The BOSS has arrived!

Hi everyone! I am Silvia García Martínez and this week I have been the facilitator of the group.

First of all I am going to tell you who has done the different roles this week:

Alba garcía subiela – farmer

María García Zamora – analyst

Marina crevillén Fernández – star

Anthea clemente Sharp – translator

Rebeca cascales ribera – journalist

Silvia garcía martínez – facilitator

Secondly I am going to talk about the activity of this week, which was based in how the media is not neutral and the consequences that this can have in the education. In the activity we have had to investigate about three types of map projections (Robinson, Mercator and Azimuthal), the differences between them and their influence and use in the society. After that we have chosen two countries, explained how they are represented in the different projections and, finally, decided which projection we would use to represent these countries. Thirdly, we had to find another media that also distorts the information depending on if you use one version or another. Afterwards we have looked for a “Treasure Hunt” activity and, finally, we have had to do a reflexion between this activity and the slogan “Media is not neutral”.

We started with this activity the last Monday. After Linda explained it in class I read the information about the activity and informed the rest of my group about what we had to do and search for. I suggested them that we could distribute the work or search the six about all the information to understand it better. Finally, we decided to do the second and planned to meet the on Wednesday to put it together. I must say in this part that, although we all did our part and looked for the information, I realized that probably to divide the work between two or three people that explained their part to the others would have been more productive, because at the end we lost a lot of time putting together all the information, but it is a new thing that we can take into account for the next activity. Then, the next day, we used Linda’s hour to develop the exposition of the activity, which we decided to make part with posters and part with PowerPoint. After decide it, as we couldn’t meet more, I divided the different parts that we had to finish. First three people of the group would do the three map projections’ posters, another would change the part of the media that we had wrong and, finally, another person would make the power point of the “Treasure Hunt”.

As I have said we have had some problems with the organization although, in my opinion, we worked together to resolve them and lastly we could do a good activity and we can use these problems to know what work or doesn’t work for us, as we can do the activities faster and easier and, in summary, to improve.

Finally, I have had the opportunity to speak with the facilitators of other groups, especifically María from the group “Meerkats” and Ana Isabel from the group “Platypus”.  Both have used a similar strategy, which has been to divide the information that each member of the group had to search and after to explain it to the others and to unite it, as I have said that our group could have done to not lose so much time. But the curious thing is that they have been a bit overwhelmed too, but not for dividing badly the work, if not because, in my opinion, their mistake was that although each member looked for a part, they did it when they were together, not before they met, so they lost a precious time doing it. This is the only advice that I give to my classmates because it can be very useful to do the work faster when they are together, although in my opinion they have had a very good organization as I have seen in their works, and they have known how to divide their functions in a good way, a thing that we know that we must improve for the next activity.