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.