Week 5: Analysts

Hi! We are Patricia and Lucía, and this week we've been the analysts of our group! 🔎👩👩

One of the most important things about this role (and also about our practice as future teachers) is reflecting💭 about our work during the whole week. This is absolutely necessary in order to be aware of our strengths and weaknesses and know:
- what changes should be made to improve the negative aspects ❌
- and what positive aspects we should keep practicing ✔️

After having made clear the importance of this reflection, let's begin with it.

This week, we have had two main activities: robots🤖 and augmented reality about the water cycle💧.

On the 5th of March, an unforeseen circumstance we weren't expecting arised: the kids were with delay, but we had to finish at the same time. That meant we had less time (around 45 minutes) for making the same activity we had planned for an hour. So we could say that was the worst part of the activity (even though it also served as a challenge we passed quite well). The best part of the activity was seeing the children try to do the Harry Potty's circuit the best. They were competitive but in a good way. Something that shocked us was that one of students knew A LOT🤓 about robots, it was one of his hobbies.

On the 10th of March (augmented reality) we found a big setback. Because of the fear and precaution that the coronavirus has caused, only a few children came to the workshop "Un día en el cole de mi maestro". Just 14 kids for all the groups. As a result, we ended up working with 2 students, instead of the 5 we were expecting. On the one hand, this could be seen as a positive thing: it is easier and takes less time to work with less people. On the other hand, we felt a bit saddened, as we were willing to show our activity to as many kids as possible.

Despite this unexpected event, the activity went pretty well. We would say that the greatest part about this activity was figuring out an original way of revising the water cycle. We came out with the idea of a making a mock-up, showing the different phases of the cycle using ACTUAL water with blue coloring, baking soda and vinegar, to make it go out of the mountain. The children were astonished and loved this little experiment.

 

The best👌 moment for our group this week was the Augmented reality🌊🚰 activity, which took place this Tuesday, we all worked coordinated and organized with the kids, may be it was easier than last week due to the fact that there were only two kids with us, this made us work more calmly☮ and in a more concentrated👀 way. Also, we enjoyed the activity quite a lot, the students worked pretty well, and all of this led us to success on the elaboration of the task.


The worst part of the week was the fact that the activities prepared for Thursday the 5th was suposed to last an hour, but the children came late⏳ so we had less time💣, and we couldn't enjoy the activity with the robot as we would like, the children wanted to continue playing with Codey rocky after the activity but we hadn't enough time. However, the task developed perfectly💪 even with less time of the expected.

During this week we learned that we need to be flexible in case some unexpected💥 circumstances happen. We have to be prepared for everything, and try to obtain our intended learning outcomes from students even if the circumstances are not the best. In short: make the best out of bad situations.

As a group, one of the things we should conserve is our positive🕂 attitude both towards children and our peers, since it makes our work more efficient. One aspect we should improve is probably learning how to be more indepent, a lot of the times we rely a lot on a couple of people from the group, that tend to take the lead.


We can easily relate the activities of this week (Robots and Augmented reality) with the contents of our first Speed learning, in which we studied the terms of TPACK🤖 and ACAD📓. The TPACK is clearly connected to both activities as it is a technology integration framework which stands for Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge, the kind of knowledge that is developed with this kind of activities.


This week’s tasks can also be related to the ACAD📚 approach (Activity-centred analysis and design), since for the preparation of them, we have taken into account its three main components: tasks (epistemic design, the activities themselves), structures of place (set design, the preparation of the mock-up for the augmented reality and the elaboration of the circuit for the robots) and organizational forms (social design, the way in which students worked, in this case they worked individually because they were only two).

That's all for this week, we hope you have enjoyed our work, let's continue with the same enthusiasm as always! 💕💕

Lucía and Patricia.