Hello, I'm Leona and this week I was The Prickle's analyst. Our task this week was about Schools that learn. We had to find connections and relationships between the two texts that we read last week and the two new ones we read this week. 

We ended this last task exactly the same way as the first one: speed learning. This was a great way to see how my peers have grown during this subject. Some people's English has gotten better, they're not so nervous, they know how to maintain the audience's attention, etc.

I think the best part about this activity was that we all knew how it was going to be presented, we knew how it was going to be carried out due to previous experiences. This activity was great because it made you think back to what we had learned in other weeks and apply it to this week's task along with the new knowledge learned. I don't have anything bad to say about the task apart from concentration whilst reading the texts was definitely necessary.

The best moment this week for my group was when Linda, the teacher, told the stars that she liked our poster and their explanation and that the only thing that we would have to improve would be adding a little bit more information about one the texts that we had to read this week. When the stars told us this, we definitely agreed with Linda. We didn't realize it until she told us. The fact that we were missing information in the explanation and the poster would probably be the worst part of this week's task, even though it definitely could've been worse.

Over these few weeks we have learned how to work together as a team and how to cooperate with one another, we all know how hard that can be. Week after week we have been trying to improve, whether it be our pronunciation, blog post, creativity, etc. And we have also tried to take on-board all the critiques that we have gotten from Linda and our other class mates. I think it is very important to be able to do that even if you may not like what the other person has said. 

I think the knowledge learnt in this week's task is going to help us in the future as we are going to be teachers and we are going to be surrounded by all of these connections and relationships all at once. It is definitely important to know how handle yourself in different situations. 

As it is the last ever task, I'm going to continue by saying that I think every task that we have done is going to be helpful as future teachers. We now know the following:

• Teaching will be more effective when you combine technology, pedagogy and content knowledge
• The map distortions
• How to give a good presentation
• How Common Licenses work
• How bad textbooks are
• Different types of leadership and it's characteristics
• Complexity in schools

Hi there! I´m Juan and I´m back this week as curator-farmer. The task of this week was about to link the concepts that we´ve seen the last two weeks with two new papers provided by our teacher. To see our diagram with this new links click here

• Bolívar.A. Los centros educativos como organizaciones que aprenden: una mirada crítica. Avaliable in:  https://aulavirtual.um.es/access/content/group/1134_G_2015_N_N/Bilingual%20Group/Schools%20that%20learn/organizaciones%20que%20aprenden.pdf
• González.M.T. Estructuras para el trabajo y la coordinación de los profesores en centro. Organización y Gestión de los centros escolares. (pp. start-57 end-71): https://aulavirtual.um.es/access/content/group/1134_G_2015_N_N/Bilingual%20Group/Schools%20that%20learn/Estructura%20de%20centros_M%C2%AA%20Teresa%20Gonz%C3%A1lez.pdf 
   
   
  To see our diagram with this new links click here
   
  Before I say good bye for the last time I´ve got to say I´ve never thought that I would be doing any kind of blog. I´ve really enjoyed it  (it was a great opportunity to show my gif collection) and I hope you liked it as well as me. 
  
   Once I´ve said that, I hope you have weekend or holiday or day, I don´t know when you are reading this ok.
  
  
  
  
  

Hi, I'm Jamal from the Prickles, and this week I'm the translator.



Organizational learning: Is the transfer of knowledge in an organization. The experience is crutial, because the organization improves thanks to it, and it also facilitates the creation of knowledge.
The people that work following the organizational learning will be more prepared for the external changes. The process is continuous.

Complexity: It is the word used to describe the relation between different elements that can work together or that are linked. Simple elements or simple parts can create a complex system. We used this "term" in the school context, where there are different levels that share information and knowledge.

Speed learning: It is the educative or learning version of the speed dating. It is a dinamic exercise that allows the students to present their works or proyects in a limited period of time. When the time is up, the "star" can get feedback from the rest of the students. It is very effective and it is the system that've we used in the activity of this week.

Connections: A connection is an association or relationship. It is a word that has a lot of meanings, but this week we studied the connection between teachers and school departments. This conecction allows the teachers to be more cordinated and avoid information problems (lack of information between school departments.) If they are "properly connected" they can work better and effectively

Experience: Is the knowlege that a person gets from the different events that that person goes through during his whole lifetime. We studied the influence of the learning experience in teachers. The experience and the shared information increase their knowlege and effectivity, so it is a crutial factor in the learning process.

Have a nice weekend :D

Hello everybody! My name is Paula and I'm from The Prickles. Before starting, I must tell you that it is the second time I'm doing this role because I have alreaady done the rest of them before. Also, I must tell you that it is the last time I'm writing here. So, here I go!
It was Sunday night when my group started to talk in our whatsapp group to say that a new task had been uploaded. So, we started to read the task in our houses to understand better what Linda esplained us the next day. After Linda's explanation on monday, we chose the roles for each person doing the usual dynamic we have followed the other weeks. And in the practical hour, we read the first document. The main aim of this task was join the 2 new documents with the previous documents of complexity and connections. We had to create a connection map so, started to think in how to do this map too...
Here you have a photo of my group while they were working on it!





As the previous tasks, we decided to do the task on Tuesday, having lunch at University, in Education Faculty. We kept reading the documents and after that, all the group started to talk about what we have read. And the stars started to write down some ideas that they thought were important. When all the connections  were clear for everybody, we bought the cardboard and started to do the map.

Wednesday arrives and with it, the speedlearning! Sara and James were very nervous but all of us knew that they were going to do a wonderful work. We divided the classroom and all the stars explained their project on the wall, making a big circle. We were passing through different groups. But first, our stars explained us their work.
CLASS OR MESS?



THE TEAMS

I loved the work of all my classmates. Definetely, all of us have understood the task and all the things related to complexity. Although, I liked all the explanations and all the connection maps, I must say that Loonatics did a wonderful work. So I decided to leave them a comment telling them things about their work:






I also commented on a blog about complexity in education, because I really liked this issue. But it was on Spanish, so I commented on Spanish too, here you have the comment I put:



For celebrating that we had done  our last task and for avoiding study, some of The Prickles decided to go to the cinema! Spending time with them withouth having to do a task was as weird as nice!

Well, everything has a ending, so this course too. I can just tell you that all the effort you do day by day, it will have a positive effect on you and in your learning. I have enjoyed a lot and also I have learned a lot about the resources and organisation carried out in education. But, which is more important: I have learnt to work in group, to respect other's opinions and to be more confident about me. It is true that I'm not going to miss working with that stress and in those hours we were used to doing it. But I'm going to miss my Prickles team!
It has been a pleasure to share with you all my feels about this last experience.
Hope you enjoy it!

Hi, it's Miriam from the Prickles team! This is the last task of the course, so I will not write here the next wek, and I really think it's going to be very rare don't have to do it again.
In this last time, I have been the facilitator of my group, as you know the facilitator must be a good lider and motivate his group, so I have tried to do my best.



This task, from our point fo view, has been a little bit difficult, that is because we didn't know how to do good all the conections and we were worried because if is the last one task we want to do it as the best one. 



The last one organization:

On Monday, Linda explained the task to the whole class and we spent a lot of time thinking how to present the project.  

On Tuesday morning we had some ideas and we organized them, then, as always, we met to do our work. We started reading the new articles (in Spanish) and we reviewed Complexity and Connection documents. When we read the texts of this week we started to get nervious, especially the starts of the team. But we were better than that and finally, we made it.

On Wednesday, we divided the class in groups, as we did it in TPACK, and we were passing for all of them one by one. (Speed Learning). Sara and James have done a good work as starts. So, for the our las task, we have done a handmade connection map explaining the different connections we found in the 4 documents.


Finally, as facilitator, I would like to say that I know we have done a good job. We have worked continually, learning something new every week and we are ready for the final exam. I also think we have become in a really friendly team, all of us have contributed with our grain of sand and it will not be the same without any of us.



I would like to wish good luck to 2016-2017 facilitators and generally, to all the groups. Hope you enjoy as me.





Goodbye, see you soon!

Hello everyone, I am Mar from The Prickles and this week I am  the analyst, that is, I have to evaluate the work of the members of my group and also make a reflection.

First of all, I have to say that this week we all have done a good job doing the task so I want to congratulate my group for their work.
The task was about leadership: the star of each group had to personalise a candidate to the director of a centre presenting a campaign where they had to show the style we have decided to win the elections. Juan was the candidate of my group and we decided to present an authoritative style.
We have worked together and designed the speech of our candidate, and also we have done some posters and brought balloons to class to try to be the best director!

On one hand, the best of this week has been the moment of the presentation of the candidates. Every star showed and explained to the classroom why they had to win the elections. Juan, the star of my group did an excellent work as leader. and the other members of the group and me with our enthusiasm and happiness, contributed to the improvement of the speech. We were behind the leader with the posters trying to convince the people that our leader was the best.


All classmates were having a good time during the class while we were also learning.
With this task we have learnt how to present a candidature, and what it is more important, know how to defend safely our ideas and our points in front of a public.

On the other hand, the worst part of the task (if any) could be the nervousness of the star, because he knew that he had to do well due to if he did his job in a good way, all the group will have a good mark. It happens every week to the star, who has to represent the entire group, and it is sometimes hard.

Even so, we did a good job both on wednesday and the days we prepared the presentation. This is one of the things we have to conserve: work as a group. We all get on well with each other and that is one thing that define us, our fellowship.

I hope you like my post, see you next week!!

Hi everybody! It's James here, this weeks curator, showing what we used to complete the task, apart from the flags, balloons, and photos we had during our leaders' speech.
Being curator this week was easy, as we only used one document to complete the task. Linda, our teacher, provided us with a document that explained the different types of leaders, for us to understand them and choose one to base our campaign around. Thus, we didn't need any other sources of information except our own creativity.

Hi guys, I'm Leona and this week I'm The Prickles' translator.

In this task we have learned about leadership and it's styles. 

The concepts that I have chosen are the following: leader, authoritarian leadership, participative leadership, transactional leadership and transformational leadership.

Transformational leadership is based on human understanding. This style is very spiritual, full of love and morals. The leader’s job is to assign tasks most suitable for each follower. The leader wants to inspire it’s group and connect with them.


I hope you know understand what a leader is and some leadership styles. Have a great weekend and see you next week for our last ever task! 

Hello everybody! This week I've been the facilitator. I must admit that I've played this role before, but in a different way because I was like a mix of star and faciliator regarding to task 6 : complexity. This task has been one of the last of this course! so, my group and I decided to try our best and not to waste time.
The reason why I decided by myself to be facilitator is because I have been  so full of energy this week and I thought this was because the week before I haven't played any role. So, in the last 15 minutes in Monday, I asked to the members of my group what role they haven't played yet. As almost all of them have played all the roles, it was very difficult to choose people to develop each role. But, finally, we came to terms and  the sresults of the roles were the following:





The task was about leadership and we had to do like elections to the best candidates of all the groups. So, we wanted to win so hard! In the practical hour, the brainstorming started! And Juan was very confident so I started to encourage my group and suggested some ideas to the campaign like making little flags with Juan's face to be the best campaign and support to him. Also, I started to say what my group had to do. Some of them make cardboards and others brought balloons to the classroom.

The best part was the exposition, Juan represented very well the campaign! He developed an authoritarian leadership and he did it amazing. Everybody in classroom enjoyed a lot and they laughed a lot with the Jamal's look of bodyguard.

I must admit that this task has been one of our best! But there were a lot of groups that did it an amazing work too like; Sweet Chilli peppers, their candidate Alejandra spoke very properly and they borught some sweets and some paper explaining the campaign.




Finally, I have realised that being the guide of your group is so stressing because if something wasn't as good as I expected I was so angry with myself and with my group. But I have learned to lead a group better thatnks to that experience. So, thank you to my groupmates to let me the opporutnity of learning this.

Hope you enjoy my little post! Love you so much. Paula from The Prickles.