Analyst

TASK 8 - SCHOOLS THAT LEARN

Hello everybody!
 I am the analyst of Fluffy Guardians, Arazgul Allaberdiyeva. Since there was a confusion on the division of roles, again I was an analyst. Anyway, it was fun.
 This week our mission was reading the Spanish papers about the school organization and comparing them with the ones that we have read before, which are about the complexity and connections in schools. We are expected to find the connections between papers and put them in a poster. Our stars were Teresa and Pepe.
  Now I am happy that I found a chance to write something about the speed learning. The thing that I like the most in this week was the way that we presented our ideas. Each group's stars were in different corners with their poster, and we went to listen one group after they finished we run to another. It was like you got one idea and you enrich your ideas with the other one after you listened the presenters. Linda said you have five minutes and after time finished we immediately run into other groups. It was such a fun for me, because I think that it is not just like an ordinary classes. It is not like I need to learn this, I need to listen this, but you even do not realize that you learnt a lot, because you learn while you are giving feedback to presenters or while you are applauding them or while you are jumping from one group to another. Besides these, our group was well organized this week. We met and shared ideas. Facilitator was active and she motivated us perfectly, like buying some lollipops. 
 After this good reflections, one thing we found bad, or we can say we found hard, was the papers. Comparing to other activities this one was harder, and we faced with some difficulties while we were comparing and relating two of them. Also, facilitator had some troubles when she divided the text, because I can not understand them very well. 
 Finally, as a group we learnt a lot from this activity and we did a great job. Now, we are aware of the complex systems, organizations and connections. It is not only in theory, as future teachers we also put it into practice. I am sure that knowing the complexity, relating them with the organizations, and knowing the connections between teachers and students or teachers with the system etc is so crucial for us. Thanks to our last activity, now we are knowledgeable about them.

PS: Since it was the last activity, I want to mention about the course as an analyst. This class is really different from the other normal, traditional classes. We learn things by applying them like presenting and I think it makes the knowledge more permanent. In other way we just read tones of information the night before exams and generally we forget them afterwards. Also, the course was so enjoyable, because we were not forced to read those boring books and Linda did not give us usual lectures. Classroom environment was so friendly.

Thank you for reading,
Arazgul


TASK 7- LEADERSHIP STYLES 

Hello everyone!
  I am Arazgul Allaberdiyeva. This week again I am the analyst of Fluffy Guardians. Let's make a reflection about this week's task. Are you ready?
  This week our task was about the leadership styles and every group was expected to select their own candidates in order to present the solutions for weak conditions of education and schools. We chose Teresa and transformational leadership style.
To begin with the best part of the activity, for sure it was on Wednesday. Every group present their candidates and candidates talk with us like a real educators or politics. They made us laugh and we had super fun. In addition, while we were preparing our flags and our candidate, we share our opinions. Each of us said his/her concerns about education and schools so,we found lots of solutions for them. Shortly, the activity was super beneficial for us. We found chance to discuss about problems that we have already faced in our schools and as a future teacher we tried to solve the problems. We were also proud of us.
  To be honest, this week I had troubles finding negative sides of our group work or the activity. However, I think for our group we need more motivation and organization. Also, in this task, the majority of work was for stars. Maybe from their point of view it was not good. Here I congratulate all stars for their courage and self confidence.
  And how this activity is related to our degree? As a future teacher, being aware of the school problems and being able to solve those problems is so crucial. Maybe, we will be leaders and solve those problems by considering those leadership styles. Even if we will not, we are already the leaders of our classrooms.

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed...
  
  


TASK 7 - Part 2 - CONNECTIONS AND RELATIONSHIPS

Hi everyone! I'm Mari Carmen, the analyst this week!
This task has been a part of the task 6. It has consisted on filming a TV show related to the complexity and relationships in schools in a funny way not as formal as the previous video.

I think this week's task has been one of the funniest that we have done in this subject because everyone was happy and enjoying at the same time than we were learning new things. People wore different clothes and one of our classmates even put himself a wig!

In this task, we have worked all the class together again. The worst part of it, in my opinion, was that we weren't well organized and we haven't decided the boss so it was a bit mess, but in the end we could talk about it and everything was decided. The best part in my opinion was the recording because we enjoyed very much and at the same time we learnt lots of things.

In terms of the best moment of the week, I think it was when we were recording and then when we finished it and we saw that it was great. I can't wait to see the full video next Monday! 

Talking about what we should conserve and improve as a group for next weeks, I think that we should keep trying to be the best we can and work hard. On the contrary, we should try to be more organized because this week we have had many problems with the roles. We didn't know which rol we were.

In conclusion, we have made some mistakes but we learn
from them and we will try not to repeat them. 

Thanks for readind! See you next week!

Mari Carmen

TASK 7 - Part 1 - COMPLEXITY AND RELATIONSHIPS

Hello everybody!
I'm Pepe and this week I am the analyst of The Fluffy Guardians. In this week, we had to prepare and record the news that we found on internet. For this week we didn't meet because we did everything in class. So all the class were working on Monday with the script, the set etc. And on Wednesday we started recording.

As an analyst I had to see and analyze what my group were doing (I didn't do it before to be honest). And I was really surprised beacuse when you don't have to analyze you don't pay attention to the effort that your collegues are doing; I mean, in some cases I thought: "oh my god, this week this person hasn't work hard as the rest", but I was wrong, they work very hard, only that I don't really pay attention to this.
So I am very happy with my group because everybody were working, helping... in conclusion, for the News video, we can say that THE FLUFFY GUARDIANS group (with all its members) has worked very hard, we put our footprint in the task and I am very proud about it.

The worst part of this week were the stress, some people were lost and in some cases there were troubles for deciding ideas. I was also the presenter and I had some mistakes when I was performing, my pronunciation and my fluenty, and some of my mates had the same problem, but don't worry, we will improve for the next time!

Finally, I have to say that during this week, I have known better my group and the rest of my classmates because we have worked all together and apart of working, we were learning while we were having fun.

Thanks for reading! 

Pepe:)




TASK 6- COMPLEXITY AND RELATIONSHIPS

Hi everyone!

I am Teresa and the analyst for this week. This week we have made a really complex task (bad joke). We divided the work and we read a lot of news and texts about relationships at school. As every week, we met up for doing the task.

The best part of being an analyst has been that I had to watch and observe the work of every person in the group. It hasn't supposed a big problem for me as I like to know what each person is doing and observe everyone. I also have liked (even if it has nothing to do with my role) Wednesday class, when we divided into Writters and Actors and we decided which situation are we going to represent the next week.

The worst part of this week was when we met up to do the tasks and we had to read all these news and texts, ii took us all the journey to understand all these texts and think about some situation but we finally did it!

As we haven't made a presentation of our work, we can not say which part of our work has been the best and the worst, but we contributed with some original examples and news, so I think we did well.

Thanks for reading and see you next week

Teresa




TASK 5- WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT?

Hello everyone!
  I am Arazgul and the analyst of Fluffy Guardians for this week. For task 5, our job was preparing 2 minutes video which summarizes the things that we have learnt so far. As a group we decided to use PowToon in order to create an awesome and cool video.
  As an analyst, for me the best part of the activity was collecting likes and being in a race:)))) Everybody got motivated and it was not just an ordinary task. The evaluation part and some other things were changed. That's why it made the task more enjoyable and changed the atmosphere of the class.
 Yes, then what about the worse part? This week, instead of meeting, we tried to do things via internet. We split up the jobs and everybody add something to the video from powtoon.com. I think it was hard to follow, as a group we need to be more organized, otherwise it will be difficult to complete the mission.
  All in all, our video was pretty good and we have been started to collect all likes from public. For me, this week's activity was beneficial for us. We found a chance to remember what we have learnt so far and it was good preparation for an exam. Besides, we discovered types of animated video programs that we can make use of them in our future classrooms. 

See you next week!

Arazgul Allaberdiyeva  




TASK 4- THE DARK SIDE OF TEXTBOOKS


Hi everybody! I am Victoria and I am the analyst this week. Using the video 'How to be the best analyst' made by my classmates, I have tried to do my role in the best way.

This week was the last week before Easter, so we worked hard to start our rest weeks as soon as possible. This week, our work was about the dark side of textbooks and we had to look for information about why text books are bad for teachers. We found very interesting this activity because we didn't know all the bad features of text books.

This week we had less time to do our work because on Tuesday we had another presentation from other subject. But, finally, we organized ourselves and we met on Tuesday afternoon. We distributed the task so we did the work faster. We chose the twitter timeline as methodology to do our work. I think that is the best decision we did because, in that way, we wrote less text so we would improve our presentation, It is original and it was well-understood. 

I think that the worst part of our work this week has been that as we had little time, we hadn't got enough time for discussing each point of view from each person of the group. But we will correct this in our next work, doing our work on Monday instead of Tuesday.

Thanks for reading guys! 

Have a great holiday!!

Victoria.





TASK 3- FREE RESOURCES AND VISUAL PRESENTATIONS AND HOW TO BE THE BEST ANALYST


Hello! I'm Jesús and this week I'm the new analyst.

This week task consisted in improving our last week one. Our presentation was about food chain. Our teacher Linda told us it was not done properly, so this week we tried to improve it. They told us which were our main mistakes and gave us some advices of how to do a presentation.

I think that the best we did in order to improve our work was synthesising. We deleted all our text because it was too much, so children would not read it. We tried to do a clear presentation with not much information in the screen, in order to make it easy to follow and read. The bear performance was also improved, adding sounds. Due that sounds didn't work in the classroom computer, we reproduced them in a laptop. We were also informed about how to use Creative Commons in our presentation.

Our presentation was much better than the last week one. Stars did it properly. Our bear performance eating a rabbit wasn't so funny as before for people, because everybody knew what will happen. However, the fact of adding sounds such a bear shout made it more realistic. It is true that we didn't interact with the "public" too much but it was because the performance didn't allow it. 

To sum up I would like to say that we did our presentation thinking in primary school children. We were focused in do it for them, making it easy to understand and funny. Children want to learn having fun. The food chain can be a bit difficult to teach in only 4 minutes, but the performance helped us.

On Wednesday, all people with the same rol of every team got together to do a video about how to be the best in each role. Analysts did this one. If you want to know how to be the best analyst, please click here!

 

 Thanks for reading!

Jesús



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TASK 3- FREE RESOURCES AND VISUAL PRESENTATIONS

Hi everyone!

I'm Mari Carmen, and in this third week, I'm the analyst of our group. The task of this week had two parts; the first one in which we should make a presentation of a topic, preferably of a primary school content, and a second task in which we should make a presentation not for showing it in class, but to know what a creative commons license is and some tips of how we can do a good presentation.

This week a good thing in my opinion is that we have organized ourselves really well because on Monday, as we usually do, we went to Teresa’s house to prepare these tasks and for that we divided the work. Vicky, Arazgul, Maria and Pepe were looking for information and making the power point of the food chain, Sara was making the video that we should upload to the blog and Teresa and I were looking for images and information on creative commons license and tips for a good presentation. We were very concentrated in the work but despite that we also had time to argue (NOT in a bad way) because we had some different opinions of what to do in the presentation. We didn’t know which topic choose to our work, photosynthesis?, food chain?, Santa Claus? Everyone liked a different one, so in the end we chose the food chain because we thought it was interesting and we had the idea to represent in class an animated example of it.

So that’s what we did. On Wednesday, Pepe was presenting the activity dressed like a bear and I was explaining the food chain at the same time! I think it was at least funny because everyone was laughing and enjoying the ‘performance’ but we made some mistakes, for example we didn’t put the references of the photos, in some slides we put so much text and we should have had more eye-to-eye contact with the rest of the class at the moment of presenting the task.

Next Monday, we are going to repeat the presentation and we are going to do it better, I hope, trying to improve what the teacher told us to do.

In this third week, we have learnt so many new things for example what a creative commons license is, what sources we should use in our works, how to look for public domain images and music and many more things.

We have found a lot of interesting things in this task, one of them is to know how to do an excellent presentation because we will have to do many presentations during our university years and later to teach our pupils so we should start being used to talk in public, knowing how to do it in a good way, making it interesting, talking in a high and clear voice, knowing the audience the best as possible, being in contact and asking questions to the public, have the ideas organized and structured and clearly doing good power point presentations with the right colors and less text.

We still have a lot of work to do but each week is a new experience for us and we are working very hard in every task to learn new useful things for our lives and our future.

 

Thanks for reading! See you next week!

Mari Carmen

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TASK 2- TREASURE HUNT: CARTOGRAPHIC PROJECTIONS 

  

Hi, and welcome to our blog!

I'm María, and in this second week, I'm the analyst of our group, so I will do a reflection about the task of this week: how we've organized it, good and bad things that we've observed working, if we have to improve something, what it has seemed us interesting, what new things we've learned with this task...etc.

Well, the task was about the Treasure Hunt, and for studying that, the topic has been a map projection. In this activity, the student doesn't have to carry out a very complex task. He/she only has to find the answers of many topic's questions given previously by the teacher. Sometimes there is a global question that requires the student did a more elaborated use of the information. This question is known as "The Big Question".

Firstly, we had to search for information about Robinson, Mercator, and Azimuthal map projections (purpose, distortion, problems, socio-cultural implications...), and then, answer the Big Questions. Their objective is to introduce terms and geographic principles to know the importance of the view on media.

Like last week, we met on Monday at Teresa's home. Although it's difficult to work in group, because each person thinks in a different way and not always all members are agree, I think it's a good way to learn from other people who can help and give you new ideas. If it occurs, the work always will be better than if you do it by yourself.

We decided to expose the task by "Prezi", a presentation's program similar to Power Point. We had never worked with this program, but our week's translator (Sara) was exploring about how to use it, and we could dominate it. Then, among all, we started to look for information and answer the questions for doing the presentation. Although it was hard to start for us, we had a good time working together, listening to music, laughing with jokes..., and in my opinion that's important too for a good working environment.

But, as I have talked about good things, I have seen bad things too, because, although we have worked a lot, the task is not perfect. In my opinion, we should improve the fluency exposing the tasks, and try to speak loudly and clearly in order that people can understand what we want to explain. Also, we have to improve some things for the next presentation that the teacher has suggested us to change. These little mistakes help us to motivate ourselves, be critical, and try to progress for the other tasks.

Finally, from my point of view, these type of activities are essential to give us ideas to prepare our classes effectively in a future.

I hope you have liked the reflection, we’ll try to improve it all weeks

Thanks for reading it!

María


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TASK 1- TPACK

Hi, I’m Sara, and in this first week of work, I’m the analyst of our group.

As it was the first time we worked together, we didn’t know how it was going to be.

At first, when we discovered the topic “TPACK”, we thought “What is this?” we didn’t know what to do so, after watching a few videos, we made an idea in our minds of how the work was going to be.

This same day , Monday 15^th of February we met at 4:30 pm at the tram’s station and we went to buy all the material and then to Teresa’s house.

We started to think how we could manage all the information and we chose the spidergram, because we thought that this information map was good to explain TPACK. One part of the group started working on the poster while other part was answering the questions.

I think we all were great organized. The best part of working together was when we were in Teresa’s house creating our poster because we were listening to music, making jokes and having a good time together.

This first week we didn’t have any inconvenient or problem between us so it was great, we have learnt to work in group, and I personally learnt that is better to do things as a group that by yourself because, is more enriching that each person of the group knows all about the topic than if each one knows just a little bit.

Also, as I’ve seen in the comments that we have had in this blog about our presentation on Wednesday, we have to improve in the information we offer by digging a little bit more on the topic.

To sum up we’ve liked knowing what TPACK is because we think that it is very related to our degree and to our future job as teachers.

See you next week!