The star

Hi guys, how are you? Do you enjoy doing the weekly work? I'm Pablo and I was the star last week. Here I put our story:

"THE FOX WHO DID NOT LET HIMSELF TO BE ADVISED"

Once upon a time, there was a time not long ago in a forest known by locals as "The Pond", a huge place full of children who want to learn and have fun, there were huge playgrounds, colorful lessons and a horrible sound announced the return home. There were attended respectable gentlemen, some softer, others stubborn ... but after all, all summarized in one simple word: teachers. The place we are talking about is called school.

One spring day, with the sun rising over the next hill and the birds singing my favourite song, I am Ardillen, the squirrel. I was waiting for my friends at the river as usual to go to school. Ratoncín, the mouse, and Serpentine, the snake, didn’t take long to arrive, with whom I share desk in class.

- ‘Hey, guys’, I said.

- ‘Hello, Ardillen! How do you do the homework that Mr. Fox sent in class yesterday? We do not understand anything, even if we read the topic of "Humans" we still can’t understand how they reproduce.’

- ‘Well, I think if I've understood more or less ... yesterday I was surfing the net and found some very good pictures explaining it to perfection’, I replied.

- ‘Surfing the net? But Mr. Fox says that's crazy!

Meanwhile, in the distance we could hear the laughter of our friends: Skunk (or better known as "The Mofetilla"), Patita, the duck, and Buhez, the owl, with which I loved spending the afternoon in the river.

- ‘Good morning!’ said still laughing.

- ‘What's the matter you come so gay?’, asked Serpentine.

- ‘We were laughing at what the Mr. Rabbit has tweeted few minutes ago. We are preparing a very cool activity for today’, Patita said laughing.

- ‘Mr Fox says that “the network” is nonsense, that those who use it are crazy’, Ratoncín said sarcastically.

- ‘Well, let’s go, we’re going to be late!’, said “ The Mofetilla”

We walked for a while to get to school, and there were like every day the Lord Fox, an intelligent, cultured, and serious being. His method of Teaching is the lecture. He loves teaching using the textbook, that is the main protagonist, and his help inside the class. He is reluctant to use the new technologies, he dismiss them as “ meaningless devices that do not add anything”, and Mr. Rabbit, who is also intelligent and educated but, unlike Mr. Fox, he is very talkative and dynamic, he is always preparing new and creative activities that make students feel motivated. As always, they were arguing at the corner of the hall that connects their classes.

- ‘I’ve heard that you want to invest money in buying more computers, and the library is lack of books’, said Mr.Fox.

- ‘You have heard right, Lord. What's wrong with that? Students with computers have access to a lot of e-books, online tutorials, video lectures

... apart from many other resources.’

- ‘Nowadays’ books, I'm sorry to tell you, aren’t like before, now they are very current. Furthermore, a machine does not provide intelligence. Look at me, I was brought up with books and paper.’

- ‘You were brought up by his / her teacher, the book was only an aid, like the Internet today.

Professor, the educators are actually the teachers. We have to get that our students can build their own learning, can research, they don’t have to resigned to memorize what is written in the text, they must understand that information and extrapolate it to other fields. Don’t you think that is shocking that in the technological society we live in has only a single source of information?’, said Mr. Rabbit.

- ‘But do you really think I have so much free time? Do you really think that I can focus on learning how the world of the Internet works, or preparing daily activities? I prefer children to learn the contents as it has always been done. Now if you excuse me, I have work to do. Good morning’.

The bell rang and we went to class. Buhez, "The Mofetilla" and Patita went to class with Professor Rabbit, while Ratoncín, Serpentine and I went with Mr. Fox. We agreed to meet during the break to play "burrows."

- ‘Hey, guys! Did you hear about the teachers’ argument this morning? They are always the same ... How has the morning gone?’ - Buhez said.

- ‘Yes, we heard about it’, said Serpentine. ‘Today we have not done much, as usual, Teacher Fox has dictated his class and we have copied, but we did not know what we were copying, we did not understand anything. And you, what have you done? What was it like?’

- ‘Well, today it was a great class. We made a timeline with Dipity tool to explain human evolution, looking for pictures and information. Did you know that the ancestors of humans are the monkeys? Maybe, one day teacher RaiMona, the monkey, will become one of them... ‘Says "The Mofetilla" laughing. ‘Then, we put it on the web and shared with students from other schools. They told us that they loved it!’

- ‘You really did everything you say? And why we do not do anything like that in our classes?’

The bell rang announcing the return to classes after half an hour of break and as always, Buhez, "The Mofetilla" and Patita went to class with Professor Rabbit, while Ratoncín, Serpentine and me went with Mr. Fox. When we returned into class and sat at our desks, before Mr. Fox’s explanation, Ratoncín legged up boldly and said:

- ‘Professor Fox… Why are you so afraid of change?’

Moral: The way requires effort and dedication. We must react and we must looking for new methods, we don’t have to let laziness get the better of you. We shouldn’t be fear of the new and neither to the different things.

After doing this work we can do a reflection, in our opinion and after reading the documents we noticed that in some countries there are some people who say that they are good teachers and it isn’t true at all. Those people thinks that being a good teacher means giving all the information which appear in textbooks to the students, but our opinion as a group and agree with most of the authors a good teacher is another thing. A good teacher is someone who achieves to teach in another way, without a special attention to the units of the books, someone who gives freedom to his students for building his own knowledge. That is the consequence of the bad use of the textbooks; textbooks are plenty of contents but sometimes this contents aren't useful and teachers don't stop and think about it, and the reason of this is that it's easier doing a class with the book as a reference than doing a class including ICT, and also it carry more work.