not all the members of the group were able to go and some of them weren’t sure about what they have to do (so they hardly did it). They decided to make a Prezi and some posters to explain the projections.

Teresa was the leader of Itschool and she as Isa and me divided randomly the information even that not everybody follow the instructions. They also were told to make some slides of the Power Point to finish it on Friday so the star could practice the whole weekend but that couldn’t be possible. They were only able to meet once.

Even thought this role is very hard and stressful I have good feeling about my job, nevertheless I am conscious that we have a lot to improve as a group and me personally.

Fingers crossed for the next week!!

ANALYST POST

Hi guys, welcome again to our blog!

I am Lucia, my role of this week has been analyst, I had to look for on the way in which my colleagues worked and they made their tasks, then I can evaluate them through a series of criteria.

To explain how has been our week, I will answer a series of questions:

1.       What was the best part of the activity?

The best part of the task has been learning new things, which are also important for us, such as the three map projections by Robinson, Mercator and Azimuthal. We have also studied how the media impacts in the children’s lifes, and finally we have known a very good way to teach our students, the treasure hunt.

2.       What was the worst part of the activity?

The worst part of the job was when Monday we went to expose our work and the teacher informed us that we should do something extra. We had to get together with two other groups and make all our work one, so the stars in each of the groups had to expose together for eight minutes. For us was a big problem the organization and set the time. Eight minutes passed very quickly and did not give us time to finish our work exposing, so stay quite incomplete and somewhat dated.

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

The best moment of the week about our teamwork was when we realized that the perception of the world we knew was wrong, our faces were the best part of wonder and fascination. Besides we were able to discuss which of the three projections was the most suitable for teaching children, we had several points of view and was very nice look all together to a conclusion in which we were all in agreement.

4.       What was the worst moment of the week (in the work of the group)?

The worst time of the week was when Thursday after having done most of the work (we had a Prezi for the three projections of maps and shaped puzzle poster for the treasure hunt) we showed to Linda and she told us that that was wrong, it was not what we had been demanded to do on the task. So we had to start over from the beginning.

5.       What have you learnt?

This week we learned many useful things that we are both in our daily life as it comes to teach. the first thing is the three different projections Robinson, Mercator and Azimuthal, with its distortions, comparing them with the example of several countries and understanding on why there is each of them. We have also learned a new way to explain to children in a strong and funny way, so they pay more attention, the treasure hunt. Finally, we know that children are strongly influenced by the media, and we as educators must teach the difference between fiction and reality.

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

We have to preserve our way of working together in dynamic manner without internal problems in the group. We also have to preserve our way of organizing, which so far has helped us to successfully complete our tasks. Finally, we need to preserve our optimism as though all our work was wrong, we got to work and got finalized.

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

For next tasks we must understand what the teacher is asking us and if we have any doubts we should to ask to the teacher, so that we are clear about our work and does not happen again what happened to us this week.

8.       How this content is related to other contents in the course and in your degree?

With what we've seen so far on our level, we can relate this content to the subject of sociology of education, since in this course we saw the impact of media on children and how it affected their daily lives, as they are modeled starting from what they see, and they believe all the fiction they see on television for example

Regarding the projections of maps, I guess we will see next year as we have the subject of geography.

9.       There is any evident social connection of this content (news, politics, etc.)?

We can relate these contents with various social and political issues. For example, projected maps have a strong political influence as some show much larger developed countries than they actually are like the case of Europe, Russia and the United States. On media we can also see political influence, as some magazines or distort reality television channels depending on their ideals. About society, especially children, the media affects them because they believe everything they see on television and may even imitates violent acts.

As for my role as analyst I have to say I liked having the power to assess my colleagues, I have also learned to evaluate basing on criteria.

Thanks for all bloggers, I hope you have found interesting.

See you soon!!

Lucía.

Journalist post

Hello everyone, my name is Julia Egea Leal and I’m the JOURNALIST this week.

First of all I’m going to talk about blogging. This is the first time for we all use a blog. Managing a blog is harder than what you can think, but we are getting used to it. We got very excited because after Lucía posted a motivational post, we got commented by a stranger who wanted to wish us luck with our blog.

I have commented in a post that talks about technology in schools, I found it very interesting so I thought that it was perfecto due to we are talking about technology, pedagogy and contents (TPACK) and it was related in a way. The name of the blog is: Michael Smith’s Principals Page. This blog is focused in the administration of the schools, and in a several topics about it. This is the post I have commented: http://www.principalspage.com/theblog/archives/technology-in-schools-is-a-fad-trust-me. And this is my comment: 

About the other group’s blogs, I have been following them, and watching what  the were doing during the week, and they basically did what they were told to, and not adding some extra posts.

According to our working week, it was very hard due to we have never done this kind of work. The first day (Monday) morning we assign the roles. In the afternoon, we talked about what we had to do and the roles. We also created some media pages: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. We also decided how we were going to do the poster.

The second day (Wednesday) we were divided, half looking for information and the other half working on the poster.

As we couldn’t do it all on Wednesday, we had to meet on Thursday and Saturday. On Thursday we used the class hour to proceed. And on Saturday we finally finished it.

In conclusion, I think this had been a fun but hard week.