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 :) 

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.