3X1 Review

This is coming to an end, this will be my last post for the ICT subject and it's a way to say goodbye to you and, why not? To think about my learning process during this subject.

For this post, I'm going to talk about my 3x1 review. What is it about? I have to talk about three things that I have loved of the subject and one thing that I consider that I would improve. I have prepare a Canva to show you these three things.

★★★ 3X1 REVIEW ★★★ de Blanca García Martínez

What I think that it should improve, it's the time that we have. The second fourth-month period has to many things to do: practices, lots of works and also, the TFM. These other things make us difficult to dedicate so many time to this subject. 

However, thanks to this subject, I have loved the new digital tools that I have learnt to use, how much have I developed my creativity and finally, all the new ideas that I have now to carry out in the future with my students. 

A fun way to say goodbye to this subject it's using the known memes. I have used Generador de memes online to make this one, which represent my own experience during the subject.

I'm sure that you agree with me :) 

Thank you for reading my posts. 

SEE YOU SOON!

ONLINE CONFERENCE

Hello everyone, I’m here to tell you about a recent experience that I have lived thanks to the ICT subject, an online conference!

What nervous I was! You can’t even imagine the feelings when you see that it’s your turn and you have to talk in front of different people which are inside the digital world of education. This experience was carried out by moodle4teachers and the two people who were in charge of it were @mjgsm and @nelliemuller.

What did allow us this experience? Well, as you have read in my previous posts, we have been carrying out a learning process which had different steps explained one by one in different posts:

• This time: evaluating and analyzing an educational project.

• Prototype of my CLIL Educational Digital Project

• Design a visual metaphor!

• Partners search.

• Superlearning mission 1

• Learning mission 2

• Learning to use rubrics

Apart from show to people what we have been doing, thanks to our classmates, now they can visit our blogs and give their opinions about our ideas. Also, our classmates give our main links to our Twitter and the direct link to our open educational project.

Furthermore, it was the opportunity to listen our classmates talking about their own projects and give our opinion about them.

This online conference has been the last step that we had to achieve in our ICT’s classes and, as far as I’m concerned, the most important challenge. 

Here you have the slides that all my classmates and me made to present ourselves in the conference following a model that our teacher provided us.

      

Open educational digital projects for clil primary education from Jefe de Área de Formación en Red y Redes Sociales. INTEF

Here I leave you the draft, using the tool Issuu, that I used to prepare my presentation in the conference.

    

And finally, here you have the video of the online conference where some of my classmates and I appear talking.

            

To sum up this post, I would like to tell you that this experience was new for me. Carry out a blog, something that I always have wanted to do, create super activities which let us to think more about them, use different digital tools to achieve the knowledge in our students and finally, this online conference which was, as far as I see it, the most constructive activity that I have ever made. 

As 21 century teachers, we have to take into account the new technologies and add them to our classes in order to innovate the education world and to achieve a better understanding in our students. 

Thank you for reading my posts. 

SEE YOU!

Learning to use rubrics.

Did you miss me? I’m back here, but this time, with a new post where I will talk about assesment. When you do an activity with your students, you always need a tool for evaluate them, it can be an exam, a survey or, in this case, a rubric. 

Do you know what is a rubric? As you can read in Merriam-Webster, a rubric is “a guide listing specific criteria for grading or scoring academic papers, projects, or tests”. We could say that it is a tool that helps us to obtain the final result of our students. 

Thanks to the rubrics both, students and teachers, have some advantages. 

For the students: 

• Students have much more information than with other instruments (feedback) 
• They encourage learning and self-evaluation. 
• They know in advance the criteria with which they will be evaluated 
• They facilitate the global understanding of the theme and the relation of the different capacities. 
• They help students to think in depth. 
• They promote the responsibility of the students, who according to the exposed criteria, can review their work before delivering them to the teacher.

For the teachers:

• They are easy to use and explain to students. It increases the objectivity of the evaluation process. 
• They provide feedback on the effectiveness of the teaching methods used. 
• They are versatile and conform to the demands of the competency evaluation process.

After doing the Superlearning Mission 1 and Learning Mission 2, I have decided to evaluate the Superlearning Mission 1. Do you remember what activity did I do? A flyer where our students had to create a flyer with their superheroes, description of them (with superhero and normal clothes), search on the internet among the clothing shops to find clothes for the superhero to wear in his normal life and finally, describe the change.

The aspects that are going to be evaluated have direct connection with the goal established on the mission, that are the followings:

• Plan the steps you are going to follow. 
• Look for information using the Internet. 
• Create a catchy flyer using a digital tool. 
• Use the vocabulary and expression about clothes and actions.

Here you have a presentation made with Canva where you can see the criteria that I’m going to follow in my rubric.

What are we going to evaluate? de Blanca García Martínez

And finally, I have done my rubric using the digital tool Quick Rubric, which let me to do an easy rubric in few minutes. It was a fantastic tool, very useful and very easy to use. 

Here you have my rubric:

  

Rubric by Blanca.

Making rubrics let us to be open-minded at the time to evaluate our students, changing our form of evaluating them. It’s good to see different ways to evaluate and I love to learn new things every day. 

Thank you for reading my post. 

SEE YOU SOON!

LEARNING MISSION 2

HELLO! Yesterday, you have been able to read my previous post where I have transformed a flat activity into a superlearning activity. In this post, it’s time to follow with the transformations to achieve a better understanding on kids. This activity is based in the Open Educational Project (OEP). I think that my learning mission fits in the blog that I would like to collaborate with, Tertulias con sabor a chocolate. 

The students continue working with the clothes and how they can order the adjectives when they are talking about clothes and their characteristics. 

Furthermore, with this activity the students will develop the following key competences: 

• Learning to learn competence
• Digital competence
• Sense of initiative and entrepreneurship
• Communication in foreign language 
• Autonomy 

First of all, I create a poster that I will put on the class to explain to the student what they have to do and what goals they have to achieve doing this activity.

GOALS

• To know the clothing names. 
• Create a fashion catalogue. 
• To search on the Internet to find different kind of clothes. 
• Be critical with the information found. 
• Plan the process. 

INSTRUCTIONS

• Organize your ideas. If you want to do a women's catalogue, men's catalogue. both of them
• Choose a digital tool to create your catalogue. (Emaze, Canva, Smore...) 
• Search on the Internet to found online shops (Stradivarius, Zara...) 
• Create your Fashion Catalogue. 
• Describe under each photograph the kind of clothes. Be specific. 
• Present in front of the class your catalogue.

CREATE YOUR FASHION CATALOG de Blanca García Martínez

Now, here you have the sample digital artefact that the children have to achieve. We can show them it, to make easier their understanding of the activity. Also, we can start to create another one with them in class to explain how the digital tool works.

I’ve never used the tool Emaze, and it has been a great discover because now, I have discovered a new tool to create presentations to the university or for using in the future with my students. 

Now, it's time to explain the final activity, where we will use the Wool Group Dynamic again, as you have read in my last post. I would like to remember that this activity will be done as a group dynamic because it's one of the activities that the blog that I would like to collaborate use, and this blog is Tertulias con sabor a chocolate as I said in the beggining of this post.

This time we will show to the students and stick in the classroom's wall this poster made with Canva. 

Wool Group Dynamic II de Blanca García Martínez

We will explain to them that this will be the second wool group dynamic where they will have to bring photographs of the clothes that they will add to their Fashion Catalogues. And the dynamic will be the same as in the previous post but, with the difference that, this time, they will have to present their photographs at the same time that they are talking to their classmates about their catalogues. When the student who has the skein of wool throw this one to another student, this one will have to choose their favourite piece of clothes from the previous student. When he/she finish talking about his/her favourite piece of clothes, they will explain his/her Fashion Catalogue. They will repeat this until all of the students have presented their works. 

Thanks to these two-last post, I have had the opportunity to think a lot about how you can transform flat activities into more interesting activities for the students.

Thank you for reading my post.

SEE YOU SOON!

SUPERLEARNING MISSION 1

Hello, hello, it’s me again!! I've been disconnected for a couple of weeks, but I'm back with the batteries charged and with something new for you, my first learning mission. And you will be thinking, what is she saying? Well, I’m going to explain to you. 

A learning mission consist in transform a flat activity, as a match activity, into a meaningful, attractive and interesting activity. Kids are bored of the same activities day by day, so, with these kind of learning missions we are looking forward their interest and constant with the activities that we want to carry out in class. As we consider, thanks to these kind of activities, we can achieve a better understanding of the concepts that we are explaining. 

The creation of my first learning mission is based in one activity of my OEP (Open Educational Project). As you could read in my previous posts, my OEP is about clothes and typical actions. Thanks to this learning mission, students can do activities related to their daily life, such as shopping. 

Here you have a poster made with the tool Canva, where I want to present you how to transform a flat activity into a learning mission.

Supernormal hero de Blanca García Martínez

The flat activity that I have choose is the typical activity that all of us have made once in our life: What are you wearing? Describe yourself. It is boring, isn’t it? Now comes the changes in this boring activity. Between children and teenagers is very fashionable the subject of superheroes, so I decided to take advantage of this. They have to create a superhero, but, do you remember the film “Superman”? He had a special costume when he had to save his city and, in his normal life, he has his normal clothing. What I want that they do is to create a flyer with their superheroes, description of them (with superhero and normal clothes), search on the internet among the clothing shops to find clothes for the superhero to wear in his normal life and finally, describe the change. 

What are the goals? 

- Plan the steps you are going to follow. 

- Look for information using the Internet. 

- Create a catchy flyer using a digital tool. 

- Use the vocabulary and expression about clothes and actions.

What are the instructions? 

- Create your superhero avatar using the digital tool Superherotar. 

- Name your superhero. 

- Search the internet for different clothing stores and choose the photographs of the clothes you want     to use. 

- Create a catchy flyer where you explain: 

       -Your superhero's description. 

       - Why you want to become normal. 

       - Clothes that you have chosen. 

       - Shops where you found the clothes. 

       - A description of your superhero's normal clothes. 

I have created a presentation that I will put at the beginning of the class with the goals, the instructions and the timing that the activity will have. The tool that I have chosen is Videoscribe, that you have to download in your computer to use it and them, share your video with the tool Youtube. Here you have the presentation.

And finally, I have created a sample of the student’s final work, using the digital tool Smore.

As you can read in my previous post Partners Search, I have decided to collaborate with Tertulias con sabor a chocolate, the reason is because in their blog, they have use talks and group dynamics and the final activity in this Superlearning mission is one of them. 

For the student presentation I have decided to make a group dynamic, more exactly a wool group dynamic. What am I going to do? A group dynamic called "La Madeja de Lana" which translation to English is "The Skein of Wool". What is this? Well, it's a group dynamic where the teacher gives to the students a skein of wool and he/she starts to throw it to their students and then, these ones have to throw to their classmates. What have they had to do when they have the skein of wool? They have to explain their Super activity and their classmates have to listen. When one kid finish explaining his/her work, they have to throw the skein of wool to one classmate, and this one has to, first of all, summarize the activity which his/her classmate has done and then he/she has to explain his/her own work. The students don't know who will be the next one so, this is the perfect activity where the students have to listen, share and give his/her opinion. 

I have used the tool Canva to make a poster that the teacher will present to the students before doing the group dynamic. Here you have it. 

Wool group dynamic de Blanca García Martínez

I can only say that thanks to this activity, I have learned how to use many digital applications that I had never heard of. Also, it has allowed me to give many returns to the idea of ​​improving the activities to make them more striking for the students, something that will certainly be of great help for a near future.

Thank you for reading my post. 

SEE YOU SOON!

PARTNERS SEARCH

Hello, hello, how are you today?

Here I am again with a new challenge: searching for partners. If you have read my latest posts with my Prototype of my Open Educational Digital Project and my Visual Metaphor, you will have an idea of my project, now, it’s time to look for partners.

Before deciding on a collaborative movement I've been looking at different projects, this has allowed me to have a general idea of what was being said in each of them before making a decision. Between the collaborative movements that I was browsing I have found some interesting projects as The ESL Times, The Twima Project or InfoEDUgrafias, but finally, I have decided that the most interesting collaborative movement for me was Tertulias con sabor a chocolate.

There are so many reasons why I have chosen this collaborative movement but, I’m going to summarize the main ones: 

• Collective blog of enthusiastic teachers who encourage the participation of an educational community open to society.
• Collaborative blog that works with TIC and with all the possibilities that these offer.
• Project that aims to encourage dialogue among all members of the educational community to reflect, grow and introduce improvements and new projects.
• They work with the tool Blogger to inform about their daily news. 
• Encourage all types of expression: oral, written, artistic…
• Develop a Cooperative and Collaborative Culture between teachers and students from different parts of the world, through the network.

Retrieved from Tertulias con Sabor a Chocolate

Once I have decided in what collaborative movements I want to participate, I would have to do an elevator pitch, and you will be wondering, what is an elevator pitch? Well, it’s very easy. You have 20 seconds to explain your open educational digital project. 20 seconds? YES, so you have to choose what is the most relevant information that you want to say. 

First of all, you have to start with a catchy sentence, something that when people hear it, they want to hear something more. Then, you have to explain the problem and what solution you are to going to introduce. To end, prepare an attractive farewell. 

When you have finished the record of your elevator pitch (you can do it with your mobile phone, as I did), you have to upload to an online video tool. In my case, I have used WeVideo but, there are other resources as MovieMaker that you can find in almost all the Window’s computers. 

Finally, when you have your video finish, you can use the tool YouTube to upload to the net and embed to your blog. Or, if you prefer, you can embed your video directly for the tool WeVideo.  

Here I leave my elevator pitch. 

Everytime that I start a new challenge I meet a new useful tool for my future job, what an amazing discovery of WeVideo. Do not hesitate to use this application!

Before finishing my post I would be delighted to tell you how I found this new activity. This activity has allowed me to read the work of others, how they use their blog, how they manage them, every few they upload a post and so on.

I thought that the page “Tertulias con sabor a chocolate” is perfectly designed, where different posts come up each day talking about current issues. They talk about chats they do from time to time, such as women and the field of research. I'm very grateful to have been able to read their work. 

As I said before, I'm delighted with the online video tool WeVideo and very surprised with the lots of utilities that YouTube has and I've never imagine. 

It's time to finish my post. 

I hope you have faded.

SEE YOU SOON :) 

Design a visual metaphor!

Welcome again guys!! 

I have some news for you. This time I would like to show you my visual metaphor, the new challenge for my TIC class. First of all, it would be necessary for us to have a look to my latest post . There you can observe the Prototype of my Open Educational Digital Project that it was about clothes and actions. In this post, I’m going to show you how I have thought to convert it into a collaborative work. 

First of all, what is collaboration? Working together for common goals, partnership, shared leadership, co-evolving and co-learning. If we develop the collaboration between our students and, also, with students for other schools we can obtain different points of view from different people. Every person has her own opinions about, for example and related with the topic, clothes. Not everybody dress equal, each person has his opinion about what kind of clothes he/she likes. There are people who like black clothes, another colourful clothes and so on.

Thanks to my visual metaphor I would like to show to the world an activity that I think that is trendy topic in schools: uniform. I can talk from my experience, I was in a private school and I had to wear uniform sixteen years, for me, using uniform was the most comfortable thing in the world, why? Because in the morning I could sleep more because I didn’t need to thing about different clothes every day, I only had to put the same uniform day after day. As I did, I have given my opinion about the uniform, defending it, but I’m sure that there are millions of kids that prefer to wear normal clothes instead of uniform. This activity is for this, to know their opinion.

I have chosen the final task to create the collaborative work. In this case, I thought that the perfect collaboration movement would be collaboration out of the classroom, connecting with other schools. I would like to get a debate between children who assist to a private school and children from a state school. As you known, my project was about clothes, then, the topic of debate will be: UNIFORM VS NONUNIFORM. 

The idea that I have had is: make a connection between two different schools (private and state school). Then, the teachers from the schools have to assign pairs, one child from the private school will write to one child from the state school, and vice versa. They will send emails between them to discuss about the topic. All this activity will be under teacher’s supervision. 

Once they have obtained a final result, they will prepare a brief exhibition to explain to their classmates what they have talked about and how they have gotten a final conclusion. 

Here I leave you the visual metaphor that I created. In order to create this I used the digital tool called Canva. I have to say that this tool was very useful and very easy to use. As far as I concerned, it would be a good tool to use with the students to make some works, for example, they can do an activity where they have to do their own poster to present an exhibition in class from different activities that they have done.

Uniform vs nonuniform de Blanca García Martínez

Thanks to this challenge I have had the opportunity to enrich my project that, one week ago, it was an idea and now, when I made this activity, I have been able to see a bit more of what I want to do. 

I would like to say that, this year I’m learning how to use lots of digital tools that I even didn’t know that exist. In my opinion, all these tools can help us in a near future with our future career. We live in the 21st century, and it is the digital century, in some years, who knows, maybe schools only use computer to teach their students and, if we know different digital tools we will be ready to teach them. 

What do you think? 

Thank you for reading my post 😊 

SEE YOU SOON!

Prototype of my CLIL Educational Digital Project

Here I am again, now with my Prototype of my CLIL Educational Digital Project.

First of all, we had to complete a template with the main points of our project. I don't know if you remember that the other day I wrote a post where I was talking about the analysis of educational projects. This time it's my opportunity to start my own project.

In the template you can find a brief summary of my future project. As you can see it's very complete so I hope you can image how it will be.

It's true that this step of the process it's the most difficult because it's when you have to start creating and thinking activities, rubrics, class distribution, content and so on.

Here you have the link of my template and then, I have done a video where I have explained some characteristics of it.

LINK:

VIDEO:

Personal reflection 

Doing videos and put on the Internet is not the best thing that I like to do. I was looking for another tools to updated a video but it was so difficult for me to find it so finally I decided to use Youtube. 

Thank to this homework, we are practicing with some tool that I haven't work before as Googledocs or Youtube. 

I also have to think about the characteristics of my didactic unit before complete the template and it carried me a long time but, I have to said that it was good to think about it, it let me prepare for next projects that I will have to do. 

Thank you for reading this blog.

SEE YOU SOON :)

This time: evaluating and analyzing an educational project.

Here I am again, but this time I have something new for you.

I have evaluated and analysed and educational project based on some projects that our teacher gave to us. Oh my god, I almost forgot it! I have discovered a new page to make presentations. Forget about the boring PowerPoint, it's time to know Genial.ly. It's awesome!!

Coming back to the issue that bring me here, I have chosen between three different pages where people upload their educational projects and I have evaluated and analysed one of them.

Here you have the link of the page where I have found my project:

- CLIL Teaching Projects: https://clilingmesoftly.wordpress.com/clil-projects/

Apart from that page, I would like to show you two more pages where there are more educational projects:

- EDIA CLIL Projects:  http://cedec.ite.educacion.es/es/rea-ingles 

- REA For CLIL - INTEF:  http://reaaicleintef.blogspot.com.es/

There you have more educational projects to use or evaluate and analyze, whatever you want, it's your choice!

It would be interesting to show you the rubric that I have used to make this blog:

Basically, we had to talk about key knowledge, understanding and sucess skills, chanllenging problem or question, sustained inquiry, authenticity, students voice and choice, reflection, critique and revision and public product.

KEY KNOWLEDGE, UNDERSTANDING, AND SUCCESS SKILLS (NOT CLEAR)
The project is focused on key knowlege and thanks to it, children can understand the Inca's civilizitacion. They have to do two activities and one discussion where they will work as a team and, also, individually. However, they aren't developing critical thinking skills so, I'm not sure if this section of the project would be good or bad to children. I would like to see this project more expand to understand better what he is trying to explain them. 

CHALLENGING PROBLEM OR QUESTION (GOOD)
The project is about the Inca's civilization. The teacher wants to explain to their students what happened with them in the past so he is working with a meaningful problem, the ignorance of this topic. 

Nevertheless, I think that the level for the suggested activities is the appropriate one but it would be necessary to go deeper woth the activities because they are very very easy ever for students from 7th grade. 

SUSTAINED INQUIRY (GOOD)

This project is active, in-depth process over time, considering that the lesson start with the explanation of the teacher, then, the students have to do questions to their partners and thanks to these two different ways, they will do activities related with the main topic. 

In this project there are two leaders, teacher and the student, giving to the class the perfect balance. 

AUTHENTICITY (GOOD)

The project has a real-world context. The students have to study about the past, they have to learn about other civilization that were before we had born. Making them aware of the culture of our world. 

The basic knowledge of this lesson will be about American Native cultures and spanish conquerors letting students to understand what happened in the past.

STUDENT VOICE AND CHOICE (GOOD)

During the lesson, students will do three activities. The first one, discussion between students, second one, Inca's domino and, third one, a farming worksheet. The teacher will distribute the time but all the choices will be done by the students, they can discuss with their partners to complete the activities. 

The project is guided by the teacher but the students can participate in any moment asking to the teacher questions that they have during the explanation. 

REFLECTION (BAD)

I consider that this project dont let the students to reflect enough about the topic. 

When the students have finished the activities, teacher only correct the activities and use only five minutes for giving feedback to the students, so it's impossible for them to understand what have done some minutes before. 

In my opinion. it would be necessary to give more than ten minutes to correct the activities and giving them feedback about the activities because children will have so many doubt about them. 

CRITIQUE AND REVISION (BAD)

As I have writen before, teacher only give feedback to the students the last five minutes of the lesson. As I consider, this isn't time enoug to resolve possible doubts that students will have with the topic. 

PUBLIC PRODUCT (BAD)

This activities dont offer to them the opportunity to show what they have learnt because they are pair or individual activities to make in their tables and dont offer a final result. 

They can learn with the activities but, there is nothing to show at the end of the class. As far as I concerned, I would do a bigger project which will have a final product to show to their classmates, maybe they can do a dispaly about the Inca's story and at the end of the project, they could present to their classmates and tell them their personal reflection.  

And now, here you have the presentation (using Genial.ly). Here you have a presentation with the analysis that I was telling you before.

Personal reflection
Personally, these kind of works were always difficult to me because I think that I'm not very good judging that work that other people do, however, I have tried to do the best of me.

The activity that we have carried out was very interesting because it let us to see how other people think and how they consider that it would be a perfect CLIL class. I have found so many works, either good or bad ones, and all of them have something in common, they are working for a common cause, improve the concept of CLIL. We can see materials, didactic units, class distributions and so on.

As a conclussion I have to said that it incredible how can you learn using TICs and how many uses it has.

I hope you like it!

SEE YOU SOON  ☺

Andrea, what about yourself?

Hello everyone, today I have a new post where you can know my friend Andrea.
I have known her in this Master's degree and today I have decided to ask them some questions to know better her.
First of all, I did some tricky questions about herself, for example, how many times a day do you look yourself in the mirror? or what do you do when you can't sleep? After this questions there will be another ones where we will talk about this master and why we decided to come to this master and let us to know each other. Do you want to see her?

She is Andrea, she is 23 years old and she's from Valencia. She decided to settle down in Madrid for a year to life the experience to live by their own. 

Doing this activity we have learn a bit more about ourselves. Also it's an opportunity to know a new App called Soundcloud that we had never used. We were working listening and speaking skills doing this interview letting us to improve our English and at the same time how to use TIC and English together. 

Here it is the audio of the interview that we did this afternoon. I hope you like it and I'm waiting for your comments. See you soon. 

Flu has something good

Today it's my second day in bed. Flu has come very strong this year so, the only thing that I have been able to do these days have been read and watch films.
It has been a great oportunity to investigate new films and books. I always have loved fantastic books such as Harry potter or the Lord of the Ring, but it sounds obvious that it will be a bit difficult to read these kind of books for little children.
The book that I want to reccomend this week will be "The colour Monster". I heared about this book one year ago when my friend and I had to do a project about books. Thanks to this book we can work the emotion with our children. How the colours can show our emotions. This book has a lot of illustrations which will help us and our students to understand the plot.

Apart from books, I have recently seen an infant film that it will be motivated for them, it's name is "Sing!". The film is about animals who love sing and they want to demostrate to everyone despite the fact that nobody believe them. Finally they will have to work together to help one of their friends. 

Both the book and the film will help us, teachers, teaching our students about values and feelings. 

I hope you like this new blog. See you soon.

blancortichuela 

Welcome to my world!

First of all, thank you to dedicate some of your time reading my blog. It's the first time that I have started a blog and I'm still learning how to use it.
The main issue of this blog will be to talk about how can we develop print motivation in our students. I know that this job starts at home, with their parents. They have to inculcate the love for reading to their children, but at school we can help them with this aspect of their life.
Also, I want to introduce the idea that teachers can teach their students using films, where the students can understand things better.
I hope you like and you enjoy reading!
Let's start!