Final Conclusions of the Last Project - Miguel Carazo Mayoral

Let’s make a reflection about all the projects that we have been showed during this last week...

Starting with Amigos del Football, they talked about inclusive schools, something very important nowadays, because there are many disabilities which make difficult to access to school. We must respect each others and as teachers we have to develop in children different values, such as respect, solidarity… We also should consider the family participating in education, they can help us a lot sometimes.

Unknowns had also this issue, and they showed us a video from Padre Piquer’s school, they wanted to build that school in a conflictive zone, where people with few resources can’t afford being educated. They have students from many different countries, which are taught in cooperative learning, participation, multitasking… They work also as in the university, based in projects.

And the other school they showed us was Sadako School, where they used technology a lot, and where they learn by practicing. But the most important thing is that they teach the children to be kind people.

Modern Students talked about how to live together in the school, or how to coexist. They divided their work in different parts, they talked about meditation for example, which is a way of both preventing and solving problems in which children are involved, such as bullying, exclusion… We as teachers should pay attention to every detail, and comment it with the families so that they can take part on it.

They put a video where the mates helped each other between them, showing that respect is very important, and we have to teach children how to solve problems in a respectful way.

Then they used a book, where using a metaphor of the archaeology, they show 3 steps, the first one is to research and find the problem; then investigate it, causes, parts involved, relations… and finally the solution.

Now it’s the turn of Wanderlust, who talked about social and emotional learning, and how important it is, so that maybe it should be another subject. I agree with them, because we need to know what do we feel, and be capable of talking about it, and reflect about it. Talking again about the family, this would be a good moment to make a combined class in which both the family and the students could learn about feelings and how to treat them. This group also talked about the multiple intelligences (H. Gartner) studied in Psychology, focusing in the intrapersonal which is the one related with your feelings and emotions. Also the interpersonal is important because if we develop both of them we can learn how to show our feelings, how to understand the others, and overall how to work in a cooperative way by making groups, so that in the end we are social beings.

Musical Chairs, they couldn’t present their topic in class, but the post they made clarified everything. They talked about “Community learning” which is a way of making every part of our educational environment being connected, matching this way teachers, students, family, etc. But they must cooperate, collaborate and communicate correctly in order to succeed. As we have said in previous works, the teacher is more like a tool or a guide, who tries to lead the students in the right path, so both children and teachers have knowledge, and they exchange the things they know in order to know more. The teacher uses part of his knowledge to make them feel motivated to create new knowledge. Also by sharing different experiences, and real cases, children learn values, which are not explained in the books, and which are learn in real life lessons, they need to learn to respect everyone, to accept diversity as a good aspect…

Using this methodology learning will be enjoyable and children will want to know more.

Now we are going to talk about Team Perk, who talked about “ICT and improvement school” this is a new methodology which is in favour of new technologies, such as tablets, mobile phones, computers, apps… They want to adapt to this new era, where children are born with an iPad under their arm. So we don’t have to be afraid of them, we must learn how to use it, and learn how can we use them to make our lessons better. This is also good to fight against exclusion, because new technologies can help us in the social area, but always being careful and showing children how to use them in properly.

So they showed something we all know, which is that technology is coming whether we want or not, and that this opens a whole new world of possibilities when trying to create new different methodologies.

Dumbledore teachers’ army talked about leadership, although it was supposed to be an interesting presentation, they didn’t have enough time to complete it, so we summed it up with two main questions:

-       Why is important leadership for schools? Well it is important because we have always need someone or something to follow in order to imitate his or her behaviour, or simply because we want. In the educational context I think that a leader is needed in order to have a role model, but we have to careful as a teacher, because the existence of a leader doesn’t mean that he is untouchable, he needs to know that maybe he has become the leader because of some details as organisation, hard work…

-       What are the characteristics of a good leader? I think a good leader needs to be a good speaker, he must know how to express orally and how to keep his ideas clear. But also he has to be a role model in matter of organisation, of being kind, he has to be confident, so you can trust him. And something very important too, he would never give up, I would expect from him to be a good fighter, till the end.

And finally Crónicas Viajeras, my group. We talked about ICT and learning disabilities, which is a way of showing how important is the technology and how many problems has it solved in education. We talked about Down’s syndrome, autism and some motor disabilities. From the beginning we wanted to express that maybe “for us technology is a way of making life easier, but for people with disabilities makes it possible.” We wanted to find an impressive video but as we found many important stories we couldn’t forget them and we made a mix of everyone. Most of the people think about technology and education and only see digital blackboards, iPads, computers, but there is a big world behind that curtain. We have platforms which have been created in order to surpass difficulties, such as the ones which some illnesses can cause. For example, we found some apps which are used to help autist people to identify their emotions, and learn to express them. At first I didn’t get the meaning of the app, but as soon as I started to read the difficulties they have I realised of how important is this.

This kind of advances make possible not to divide a classroom only because for some people it is more difficult to follow the class, so for us as teachers it’s been a great project and we have learned a lot.

So, to conclude this post, I want to say that in this whole semester we have learned a lot, specially with the long research projects because they have helped us to know more about the reality in which we live, and also how to deal with it and how to surpass the difficulties that we can run off with in our work.