FACILITATORS

Hello readers!

We are Paz and Isa from the group T8T and this week we are the facilitators!

This week we are repeating role, so in certain way, we have known what to do, which is interesting and great, isn’t it? 

Although we have repeated role, we haven’t repeated activity. Like you know each week we work in very different activities and we do many different things.

This week we have been working doing some questions about the spanish educational laws and about the conceptual maps, which we worked at last week. We did that with an objective: use it in the game that we are going to do the last week of the course.

As we have said before, these questions were about LOE and LOMCE, and the differences between them, I mean the changes and similarities that are among both laws. This is because LOMCE only modify some topics of LOE.

At first, as we had to do four questions about each topic, which were six; we decided to distribute them between the six roles that we are in the group. But then, we realized that in this way we were not going to learn about all topics. So we did a raffle, in order to decide which role will start with each topic. We took a number and then, we started to work.

After working in our topic, we changed them and we worked in a different one.

When we had all the questions, we met at the university on Tuesday in order to improve and revise them, if any had mistakes, or we could make them better.

It was very useful because we could modify some of them.

And, finally, on Thursday we printed and worked with them.

The way of working was like last week. Each group worked alone with one topic, our topic was number three (Organization of Primary School), choosing the eight questions that we considered the best for the game, but this time the evaluators weren’t the same at the last week. This time the evaluators were different group. My group T8T worked with a half of the group called Hide&Sick.

We think that we worked very well and we understand each other.

Our mission was to choose the best eight questions of topic 3, valuing the difficulty, the mistakes, the expression and the understanding. The mission of the evaluators was to supervise that we did well our work.

Fortunately, we think we did it the best we could.

Our star, Alba, have upload to the blog the 36 questions which we have worked. The eight that we selected have been sent to Linda by email, because they are secret.

One of the best things of this week is that, as facilitators, we haven’t have any problem to solve. It’s true that all the people in the group don’t think in the same way, but we have get an agreement and we have worked as a real group. That’s a very good aspect we have to mention about our group.

We hope you have enjoy it and have understand our way of organizing this week.

Regards,

Paz and Isa, the facilitators.

FACILITATORS

Hi everyone! :)

We are Sandra and Laura, the facilitators of this week.

We have had to do two conceptual maps of two different topics of primary education to compare the LOE and the LOMCE.

As in our group there are eight members, we thought that the best way to work out with our topic is dividing us in two smaller groups of four members and each group would work in one topic. Our topics were primary education and administtation of non-university institutions.

Firstly we read all the documents that Linda gave as and after that we began to look for a good program to represent our conceptual maps in the best way. This part was the most interesting. There are a lot of programmes for this. We first of all tried to use mind42 to do our maps, but it did not have a lot of different tools and things to include in our map, so finally we decided to use inspiration 9. It is a great program, we recomend it to everyone!

We have had some problems with one of the maps, because we did not know at the beginning that we had to compare both laws, LOE and LOMCE, so we had not done it; we just focused this map on the LOE law.

On Monday in class, we have had to compare the maps with other groups which had done the same topics as us. As there were just 6 topics:

- An overview of the Educational System.

- Primary School.

- Organization of Primary Education.

- Organizational variations and akternative structures in Primary Education

- Administration and governance at local and/or institutional level I.

- Administration and Governance at local and/or institutional level II.

And we are 9 groups in class, the 6 topics were divided into those groups, mixing the maps of the other groups which had the same topic, and they had to join the 3 maps into a single one for the rest of the class to study the concepts for the game. Our group did not have to join any map, so we split our group members again, and be supervisors of two groups: Educational Rush Hour and C'mon Tutankamon. 

We had to check that they evaluate good the other maps and that they were objectives with their own califocations, apart from the good joint of the final map. After that, they had to publish it into their blogs. Moreover, we have uploaded our own maps to our blogs too.

In general it has been a very abstract and messy week, because it has been a very theorical topic, but we have learnt some new things.

See you next week.

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.

FACILITATOR

Heeeello everybodyy!!!

I'm Raquel, the FACILITATOR, the best one jeje

Well, this week I have been thinking about our organization respect to the activity and I think that this week has been wonderful. All of the members have been very interested in the videos recovering, also giving ideas about how to do a video etc.

Well, the first day, on Monday, when the teacher ordered us the new activity, the first thing that we thought was, oh, my god! But, on the week, there have been some dificulties, but surprisingly we have organished very well, and I am very proud of it. =) =)

Monday, we start thinking..." What are we going to do? What program will we use? etc.. Soon, I decided, as Facilitator,to organize everybody in order to work properly and with happiness. I ordered each member of the group to read one of the resources that Linda sent us by message to the better undertanding of the new project: the Dark SIde of Text Books.

At home, we were reading these resources to know everything about it the next day.

There was little arguments about if the resources are important or not, but I thought that it was important at least to undertand the activity and also to be able to give ideas about how to create the TV advertisement and to do a proper project.

The next day, everybody read the homework and we did in class lesson a brainstorming or something similar, because we knew the content and it allow us to give ideas about the text books and different arguments about why are criticized today.

At the end of the class, we were preparing and writting the dialogues of the advertisements and then we shared out the roles of the video.

We enjoyed so much making the videos because we dressed different things to do a role, for example, one of them was politician or others were editorials and so on. So,it was very fun. We chose the TV advertisement, because we think that it could be enjoyable and a good way to represent our aim in order to everybody knows what we were representing.

We all were teaching the different programs each other. I mean,second week I was Curator Farmer and I taught my class mates the organization of Pearl Tree for example, and the other roles did the same, in order to follow a similar structure every week. So, I think that if we follow this method, we can improve so much soon =)

I love this roleee!! I very glad that this week all of us were happy and have fun, recover the TV advertisements.

thank you. See you soon

T8T

FACILITATOR

Hello everyone! 

I'm Ana Ruiz this week as facilitator.

First of all, here you have all the roles of this week:

Alba Ramsay López , Journalist

Paz Pascual and Isa Torralba, Analysts

Raquel Ramón, Star

Laura Zuza and Sandra, Translators

Ana Sánchez, Curator Farmer

Well as I imagined, the role of facilitator has been difficult. It has so much responsibility and when the things that you have planed don’t work you have to think in the way that you have organized the work.

The first day that we started the work was Monday, this day all members of the group had to read all the information about the exercise, to know what we have to do and to have a clear concept about the topic for next day.

The next day, Tuesday we started doing the Power Points. Firstly we had to do the Creative Commons ones. To do this   I break up  the group in two. The first one would do the part of explain what Creative Commons License resource is.  The second group had to do the power point about the 20 basic tips for developing a good presentation. Finally I had to put together the two tasks and upload it to slideshare.

 Then, the second part of the work was to prepare a presentation about one topic, which at first was The Planets, but after some drawbacks we decided to do it about Energy Resources.

 But when we have done all the work, and we were happy because we have finished ahead of time we didn’t realize that the work, concretely the presentation about the Energy Resources was badly focused. 

Unfortunately, was out of time just when the start was doing the exposition. So we need a solution.

 And we started again because we had to do a good presentation.

The solution was to do again the presentation and with a different point of view. In order to do it, to be presented we have recorded a video, where the star is exposing the topic.

Also as a facilitator I was able to do some modifications on the blog. I have change many times, because I liked this view:

But finally I decided to leave it like it looks now, because is easier to read it.

Well I think that despite of this mistake, we are working properly.

 This week has been less difficult than the last week, but I think it is because we didn’t want to be lost as the last week, and all of us were working hard. Also I have to say that we are more comfortable with the group and now we can express what everyone  think to improve in our work . And this make easier to work, so I hope that the next week do it better and improve in all aspects as we can, to finally  reaching our goals.

See you next week in my next role.

Ana Mª Ruiz.

FACILITATOR

Hi everybody!

I never thought that being the facilitator of the group was going to be so difficult nor did I expect this week’s task to be so complicated.

My job this week consisted of organising the group, dividing the entire job, distributing the information and allocating the tasks to be done. At first, everything was very chaotic; we didn’t understand anything, the content of this week’s work was all new for us. I tried to distribute the work equally and I wanted to put it all together quickly to get the theoretical part of it done ASAP. However, this couldn’t be done as quickly as I had planned because it took more time than I expected to understand the subject, find the relevant information and set each task to be carried out.

Nevertheless, against all the odds, every member of the group tried to help each other, collaborating successfully to complete the work. Even though it was very time consuming, we managed to get everything done in the end.

Our mentality was based on never forgetting we are a group and that we must work together for it to work correctly and successfully, we worked with the aim of making the most of the T8T group, to get the best result and in particular encourage each member to put their best effort into their task, and they did.

Therefore, from here I want to congratulate each and every one of the eight members of our group for their patience, their effort and for their excellent contribution this week. THANK YOU T8T!

See you next week with another completely different adventure.

Alba Ramsay

GROUP MEMBERS

Good night everyone!

We are so sorry for not introducing ourselves before. We have been a bit absentminded... sorry again.

Here you'll have our names and the roles we have represented this week (from 3-February; to 9-February):

 - Paz Pascual (Facilitator)

 - Sandra Pelegrín (Journalist)

 - Raquel Ramón (Translator)

 - Alba Ramsay (Star)

 - Ana María Ruiz (Curator-Farmer)

 - Ana María Sánchez (Analyst)

 - Isabel María Torralba (Facilitator)

 - Laura Zuza (Journalist)

We wish you the best for this starting week,

See you soon

T8T TEAM

FACILITATORS

Good evening and hello everyone! 

We are Paz Pascual and Isa Torralba, the facilitators of the group this week. As we are 8 team members in the group, we share the role.. 

First of all, we have to say that this role isn't easy because you have to coordinate and organized the group, apart of revised the blog, and do so many things. 

At the beginning, we didn't know how to carry out the work and we were lost. The dynamic of this course is totally different from those we have experimented until now. The only person of the group that knows how to carry out a blog (more or less) was Paz, but she didn’t know it very well (that’s why we decided to start this first week with two facilitators, in order to make a really good blog…or at list, try to get it). After this decision, we made a raffle in order to distribute the rest of the roles. 

The next thing we decided to do, now as the facilitators of the group, was to start with the poster about TPACK. We did brain storm with the whole group, for decide how we will do the poster, look for information and planning its structure. We also made another brainstorm to search for the group name. 

When we had all this organized, we decided to make the blog in order to allow all our group mates publishing all that they want (of course, about something related to the topic). 

We haven’t got so many problems during the process of doing the poster because we were working together. Maybe we were stressed and we had different points of view, but we knew how to work like a group, sharing our ideas, contrasting them with our mates’ ones and adapting to others’ proposals.

The "big problem" was that we didn't understand how to make the activity. We started to do it and just before finishing it, we realized that we were making it wrong. We felt frustrated because most of our week's work wasn't useful. We started to make it again (now with a clearer idea of how to make the work and, also, about TPACK concept). We couldn't finished it in class, so our Star had to end it at home pasting the elements of the poster.

Another responsibility of the facilitators was to correct all the posts that our partners had published on the blog, but it was difficult because they are great in english and sometimes they knew more than us (we have to admit it, even it is little embarrassing for us). 

We have done our role the best we could, and the results are very good (despite of being the first week and being a bit lost). Now is the turn of our mates to continue doing our work as facilitator. We are sure they will do it very well (even better than us!) 

We think everybody is happy with our work, and we think it is because we haven’t been so bad bosses! 

See you next week as Journalists! ;) 

Paz and Isa.