Task 6 (Spanish Educational System I). Journalist

Hi everyone!!!
I’m María José and this week I have been the journalist, oh yeah ;) My role consists on tell the history of the group, tell the dynamic of the weekly work and recover evidences about our work.I have to recognize that I have really liked being the journalist because I have learnt a lot to describe how my group work in a faster way.

Today's article is an explanation of the process that we followed in order to do the activity called “Changes in The Spanish Educational System Overview: The game”.

First of all, I am going to explain the time spent in the these activity: last Monday our School Organization and Educational Resources teacher proposed us a task  in which we had to investigate about different topics related to the Spanish Educational System. The topics that we had to investigate were the following:

• An overview of the Educational System
• Organisational Variations and Alternative Structures in Primary Education

              Rural schools

              Itinerancy and non-regular schooling

              Bilingual teaching

              Distance Education

With these topics we had to do a conceptual map in which we had to explain the principle ideas about this two topics. The best conceptual map would obtain a prize (1.5 or 1 extra points in the portfolio mark)

So this day, in class, the facilitator (Miriam) divided the work that each person had to do for meeting other day with  all of the information summarized and clear ideas about the topics.

We met on Wednesday 18th. This day all the members of the group have the information summarized so each one have to explain the principal ideas that had found. It was like a brainstorming,each one had many ideas about the topics.All the members of the group wanted to speak at the same time and we had some problems with it but the facilitator(Miriam) control that the group was working properly together and tried to avoid this situations with the goal of working in a good way and organized, always with the objective of improving as a group for doing the task as well as possible.
The next step was to think about how we had to organize the information in a clear way to put it on the conceptual map, so we were talking and discussing about it .We had also to do schemas for representing it in a good way.

We spent a long time doing it so we had to do Skype next day (Thursday 19th) in the afternoon in order to do the conceptual map with an useful tool that our teacher, Linda, recommended us called Mindmeister.

The last day was on Friday 20th, we finished all the details that we wanted to include on the conceptual map and after that, we revised it with the goal of avoid any mistake.

This was the result of our work:

An overview of the Educational System

Organizational  Variations and alternative structures in Primary Education

...and the expected day came :)  How was the dynamic this week with the sixth task?

On Monday 23th, our teacher Linda explained how we had to carry out this task:

Keep Calm group (who were the visitors) and the star of Power teachers (who was the alien) had to mix with our group.

At the same time our star Ana (who was the alien) had to mixed with the rest of Power Teachers group(who were the natives) and Keep calm group (who were the visitors)

The first one, had to work on the topic one and the second one, had to work on the fourth topic.

Linda divided the lesson in order to do two things:

On the one hand, in the first lesson we had to evaluate the Conceptual maps of Keep Calm and keep Organized with the help of the star of the group Power teachers (Rebecca).So first of all, the three group established a criteria that we were to follow in order to evaluate the conceptual maps. After that, we evaluated them and fill in a survey in order to observe if the conceptual map followed some criteria, such as if it was legible, their sizes, their contents,their designs,among others. In addition we had to do the same thing (to evaluate and fill a survey with a criteria) with the conceptual maps of Power teachers group.

After that, we were talking about the mistakes that we commited on the conceptual map in order to improve and we talked also about the marks that we had put on the conceptual maps.

At the same time our star, Ana, was with the other part of the group Keep calm and Keep organized and Power teachers doing the same but with the topic four.She was the star so she helped to the group Power Teachers in order to evaluate the conceptual map of the group Keep Calm and Keep organized.

On the other hand, in the second lesson we had to chose one conceptual map (the best conceptual map) in order to add some contents or aspects for completing it as well as possible.

Here I attach a video working hard in the task with the star(Rebeca)of the the group Power teachers and the visitors(the group Keep Calm and Keep Organized)

                                                         Picture belongs to the Power teachers Group

It has been a pleasure working with you!!!:)

Finally, the second part of my role consist on explore and comment a blog from inside the class and other from outside the class. 

From inside the class I selected the Power Teachers Group.I chose this group because I like how the map was done. It was very clear and with the principal content. Furthermore it was very easy for understanding the basic concepts of the topic.

I commented on the star post, which is this: http://goo.gl/XIFRKv

From outside the class I decided to comment a post that resulted me very interesting. It is about the introduction of ITC(for example,the use of Ipads applications in the classroom).

As I have put on the comment new technologies(such as iPads) are a good option for introducing in the classroom because it is a new way to teach in which students can visualize the things that they learn and understand the contents more easily. In addition they can improve their creativity and imagination. For that reason this blog,especially this post ,from my point of view, is very interesting because as future teachers, to learn more things about how introduce technologies in the classroom and use them, is a very important point.

The post comment is this: http://goo.gl/fbSZLV

I hope you enjoy reading my post!