Let's organize this a bit!

Hello bloggers! I'm Alba García and this week I've been the facilitator. My job has been to organize and distribute the activity about The Dark Side of Textbooks among my group-mates to make the activity easier and faster. In my opinion, the most important thing I had to do was distributing well the time so all of as were working at the same level and profited the time the better we could.

The roles for this week have been the following: 

Rebeca Cascales Ribera – translator

anthea clemente sharp - star

marina crevillén fernández - journalist

silvia garcía martínez - analyst

alba garcía subiela - facilitator

maría garcía zamora - curator / farmer

This week's activity has been quite fun, so we all worked very well together and did our job correctly. We had to do a piece of work using a Web 2.0 tool which illustrated the dark side of textbooks, and we chose to do a comic. Doing a comic was a great challenge as none of us had done one before, so we were really looking for it.

First of all, we had to read some documents in order to draw the key points on which we would base our comic. So we didn't spend too much time reading, I decided to devide the different documents on Monday in a way that the six of us had to read more or less the same as the others, and we all read the same. This way we profited better the time.

Then, when we met on Tuesday and we put together what each one of us had read and noted down the main points common between the different documents. I found this method of dividing the information and then doing a brainstorm to put together the main information very effective as we all knew what the topic was about and could talk about it, and we didn't "lose" time reading things that one of our collegues could read and explain to us. 

Then, once we had developed a common outline with the information, we decided what the comic would be about. We thought that going beyond the information and interpreting it would be interesting, so we decided to represent an extreme situation caused by "the dark side of textbooks". I planned the comic in a whiteboard by making an schema of the different vignettes with what we would include in each one of them. 

As we are six components in the group, I decided to divide each vignette for each component, so we all worked on the same things and took more or less the same time. However, one of the components had to leave earlier, so we did her vignette and, as she was the star, I told her to write an outline of what each vignette was about so she know what to say in the exposition.

It is very important and worthwhile to organize ourselves and learn how to work in groups, as for our future job, being teachers, we need to organize very well every lesson and plan different possibilities in case one method or explanation doesn't work for our students. We also need to know how to work in groups and be the leaders. For instance, in schools there are different departments for the different subjects and each department has a "boss", who is responsible for coordinating the members of the department, just as the Facilitator coordinates the members of her group.