Activity 3

Darkside of textbooks

Text book is a book which pick up all the content children must learn in each course. Apparently, everything is fantastic because it helps the students´ learning and teachers´ teaching. However, this “inoffensive” tool carries out a dark side. Test books are the way more intelligent to editorials transmit us their ideology, reduce our knowledge, and steal our money. Clearly, test books are a business, but it is a business which is playing with our knowledge and future.

Test books only teach at students studying by heart. They don’t put into practice others ways to learn more effective, dynamic and useful. Students are obeyed to load so many kilos in their back. They load something which they hate, something which is so expensive for their parents, and something which is reducing their knowledge.

Who are the most harmed? Students whose knowledge and motivation to still learning are reduced as well as parents who spend so much money on it

In spite of all the disadvantages, it still using. Do you know why? Due to the many. It is the best business. The benefited are a lot of. Editorials of course; teachers, their work is so much easier. Some parents feel more securities their sons have some physic to learn. Some schools receive rewards in charge of editorials in order to students buy their books. The government let editorials do whatever they want with us. At least, somehow, everyone is faulted of editorials´ wealth.

The fable

In this activity we have made a fable which explains the main concepts of the dark side of text books. First of all we had collected the disadvantages of using textbooks and then put them in a fable. After the presentation of our star we made a quiz with "Kahoot" to check if our classmates had understood the story and the roles of each animal of the fable. 

  FALL HIVE HONEY

Once upon a time, there was a vast green valley full of animals, insects, plants, trees... In this valley all lived in harmony, but it was organized by a selfish hummingbird, that only modified it according to his interests. However, the hummingbird had a great weakness, he loved honey, so that he took always care to the queen bees, since they were the owners of the combs producing all honey.Honey was produced by worker bees that had worked all his life in the hive.

    However, many times the worker bees felt that they were exploited by the queen bee, because she always required them to bring a specific type of pollen, which was very difficult to get along with, and heavy to carry. The work of the poor bees werehoney quite boring ,as for many many years, they had been sistematically doing the same type of collecting, and also they would often forget how to proceed, knowing that all the instructions given were in the planes of the queen bee. On the other side of the valley, lived a group of witty worker ants, which in this case worked in the construction of a large antbird. Although ants were also under the mandate of the hummingbird like the bees, the hummingbird was not interested on the ants production, therefore he ignored them.In order to build its nest, ants did not needed any kind of maps provided by the hummingbird, they would use a wide variety of materials, diverse tools and resources to create the world's strongest anthill.

One day, a devastating storm hit the valley, and there were a lot of damage done. Many tree branches were destroyed, among them the ones holding the hives causing them to fall on the ground and broke into pieces. All beings of the forest were very frightened by the devastating storm. When the storm ended, the inhabitants realized that the bees community were the most affected because their hive was broken to pieces.

Both, the queen bee and hummingbird demanded to the workers bees to rebuild the honeycomb, to continue producing honey. However, the poor bees did not have the skills to rebuild it, because due to the honeycomb accident, all the plans and maps were lost and they did not know how to proceed. This response, strongly displeased and disappointed the queen bee, as well as the hummingbird. In this situation, the poor bees were very frightened, they did not know what would happen now. Fortunately, the ants’ community that were less affected by the storm because their nest was built with different resources and materials which together constituted an indestructible structure came out the blue. The ants community kindly offered their help to the bees community to rebuild the honeycomb , but using a wide variety of techniques that were new, faster, easy to access, and most important

was that they combined were more effective.

And here we have the link of the quiz"Kahoot": 

Click here

Our videos

 

The first video shows the way we have learned in school 30 years ago, and the opinion of one of the E.G.B student’s generation.     

It is of overriding importance, to compare two different generations in order to learn how humans are constantly evolving. The following interview will acquaint everybody with the innate intelligence that children nowadays have. So that, texbooks are a scarce resource for this generation.

 

Roles

Well, Raquel as facilitator followed the same pattern as in the very beginning, that is to search for relevant information, summarize it, and post it on our blog. In this case about text books, related to schools, families incomes, the extremely high  prices of them, the companies jerarquies.....
So that as facilitator organized the topics to research in the following way:

1.- Disadvantages of text books. 

Was researched and written by Maria.

2.- Advantages of using new technologies in class.

Done by Rosana

3.- The broken market.

Was researched and summarized by Feli.

4.- New editions and the used book market.

Was researched and summarized by Rocío

5.- Price disclosure.

 Was researched and written by Cristian.

6.- “The future of the books”.

The last one by Fernando.

Once all the information was well summarized each member posted his/her research in our post. Each member read each other summary in order to understand better from different perspectives what is going on nowadays. Even though we have plenty of tools, devices, technological advances, some teachers, administrators, companies, opposed to all these new changes. Some of them, because they are not willing to learn new strategies to teach and invest time on doing it, others because they are not confortable with changes, others for personal interests and above all because text books move millions and millions of Euros every year and the few companies that have the monopoly, play well their cards to make sure that nobody and nothing changes their fantastic and productive business.

After have understood what was broken market, price disclosure and used marked that we could not represent in the fable. The question is… why we have chosen a fable to explain the dark side of text books? We have chosen the fable because we think that with a story children could understand better what we want show them, indirectly. And then it was because is very original and do something different to the rest of the class. Finally to check if everybody has understood the roles of the characters in the fable, they had to take their mobile phones and enter to the page kahoot  and make a quiz.. Even though we knew that it was not an easy task, the new responsibilities were shared in this way:

Rosana wrote the fable in Spanish, Feli translated the fable into English, Fernando and Raquel were in charge of creating nice drawings to add in the fable and they created the Kahoot page. After our presentation Fernando was asked to record the fable and he did it.

Apart from that, Feli, the journalist wanted to research with real people, so what she did was to interview a man on his 40 in order to know if he is aware of the new generations of teachers and students that were not learning only through text books, and he replied nicely to all the questions.

A second interview was carried out with a 6-year-old girl to find out whether she is currently learning with textbooks or her teachers are giving her different resources and tools to learn. THE RESULTS OF THAT WEEK CAN BE SEEN IN OUR FANTASTIC POST OF BRAINSTORMING.

I have to say that that week was plenty of challenges, creating a wide range of different tools to exemplify that, we do not need just textbooks in order to acquire knowledge.

Out there, there is a fantastic innovative, diverse and creative world plenty of magnificent resources. And this was our aim, goal, to show everybody that in order to transmit knowledge we can do it through, fables, records, interviews, research and summarize with own our words, creating great drawings, quiz etc...
So let’s be proactive teachers and try to invest time researching new ways to transmit knowledge to our students, and above all, we should not let the big boards of marketing directors of these monopoly industries buy our integrity. They must learn to share with people that are willing to search for the best and easy way to trespass diverse acquaintance to our kids.

Roles distribution              

María Moreno: Curator- farmer

Fernando Tortosa: Star

Raquel Pelayo: Facilitator
Feliciana Travieso: Journalist

Cristian Paco: Translator

Rosana Yepes: Analyst

Rocío Ramón : Journalist

What have we learned?

That Monday, when we saw the activity: “The Dark Side of the textbook”, we thought: really? Do Textbooks have dark side? We have been learning with text book during all our scholar process, so are we in the dark side?. But when our teacher, Linda, explained us her position about this and why she thought that text books have a dark side, we started to think and finally we realise that she was right. Textbooks are not the best solution for learning, we have learned with them, but in this subject we are learning many things without opening a book. There are many resources, many different ways for investigation, reading and working without the need of being turning the pages of a book and studying what they say. Our mind changed in that moment as if we started to see with other eyes.

What did we learn? As we know, each work has his objective. And we have to put it in practise.

During the process of elaboration, we learnt many things. Firstly, we discovered the existence of the dark side of a textbook. And many questions started to appeared in our mind.

The first question was, If text books have a dark side, why we continue using them? The answer is very simple.  Because they are the best business for editorials; editorials manipulate us as they want. They show us their ideology, steal our money, reduce our creativity, our critique sense, our capacity to decide, and furthermore, our opportunity to learn. We are paying something that makes us less intelligent, less skilled and more useless.

But, why can´t we stop it? When something is being maintained by someone, it is very difficult to stop. Although it is very sad, the Government, editorials, schools, headmasters, teachers and parents are promoting textbook. But, why? The main cause is the money. All of them are richer with the use of textbooks, the government and editorials earn huge amount of money; teachers don’t have to worry about anything, because in textbook everything is redacted and explained, they only have to reproduce what textbook tells; parents feel better when their children follow the book and they do their homework and so on. Certainly, textbook is a comfort for everyone, and a real business for editorials. Unconsciously or not, we are paying our stupidity. How much political interests there are in text books...?

To deep more, why do teachers use them? Because the school require them? Oh my God, what lack of personality! All teachers have been studying during years to carry out their job as well as possible, and now, am I going to reduce everything I have studied in a textbook? NO. My time and my professionalism are worthier than this. When  I finish my degree, I hope to be capable of developing my classes in the best way, I won’t need some textbook that say to me how I have to carry out my class.

 Innovate, investigate, prepare your own work without doing what everybody does, so that your life will be interesting and full of emotions. We have to do things in the best way, so start thinking and let´s put it in practice!!

Self-evaluation

All of us have worked a lot on this portfolio, so giving a different mark to each one is a Little bit amazing, because we have made the same effort building this great summary about what we have learnt about The Dark Side of textbooks. So as our result is what we wanted to do before starting and we have being working as a group, we all have an eight.