FACILITATOR

Hello everyone,

It´s Ana Mª Sánchez, the facilitator for the task "Synthesising knowledge", our last task for the "Educational Resources" part of the course #SOyER1314... but the course is continuing and this blog too...

First of all, I will show you the T8T Rota, made by our first facilitator. As it can be seen, the roles for “week 5” are specified there, well, we could say for “task 5” (because actually I think we have had 7 weeks; but one of them was spent in reviewing our previous work and the other one was centered in Londones visit and it was included into the big task “the dark side of textbooks”, but highlighting its special place there).

This task has made us rethink the topics that had been proposed during the first part of the semester... And I say "rethink" because we tried to synthesise and think in an animated way... helped by the tool "moovly". We only had 1'30'' for doing so, and we knew since the very beginning that was not going to be an easy job… or maybe things were not so clear at first.

Actually, the first time this task was explained to the class, our team didn´t know if keeping the roles or not, the same happened to others groups. In our team, some members offered themselves to summarize our experiences, but the result was not what was expected from us… When our teacher explained it for the second time to the whole class and she made clear what she didn´t want, we organised the task in a different way. It was then when we saw things clear: this was a huge task. Why? Because synthesising is itself complicated: not repeat, not make just a summary, but recreate in a connected way what we had been meant to learn: the concepts, abilities, attitudes… and that LOE-concept, “competences”, that integrates everything and is led by “ethical purposes” as Escudero Muñoz, J. (2008) explains.

We decided that we were going to split ourselves into four couples, and every couple would be in charge of one of the main topics: “TPACK model”, “Map projections” (with its treasure hunt and its reality distortions), “Creative commons & presentations” and “The dark side of text books”. As a facilitator, I decided that I preferred moovly rather than powtoon, just because I had a look to both tools and moovly seemed to match better with what I thought the aim of the task was, and none of the team members manifested to prefer the other tool.

After exploring the tool and experimenting all the panic it created (“What a huge task!”, “I have no idea how to use it!”… Yes, T8T Whatsapp group was burning…), the result was pretty good: almost all the couples had finished their own work by the deadline (friday before presentation), and the rest had to make just a few modifications in order to make it more attractive, short or simple by removing some words… I think that making ourselves work on the tasks separately was good, because we could later add quality to the final result by having trained ourselves in managing moovly with a concrete theme to recreate.

My experience as a facilitator hasn´t been bad, but has been difficult. It is not easy to arrange things and to say to your mates what should or shouldn´t be done… Maybe the part I´m more proud of is the blog organization… I didn´t think I was going to be able to reconfigure the blog, not everything was perfect (the group didn´t like the colours and pictures that I chose in the first place) but we all did enjoy the new arrangement (even if we know we can improve it even more. So let´s improve whatever is needed! 

See you soon as a journalist in the second part of the course,

Ana Mª Sánchez, The facilitator.