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!

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  ☺