The last thursday 19-february-2015, the gruops of : Escuela de Bocación, and Futupasta expose their presentations.
Now, i am going to speak about the next concepts:
 -AUTONOMy : as a teacher, we have to take an autonomy to the alumns, because they have to learn to resolv their problems by themselves. That is not that the children have to work alone, that is that we have to guide them, help them.
 -GROUP INVESTIGATION :it is an activitie that we can do when we are working with cooperative learning. it is that each group choose a topic with the teacher, and stablishes the contents that they have to learn, and the objetives that they have to catch up. Then, the alumns work in gruops, and finally, they share their news knowledges with their partners.
 -TAI : TEAM ASSITED INDIVIDUALIZATION: It is an other activitie that we can use if we work with cooperative learninng.it consist on work in a individual form with each children, with personal activities. It is so important that the alumns do not see this activitie like a competition, and respect each one in there.
 -TGT : TEAM- GAMES TOURNAMENT: it is an activitie in relation with the cooperative learning, in which the class is divided by gruops with a different levels of knowledge. Each gruop have to study about one subtopic, and then , the game will started. The teacher will do questions, and who have most correctly answers, will win.
 -MULTIPLES INTELIGENCES : each alumn have a form of learn, and the teacher have to respect and acept all. there are different types: linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic. musical, interpersonal, naturalist.

Rocío González - 19.02.15

Today was the last day of the presentation of the group and we talked about different main ideas like the autonomy, scaffolding, multiple intelligences and two more techniques: TAI and TGT

19/02/15 PRESENTATIONS

Last week, on Thursday, we had the last class dedicated to the presentations of the two groups that can´t do it before.

The first group of the day was the mine, “Escuela de bocación”. I am very happy with our job and I want to thank my classmates because I feel very comfortable inside that group and all of us have contributed for having a good coordination and organization. And when the pieces fit in, the results are better.

The second group and the last of the day was “Futupasta”. I like their job a lot, they use a great format of the presentation, where we can see all the points connected and finally a big diagram that explains the cooperative learning  easily to understand and very complete. I think that also the video and the explanation were very good.

Like other days, we also focus on the new and most interesting things, not explained before.

The first aspect that I want to remark it is the scaffolding that teachers offer to the students, accompanying and guiding them in their process of learning. It is beneficial for the students because it helps in the acquiring of knowledge and develops their autonomy, very useful for their future but not only in the academic area, also in the life. It is very important to help others and feel satisfied doing this.

Related to the develop of kids and the role of teachers, we can found the broad topic of the multiply intelligence. Inside the classroom, we have a lot of children with different objectives, expectations, skills, and situations. For including all these type of students, we have to keep in mind different possibilities and minds and try to adapt the contents and know about the different intelligences that are: 

•    Linguistic.
•    Musical.
•     Logical- Mathematical.
•    Visual-Spatial.
•    Bodily-Kinesthetic.
•    Interpersonal.
•    Intrapersonal.
•    Naturalist.

During the class we went deeper into some methods for working in cooperative groups:

1. TAI: The children respect the others, help and work combing the cooperative and individual learning, it means that there is not competition and the tasks are adapted to each kid.

2. GROUP INVESTIGATION: each group has a subtopic for investigate and from there the group creates a team plan with objectives, personal commitments and tasks that have to fulfill. Later, the group explains their project and is questioned by the teacher and the other students. Thereby, the work of the group is evaluated not only by teachers, also by the other classmates.

3. TEAM GAMES TOURNAMENT: The class are divided and the teacher gives some questions to the groups that have to answer them and later if the answers are correct the team wins but nor only one team, there are some prizes for motivate children.

Finally, I want to add to this post interesting information that appears in the Futupasta´s project that is resources for meeting or gather all the information. Today we can use a lot of ways for it but the best for doing projects are Google docs, Prezi and skype. Also I find important the evaluation that made the kids to the task proposed by teachers for being a positive reinforcement that improve the teaching.

Two last groups

The last February 19, exposed two groups more: “Futupasta” and my group “Escuela de Bocación”.

As the others team have talked a lot about the topics of the beginning (introduction, student’s distribution, roles, two techniques…) those two last groups explained another things, so we learnt some interesting things about the Cooperative Learning, for example:

•     TAI.

In this technique there is no competition. It combines cooperative learning and individually-paced instruction.

Every member of the groups receives an exercise that in specific for him/her because is personalized on its characteristics and needs.

Moreover, is necessary to respect the pupil progress and help each other.

•     Group investigation.

This technique is similar to the jigsaw.

1.       First, the students choose the topic that they want and then the groups where they want to be (this could affect to the heterogeneity of the class, but the teacher has to respect the decision)

2.       The team and the teacher plan the objectives and the steps that they are going to use to get the objectives.

3.       Develop of the plan.

4.       The students analyze and make a resume of the information and then, they explain to rest of the class.

5.       After they have exposed, teacher and the rest of the class can make questions to the group.

6.       Finally, the teacher and the students make together an evaluation.

This allows that each member can participate and develop one for what is best prepared.

·         Teams-tournament.

At the beginning we thought that this was something like a competition because in the notes was written that, but the teacher explained us that it is totally different. 

o   It is not personal or individually. 

o   It is not about the team that more points has, it is about some awards (like the Oscars) for example, the team that has the best answer; the one who has answered faster; the one who says more answers and so on. 

I like that the teacher explained this well because in the other way it seems like a competition and it hasn’t sense, because in the Cooperative Learning it is about to help each other, not make a competition as in the traditional learning. 

Other interesting things that I learned were:

•       Multiples intelligences.

This is very important because as future teacher we have to understand that all our students are smart, but not everyone has the same type of intelligence. For example, we could have a student that is good at math but so bad at science or someone who is good at music, but is not able to have an intrapersonal relationship.

There are many types of intelligences:

o   Verbal-linguistic Intelligence.

o   Logical-mathematical Intelligence.

o   Musical Intelligence.

o   Bodily Intelligence.

o   Intrapersonal Intelligence.

o   Interpersonal Intelligence.

o   Naturalist Intelligence.

o   Spacial Intelligence.

There are many tests that the teacher can use to know which of these intelligences has each student.

The most important is to understand that every student has a different type of intelligence and in Cooperative groups they can help and they can learn of each others.  

•   The teacher.

Is very important that we know that the teacher is going to be the scaffolding to their students.  He will be always supporting them, teaching them some strategies to work in group, promoting their own cognitive and their learning, and finally the scaffolding will disappear because the pupils will know how to act without their teacher’s help.

•      The student.

The student has some difficulties until get to the objective.

1.       He is conscious but clumsy use of the skill.

2.       He could feels falseness when he is using the skill.

3.       Proper use of the skill but still mechanical.

4.       Finally, he would be able to make an automatic and proper use of the skill.

We can compare this with when we started to read or write. At the beginning is too difficult but through the time goes by, we improve the skills until we learn how to be autonomous. 

Presentation of Tuesday, 17- february, 2015

In the class of the Tuesday, the groups of The difference, La banda del patio and Rigatoni´s angels presents their works.

The teacher tell us that we have to write about: inclusive philosophy, rules, sociogram, jigsaw, webquest.

 -INCLUSIVE PHILOSOPHY : it consist about that in the classrooms, the children have to be respect with all of them, independetly of the phisical / ideological features..etc. All the pupils have the same to do, and deserve the same respect. The teacher have to awareness and instill this values to the pupil.

 -RULES : it is so important to pin up some rules with the pupils ( not impose it ) that everyone will respect to promote a good an comfortable work in the class

 -SOCIOGRAM : i am going to explain  what is sociogram in the way of make base team. With this technic, we are going to pay attention in the form of make a relation with other people that have the children; so, we can not put in the same gruop all the persons who have not problem to be related, we must make haterogeneous gruops mixing persons with differents personalities, and all the people of the gruops help to everyone.

 -JIGSAW : it is an activitie that we can do when we are working with the cooperative learning; in this activitie one person of one base team make a new gruop with people from the other gruops ( never two persons from the same gruops ), and they will develop and learn about one topic  that later will explain to their partners of the base teams, and the other people from the base team do te same with others topics. Then, they will meet in the base team and they share the information, making a new knowledges.
Because of that, it is like a puzzle, because all the members are important for the final product.

 -WEBQUEST it is a web that the teacher will makes; in this page, will be the information that the pupils need to develop their competences.

PRESENTATIONS OF LAST TUESDAY

Last Tuesday, in our class, we continue with the presentations of the cooperative learning projects made by the rest of the groups. The groups that explained their jobs were, “The differents”, “La banda del patio” and “Rigatoni´s angels”.

In my opinion all the expositions are very good and have a lot of job in their backs, I can notice that the different members of the groups know about the topic and have interiorize the contents for our future practices in the classroom. I like more the project of the last group that I mentioned because I found a lot of similarities with our project and new interesting ideas.

I want to remark in special the things that are innovations at this day because all the groups have more or less the same points and it is important to go deeper in the new things not mentioned before.

The first new idea that appears was the sociometric test that is a technique used by teachers for organizing the students in groups of cooperative learning. With my own words, I can say that it consists in doing a research to the children with the propose of having an idea of  who want to work with who and motivate people who can feel comfortable and work better surrounded by the chosen students. Also we included in our project the techniques of columns that it is based in choose people that are organize in columns with some criteria’s for doing groups heterogeneous.

The next aspects of this way of learning are the philosophy and the rules. The philosophy always have to be inclusive, for favor the diversity and the develop of all the students. We have to take in account the multiply intelligence of the kids and their own characteristics. For this reason it is important to adapt the curriculum to the children and also some rules that help the organization of the class, make a good environment and favor the respect but also these rules have to be adapted to the kids.

In the last post that I upload, I talk about the web quest as a resource that improve the work and make easier and clearer the tasks. I can see that in many groups, my partners have included it. It is a tool when the teacher can upload the task with many steeps for the students and with multimedia contents.

The last idea was the explanation of the jigsaw again and using an special video that I like a lot and make me complete the explanation of the last day, when teacher make groups, divide the job and last, the students have to join it for seeing the importance of all the members. 

Rocío González - 17.02.15

The main ideas that the groups: The Differents, La Banda del Patio and Rigatone's Angels spoke about are the rules, the philosophy of the class, the webquest and the technique Jigsaw.

The rules:

For work well in Cooperative Learning is necessary that each group and all class as well have some rules that they have to negotiate among all of them and with the teacher and it is necessary to work in a proper way and have better relationship. Some examples of rules are: share ideas and all ideas are important, respect the other people, don’t speak very laud, etc.

The philosophy of the class:

All student have to have their space in class and everybody is the same important than each other. The activities and everything have to put the focus in all people, include everybody thinking in the different cultures, multiple intelligence...

Webquest:

Is a didactic resource in the process of learning that is guide by the teacher using the Internet to work with the pupils and you put information and activities to develop more knowledge and abilities. And it is also developing the autonomy and the cooperative work.

Jigsaw:

Is a technique to work in the Cooperative learning, the most important ideas are that the students need each other because each member specializes in one piece of the whole topic and later they complete the information when they put in common what they were learning on each other.

Simona Kajtazova - 20/2/15

Reflection about the presentation of the group "Futupasta":

This group decided to do their presentation in the format of PREZI, which I really liked, because it was visually attractive and furthermore, they were the first group that chose this programme. They explained the technique TGT (teams-games-tournaments), which I will analyse it in more detail later in this blog. What I found very interesting was, their methods of meeting and I will definitely try that out with my group also. Namely, they made their reunions or exchanged materials through Skype, Prezi and Google Docs. Additionally, they created their own evaluation sheets, which I must say that I find a very good idea.

Moreover, I will now talk about important facts that are essential when a teacher wants to carry out Cooperative Learning in his class:

Teacher Planning

It is very important that the teacher is concrete when it comes to distributing the tasks for an activity. He has to make his ideas very clear, so the students understand very well what he wants them to do. Furthermore, he has to define each skill and explain, which roles exist and what is the job of each one. He has to start step by step and take care to not overload the students. Additionally, it is essential to often practise the skills, so the students acquire more and better cooperative learning skills. The teacher also has to be scaffolding for his class. That means, to support them during the learning process, while the students, little by little, develop autonomous learning strategies, thus promoting their own cognitive, affective and learning skills and knowledge. This brings me to my next point, the autonomy of the students.

Autonomy

What if the teacher needs to go out for a few minutes and leave the classroom? Can I leave my students alone? Having students that learn on their own and can work autonomously are not a matter of course. But it is important, especially during cooperative learning activities, that the children can learn themselves. It is not easy to learn this skill automatically; actually, a student passes through a few steps to reach autonomous learning:

1.  Conscious although clumsy use of the skill.

2.  Feeling of falseness when putting the skill in practice.

3.  Proper use of the skill, but still mechanical.

4.  Automatic and proper use of the skill.

Group Investigation

This technique is similar to jigsaw but actually more complicated. First of all, the students choose a subtopic, according to their interests. Later, each team is responsible for a different subtopic. Like we did it, the team members have to choose, together with the teacher, general objectives and plan the procedures they will use to fulfil them. Also, they distribute the tasks they need to do. Further, the teams have to develop a plan for their group, which will be their work plan throughout the project. In the end, the groups have to analyse and synthesise their final output, summarize the information and present it to the rest of the class. During or after the presentation the group has to be prepared to answer to any questions, given by the professor or the other groups. Finally, when it comes to the evaluation, it hast o be done by the teacher and the students.

Multiple Intelligences

One reason why it is an advantage to create heterogeneous groups, are the multiple intelligences. This theory was identified by Howard Gardner, he claims that Students possess different kinds of minds and therefore learn, remember perform and understand in different ways. Where individuals differ, is the strength of these intelligences. There are eight different intelligences:

·      linguistic: often think in words, like to read, use words effectively

·      logical-mathematical: think conceptually, like to experiment, like logic games

·      visual-spacial: think in terms of physical space, like to draw

·      bodily-kinesthetic: like movement, like role playing, need physical activity

·      musical: love music, may study better with music in the backround

·      interpersonal: are understanding, interacting with others, like group activities

·      intrapersonal: tend to shy away from others, are the exact opposite of the interpersonal type

·      naturalist: like to explore things, connected to living things, care for nature and human beings

TGT (Teams-Games-Tournaments)

Today we learned important facts about the technique TGT. First of all, it is important that there is NO competition during the game. That means that it is not important, to answer fast or answer as many questions as possible. Furthermore, it is essential that there are many prices, although, not for those who answered the most questions correctly, but these prices are about behaviour. For example: team that works together well, team with creative answers, etc.

ROL KIDS

The first group that broke the ice was the Rol Kids, formed by María Lopez, Silvia García, Borja Hevia, Lidia Torres and Cristina Martinez.

They made a power point presentation about the cooperative learning. I find this project very interesting and I can see a different perspective of schematize and organize the topic.

I think that some things are missing but little things like the personal objectives of each member of the group. During the presentation, the teacher has reviewed the contains and removing od adding the things, for example the number of the members of the base groups of cooperative learning are five and that is a wrong information in the power.

In one hand, the explanation of each point was very complete and good. Specially, Silvia has explained the method of jigsaw in a fantastic way that makes me understand it better.

In the other hand, I did not know before this presentation that in cooperative groups, students can use an important tool like the web quest. I did not think in this resource when we was planning our project an now, I have learn how to work with this.

My conclusion of the Rol Kids project is that they have done a good job, very complete and with many multimedia contains like images and videos that I like a lot and makes me internalize the contains better.  

Presentations 17/02/2015

I'm going to talk about the different main ideas that appeared during the presentations of the Cooperative learning last Tuesday. The main topics are: Inclusive philosophy, the different types to create the teams, the rules of the class, the jigsaw and the Web Quest.

INCLUSIVE PHILOSOPHY

To beginning with, when we see a class we have to take into account that there are a lot of different types of students that are completely unlike the others. The teacher has to know how to confront this situation, teaching the students different values that show them that despite of the fact that there are physically different, they deserve the same rights.

CREATING THE TEAMS

When we create the teams, we have to keep in mind the various criteria that exist. One group talk about the sociogram, which consists of knowing the relationships between the students by making them questions and pay attention to their behaviour. Other way of creating the groups is by making three columns: in the first one you put the smart ones, in the second one the people who need help, and the others in the third; next, you pick up one from the two first columns and two from the third one. This creates mix groups of different kinds of people.

THE RULES

They are essential and students should respect them. The main idea that the teacher creates and decides this rules with the students, they may not see this like an obligation, but something that will help to group in a better way that improve what they are doing.

JIGSAW

This is a technique, usually use in Cooperative learning. Each student has a topic in which he has to be the expert and know everything about. Once they have investigated and have the information, they create group of experts that put in common all the information and compare it. Then, when they are real experts about the topic, they return to their base teams to explain what they have learnt to the others, to share the knowledge.

WEB QUEST

First I didn’t understand at all the meaning of this type of web, but now I think I finally get it. Is an instrument that teachers can use to share with the students the activities they should do at home. In this web page the teacher upload all the information about the topics and then the activities, so that the students don’t have any doubt when they see it and start to do the exercises.

Yesterday, three groups of class did their respective presentation. Those groups were: "The Differents", "La Banda del Patio" and the "Rigatone's Angels". All them talked about some interesting topics:

• How to form a base team. One group explained it and they said there there are three ways: 

1. The sociometric test. This consists in that student make a test were they put their hobbies, skills, preferences. All this is for the teacher could see the students who are more similiar and think in how to agrupate them. 
2. Let the students choose the group where they want to be. Althought this way is effective in sporadic group because it promotes the homogeneity. 
3. Form three columns. This promotes the heterogeneity because pupils have to make three columns, in one of them will be the students who have a higher permormance, in the second one, the students who have a lower performance and in the last one, the students who has a average performance. So, teacher has to choose one pupil of the first column, one of the second and two of the third column.

• Philosophy of the inclusive classroom. Is necessary to have clear the real meaning of what want to achieve the Cooperative Learning. We can resume in those points:

1. All the students have their place in the class.
2. Nobody can judge a pupil by his/her way of learning. 
3. All the students learn from others. 

• Rules in the cooperative groups. for group work appropriately, they have to fulfill some rules, those are:

1. Share everything.
2. Raise the hand before talking.
3. Whisper when they are working (don't confuse it with be in silence, it is not the same)
4. Ask for help when needed. 
5. Participate in all the task and activities of the team. 
6. Accept the decision of the majourity.

• JIGSAW. This is a technique of the Cooperative learning and has some steps:

1. First, the class is divided into heterogenous groups formed by four or five people.
2. Everymember of the group is given a specific topic.
3. Each person go with other people of different team that have the same topic as him.
4. The new group have to prepare their topic very well, as they were experts.
5. Finally, each student come back to their first group and explain him/her topic to his/her classmates and the other members of the group do the same. So, with this everyone learn of everyone.

• Webquest. Some teams have explained about webquest. I think this is a very necessary resorce because we mix the subject with the new technologies and is more interesting for pupils. Students can work in a different way, they have to investigate and the teacher can guide them by this plataform. 

This resource has some parts: introduction, task, process, resources and evaluation. Moreover it promotes the cooperative work , autonomy of students and includes an authentic assessment.

Simona Kajtazova - 17/2/15

In this post I will be reflecting about the three presentations we had that day. Furthermore I will explain four different things that are important, when putting in practice Cooperative Learning.

Reflection about the presentation of the group "The Differents":

The group started with presenting their PLAN OF THE TEAM. Sergio's personal objective called my attention because he wanted to "Learn for the others", which is hard to reach since every member has the job to learn individually and share ideas with the group. They made a very good introduction explaining that Cooperative Learning is based on heterogeneous teamwork and is NOT supposed to replace individual work. I also learned from their presentation that one big advantage of CE is: Different academic levels give different answers to different levels in the same team (base groups). The teacher can do this in from of workshops, providing material for different levels – this could at last for a week. Our professor explained us an interesting thing about multilevel classes in which it is essential to look how to give answers to everybody. Furthermore I learned that in a class of CE it is absolutely not necessary that the children work in silence, there has to be a "natural" loudness, which is obvious because: How are the children supposed to work in group, without being able to talk to each other?

Another important thing to know is, concerning the roles of the group that the responsibility of the secretary is to take care that all members carry out their tasks and that all things are done.

Reflection about the presentation of the group "La Banda de Equipo":

Almost all members of this group had as their personal commitment to speak more English or more Spanish, which seems important to me because otherwise it would be hard for the group members to communicate. What I learned is that the purpose of the PLAN OF THE GROUP is that it has to be in written form, so everybody sees it. It is also a way of having the objectives and later the criteria for the evaluation. Furthermore, I have learned an important fact about the evaluation, or putting it more precisely, the co-evaluation: One of the difficulties of CE is the trickiness of how to evaluate the students. What if somebody has done more/less work? To avoid this problem, it is important that a group makes its CO-EVALUATION that will show the effort of every member in the group.

Reflection about the presentation of the group "Regatonis Angels":

The presentation was very well prepared and included very good ideas. Talking about the guide of CE, there was one sentence that called my attention, which was: "Cooperative learning creates successful people". Also, our professor liked that idea and told us, that nowadays many job offers require a master degree and in their requirements describe exactly the cooperative skills.

In addition, I will explain four different things that are essential for CE:

Jigsaw

During all the presentations we got to know very well what this technique is about. First of all, the teacher has to form base groups that have to be heterogeneous. To find out the different levels of the students, the teacher can use the sociometric test, I will later explain what that is. After that, the teacher "splits" the content in various parts (there can be a maximum of 5 people in a base group!). Every member of a base group gets one of the parts, without seeing what the other members have, he prepares it and informs himself about it. As soon as all the students have prepared their parts, expert groups are formed. In these groups, the students exchange their ideas and become an expert in the topic they had to study. Finally, the experts go back to their base groups to teach the other members all the things they learned. The purpose of this is that in the end everyone knows about everything. It is also important that every group has a coordinator; he takes care if everybody carries out the task given.

Sociometric Test

The sociometric test is a technique to obtain an objective picture of the relationships, which exist in a group of people. It is normal that some will like one another, there will be some who will be liked by many, another ones that may be disliked. This test should be done at the beginning of a course and is very easy to do. The teacher has to ask the students with which companion they would like to work with, so he later can see, if there is exclusion in his class. Furthermore this test should help the teacher become familiar with the levels of his students. It is necessary to find out who are the ones who like to help and who are the ones that need help. When it comes to form the group, there has to be ONE student with a high level, TWO students with a medium level and ONE student with a low level.

Philosophy of the Class

The teacher has to make his students realize the importance of CE and also put different norms that the children have to respect. Here some examples: give thoughtful feedback; respect others; on task, all the time; use soft voices; participate actively; stay with your group; etc.

Webquest

WebQuest are activities for the students to motivate their learning and higher thinking to solve a problem. They can use Internet resources for their work. Teachers can create their own classes, as well as share them with others. Students are provided with online resources and are asked to use the information given to solve a problem. One can design different units, either for only one lesson or for a longer period. This program also supports the students thinking at the level of analysis, synthesis and evaluation.