LONDONES SESSION OR “BREAKING STEREOTYPES”

Last Monday, March the 10^th, we assisted to an especial and a different class… Maybe it is better that we refer to it as a “learning experience”. This session was related to our study topic of the week: Exploring the dark side of textbooks. But in this occasion, what we were called to do was going further… 

What happens if we don´t use textbooks? What could we do then? Yes, we need to plan our classes, there is a curriculum, and there is a need for choosing or developing good materials to be able to teach. After reflecting on the fact that textbooks are not covering the whole extension of this need... and even on the contrary, considering that textbooks most of the times just limit the possibilities of teaching and learning, Londones came to give us some presents…

Giving someone else your experience is a present, giving someone inspiration is an invaluable present. Well, Londones came to show us that there is hope… that there is learning and teaching beyond textbooks, and maybe a more quality one.

Fortunately, it is not the first time we meet a teacher practising this. We all can think of teachers who were building their own lesson plan, carrying lots of materials (as londones did) or recommending us several books and different resources that they knew in deep and that they had used to explain a theme. Maybe the difference is that some teachers love not only their subject, the topics they teach, but they also love teaching, they love the profession, and they don´t have any other escape that orientating others in the difficult task of teaching.

Londones was trying to send us some messages... Why getting stuck in a textbook when there are so many good materials around? Why limiting our knowledge to a textbook (or even just to a good book...). This was the time for us to go away and look for contents outside the class. Everything around us can be object of study. Curiosity, observation, capacity to relate things that most of the times are not going together and integrate them to give a message... We tried to look for our lost content. Did we find it? Well, we are not sure, it´s the price we have to pay for being a long time in a study system that doesn´t really promote creativity and tangential thought... It was a little bit scary... we were not sure of if we were doing “the right thing”. But, at least, we observed around us, we paid attention, we had a thought in a different way...

In our search, there were several things that cached our attention: we selected an announcement in the Education Faculty that we didn´t expect to find there; it was about some fashion magazine and its offer of postgraduate scholarships for graduated women with good grades. Somehow, it made us think about fashion and education... being closer than anyone could had expected. 

We looked aswell at the empty classes, which made us think of what really constitute education... students, teachers and the interaction between them through the transmission of knowledge...

We even had a look to the “Socialization area”... well, socialization is something that has a big impact on students, and now an especial area apart from the cantina has been arranged for it, and it has its own name...somehow shocking.

We realised that we had to look, open our mind, look again, and rethink what we already thought that we knew... But it is still not easy!

There it is a sentence I read some years ago from a little book that an inspiring group instructor gave me as a present, and I read it so many times that I learnt it by heart. Here you have it, as a present, in case you want it:

“It’s not inspiring books or presentations that change people`s life; they simply act as a catalyst. It is what you choose to believe and act upon, that’s where the change comes. No one can change the life of any individual except that individual.”

So, what do we choose to believe?

Let´s break stereotypes… Let´s Learn… Let´s Teach.

Thank you, Londones, for being a catalyst; thanks to all the good teachers that have been and are around us.

T8T team.

Dark side of textbooks videos project

Here are our videos about textbooks. We hope you like them!

Take control of your class!

Make up yout own mind!

                         

 Be original!

Publishing houses

GRUPAL SLOGAN

                 BREAKING STERIOTYPES!!

funny process:

finally,we got it!

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

TRANSLATORS

Good morning, everyone!

We are the translators from the Group T8T, Paz and Isa.

This week we have been working in an amazing and interesting topic. It was textbooks and the attitude of the teachers about it. We had to choose an option to represent it and explain it to the rest of the class. The one we had chosen was advertisement.

Here we leave you five concepts about this topic. We hope it will be useful for you and you can know and learn more about it.

Comic: 
there are many ways in order to define comics.

Will Eisner defines comics as a sequential art. 

Scott McCloud defines comics as juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence with the objective of convey information and produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.

Another and an easier definition of comics could be a visual medium, often combined with text, that express ideas via images. Normally, juxtaposed sequences of panels of images.

Textbooks:
 is a manual of instruction of study. Textbooks are produced according to the demands of educational institutions. Although most textbooks are only published in printed format, many are now available as online electronic books. 

Infographic:
 are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge intended to present complex information quickly and clearly. They can improve cognition by utilizing graphics to enhance the human visual system’s ability to see patterns and trends. The process of creating infographics can be referred to as data visualization, nformation design, or information architecture.The entire infographic could potentially be interactive, allowing people to play with the data, turn knobs and dials and get a feel for the data behind the visual. Additionally, savvy users could also access and download or fork the data behind each inographic. 

Publisher: 

A company or person that prepares and issues books, journals, or music for sale.

An organization that publishes text or music

An employee of a publishing company who has responsibility for deciding what is published

Ideology:
An ideology is a set of conscious and unconscious ideas that constitute one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology is a comprehensive vision, a way of looking at things as in several philosophical tendencies, or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society. Ideologies are systems of abstract thought applied to public matters and thus make this concept central to politics. Implicitly every political or economic tendency entails an ideology whether or not it is propounded as an explicit system of thought. It is very related to the topic of textbooks because, every text book has political influences. It doesn’t exist any neutral textbook.

See you soon,

The translators.

JOURNALIST

Hello everyone, again! I’m Ana Ruiz and this week  I’m the journalist.

This week we have been working about The Dark Side of Textbooks.

We never have stopped and thinking on textbooks and we can say that search and work on that topic has been worth, we have  realize what is happening. To know that something so easy as a textbook seems, has something behind, something which is an ideology and an economical marked as some editorials are.

This has been a long week...

Monday 3^rd of March:

Firstly we were informed about the new amazing activity (the bad side of textbooks) and also we tweeted @londoness , that was something mysterious because we didn’t know who she was but she was going to come to our class. Visit that we were so exciting to have during a week.

Tuesday 4^th of March:

The second day of work, the group were together and we decided to explain the topic with videos because we thought that it could be a shocking and so clear way.

Also, for that day we had read the documents, in order to understand the activity and the meaning of the activity.

Thursday, 6^th of March

The third day we started working on videos. At first, we choose the messages of the three advertisements. But then was difficult to decide which ideas we could use to transmit the message. But finally, we had a clear idea and was so easy to carry out the work.

Saturday 8^th of March

That day, was a fatidical day because we lost our work, all that we have record, so we had to organize again.

 Monday 10^th  of March

Monday was a very full day. We have to record again to prepare the advertisements.

Then we had the amazing visit of Mercedes Ruiz.  We learnt a lot, and the most important, she transmit us lot of feelings such as motivation . We were absolutly concentrate in her and in his words. We spent a very nice time with him.

Thursday 13^th  and Monday 17^th of March

Those days we had the expositions of our works.
We saw a lot of advertisements, comics, a fable and an infographic, four ways to express and represent the dark side of textbooks. 


ABOUT CLASSMATES BLOGS:

This week, we decided to mark out Brainstorming blog  because of his great  work on the fable and also because we like the way they work.  7brainstorming.blogspot.com.es

But  we have to congratule   Giveme7 blog too. They  have done a very good work with their infographic and they have show us a new useful method to work with. And we like their work in the  blog. http://giveme7blog.blogspot.com.es/ 

CURATOR FARMERS

Good morning! We are the curator farmers of this week, Sandra and Laura, and we hope that it will be very useful for you. This week we haven't used a lot of information, because the videos have been made by ourselves, and they are just based on the information that we present here. Even though, it has been an interesting and great job, we have had a lot of fun recording the videos.

STAR

Hello everyone,

It´s Ana Mª Sánchez, the T8T Star for the task “Exploring the dark side of textbooks”. Well, what can I tell you about my experience? I think we have explored an interesting topic; the articles we were proposed to read were quite illuminating and instructive… I didn´t know, for example, about the existence of an Institute for International Textbook Research, just a pity, I thought at the beginning of searching into the website (http://www.gei.de), that most of the information is not translated into English (even if I was clicking the translating icon once and again). I was missing some broadcast articles that were giving examples about the different approaches to the same topic (e.g. a war, a battle or even an ideological conflict). At the end, after searching a little bit more, I found some information about textbooks in Middle East, National Identity and the images of self and other (Alayan, 2011), but was just information about a conference. Anyway, there is no much time to deepen into the topic, I mean, no before publishing the posts. Later on we can deepen into them as much as we want. And maybe, as future teachers, we should be quite aware about this issue, and the fewer intermediaries we have, the better.

             About the procedures we had to use to show this dark side of textbooks that we had been exploring through the articles and blog post we read, we were especially interested in two of them: infographics and advertisement videos. I really preferred to do an infographic… because I thought it was a cool way of showing information, especially after watching one interesting professional website (http://infographicworld.com) and particularly an infographic about Christmas and its transformation into a business; but also because I´m quite self-concious (something I have to improve, I know… not a good trait for anything, and less for a good teacher…) and, in some aspects, it was more comfortable for me to choose the infographic… But the majority gained, and even if I still have to assume that I am in youtube (I cannot believe it yet, hum… actually I try to not think of it…) Well, I have to say that I enjoyed with the whole process. What is more, I discovered there are quite skillful people in my group with the video making and with creative ideas for doing so… quite impressive the qualities that can be found around… Thanks to you all. Well, I felt supported throughout the week and, even if we had technical problems (always something happens, but we are becoming skilled at solving incidentals… aren´t we, girls?) I think the result was not bad at all, and I think we learnt quite a lot of things during the process… Even during the presentation, I had to learn to not apologise for the mistakes before presenting… I think I still have to learn quite a lot of things! And I expect to have the capacity, the motivation, the inner force and the inspiration for continuing learning… quite big desires, I know. Actually I hope to get assistance from on High, while I continue doing my part of the job. 

See you soon.

T8T team

ANALYST

Hello I’m Alba Ramsay, the analyst. Looking carefully at everything is one of the most important tasks of this role. This week has been very entertaining, having to interact all together trying to reach the target of this week’s work.

Therefore, as I’ve said before the best part of this week’s task was the way we’ve worked as a group, the different way of working having to perform, to record and to find the most creative part of each one of us. I must admit that this week we have teamed even more, and that is the most important part because due to this, the work improves and we work better.

On the other hand, the worst part of this week when we had a mishap, when all our work was recorded, we missed it, so we had to start all over again. Nonetheless, this only stressed us a bit, but we knew how to cope with it and get everything to show it on class.

For sure, the best moment of the week working as a group was recording our adverts, we enjoyed as if we were kids, laughing, repeating it, and enjoying our project. It has been the best way of connecting all of us, getting the group more compact.

But for instance, the worst one was when we had everything recorded and we had to do it all over again. We felt as if we wasted our time, but after doing the second time, it wasn’t that bad; because of having it already done and memorized it took us much less time than expected.

From this week we’ve learnt how to show in a short time our thoughts, from a brainstorming of each member of the group ended up being a great idea. Apart from that, we’ve learnt how to use contents properly, and of course, that text books are not the best option to use as a teacher.

From this week I would like to conserve the cheerful spirit the T8T had, the way we solve problems, and how we face them.  And especially the unification the group has had this week, the way we’ve learnt from each other.

For next week, from my point of view what we need to improve is communication, sometimes we don’t know how to illustrate our ideas, or maybe prefer not say what they think. But from my perspective, for a group to work well needs to show their thoughts, agreements and disagreements as well.

In conclusion, I would like to highlight that cooperating with and as a unified group is the key to success. I’m sure we have to keep on working on this to improve but in my opinion we are having a good start.

See you next week.

Alba