Being facilitator is not... that bad

Hello everyone! I'm Ángela and I had the role of being the facilitator this past week.

Firstly, I have to say that I was very interested in getting to know how this role was going to be and once I know what it is, I think is not that bad, although there is a lot of things to be aware of and sometimes it is a bit frustrating, because I had to take control of every single detail, as well as trying to solve every problem if there was any. I have to say that this role is not an easy one, but I think that if everyone does her work well, there is nothing to worry about and I have to say that being the facilitator does not mean just telling everyone what to do without including him or herself, the facilitator has the 'control' but it means more work to do.

We, as a group, have very busy lives and we usually find it difficult to meet all together on the same day and that is the reason why we weren't able to meet in a single day the whole group, in fact some of us started doing the work on monday and on wednesday the rest of the group continued with it. Maybe our journalist of this week will explain that with more accuracy.

Our teacher told us to to do and activity whose title was 'The dark side of textbooks' and in there, we had to talk about all the disadvantages of textbooks. She gave us three options to develop this activity, we were able to choose between making an infographic, a comic or a Twitter timeline. At first, we were talking about doing a comic, because it is more creative and funnier, but later we thought that by doing an infographic we would have the option of presenting into it more relevant information, rather than by doing a comic, so finally we took the decision of doing an infographic.

As I said before, we were not able to meet all of us at the same time, so three of us were working on the activity on monday afternoon and then the rest on wednesday. On monday we read some important information and we started writing down all the disdvantages of textbooks, we also created an account on a program for starting our infographic, but it was a bit difficult for us to understand how it worked and we decided to change the programm into an easier one, called 'Piktochart'. At that day we weren't able to work on the design of the infographic because we were just exploring the progarmm in order to learn a bit how it worked. One of our mates, had the brilliant idea of including a very famous character on our work, as you can see in the star and in the journalist post. On wednesday, the rest of the group was working on the infographic and they did great because they design the whole infographic and they started doing it as well as they looked for some more information on the internet, because we wanted to compare on our work two different countries relating it with the educational level and those two countries were Finland and Spain.

Due to the fact that we did not have enough time to finish the whole infographic in two days, two of the members of the group had to met on Friday and the rest of the group was not able to be there because of many reasons, one of them could be that we are from different places and it is difficult to meet all at the same time, as I said before. However, I think that we find solutions for everything and at the end we all get time for every week's activity.

On Saturday, one of the members of the group sent me some new information the she had found because we came to the conclusion that our infographic had a lack of information and that we had to complete it with better information. So, she sent me the information and I was in charge, as a facilitator, of including all of this information on the infographic. It was funny, because I like designing things, but  it was stressful as well, because we had to print it and every printer closed on Saturday morning till Monday, and we needed to have it printed for Monday. Thanks to one member of the group, who found a printer whose shop assistant was really nice, we got to print it on Sunday and we really appreciate it.

In addition, as you can appreciate, my role of facilitator has been based on trying to help all of my mates in case they need help, as well as organizing every single aspect and revising the whole work just in case there were any mistake on it.

Thanks to the rest of the group, I have been able to do all that I have done, because they have worked very hard to make all of this possible and if I have needed anything, they have helped me with it. And I have to say that I'm sure that I have made mistakes, but I will try to fix them out for the next time.

As an evaluation of this week, I have to say that we have improved so much and we must continue going this way.

Thank you for reading and hope liked it!

PS: Here, you can find the roles for the following week:
- Clara: FACILITATOR
- Ángela: JOURNALIST
- Elena: ANALYST
- Marta: TRANSLATOR
- Marina: CURATOR-FARMER
- Noelia: STAR
- Holly: HELPER
- Paula: HELPER