THE DARK SIDE OF TEXTBOOKS: FACILITATOR

Hi! I am Paloma and this week I have been the facilitator. My role consisted in organizing the group in order to do the activity.

This week we decided to design a comic which reflected the dark side of textbooks and considered the advantages of new technologies as a scholar method for learning.

Once we had the idea of doing it, we had to meet one afternoon at the university to put in practice the comic. We had to read several of documents in order to get informed about the disadvantages of textbooks, so we divided the information  and every person was in charge of reading a part.

At first, it was difficult and we were a little bit exasperated because we did not find a good history to tell in the comic. Furthermore, we were a long time looking for the appropiate program on Internet for doing the comic. Finally, we found a web page named Pixton, that we considered the best for doing our work.

We passed the afternoon thinking on the story and we had a lot of different ideas, but none of these were convencing enough! We wanted to show in an easy and funny way that textbooks have a bad impact on schools. They present various problems for students and their families, such as the amount of money that they cost, the excessive weight, or the cultural influences that they have.

Finally, we decided that our story was going to be about a child dreaming that at school he learned with technologies, and he was happy because of all the advantages that technologies have and textbooks don't.

I have to say that this week, our star Ana, has a big merit because she has been who has make all the cartoons with the web page. She has been very important because she has a really good ability with tecnhologies. The work have not been easy, and specially for her, but we think that at the end, we achieved a good result :)

I think that as facilitator, I have not had any problem because every member of the Meerkats have contributed providing ideas and doing the work.