E-portfolio final reflections

Good morning!

Since my learning journey through ICT at my master's degree is finishing, I have created a video with my final reflections about all this subject.

To create the slides presesntation I used Genial.ly and then, to record my voice while I showing the slides, I used Screencast-o-matic. It was really easy to use and inntuitive but the free version only allows you to record 15 minutes.

It has been an enriching journey and I am very grateful to my teacher @mjgsm. I have learnt incredible and interesting ICT contents which I will use in my future teaching practice :)

Thanks a lot!


                 

My rubric to evaluate an e-project

Hello everybody!

1. Creating my own rubric.

As you can read in my previous posts (The Earth's adventures InfoEdugraphic, Our videochallenge with Tic and Piktochart slideshow), lately, I have been part of the development of a group e-project. 

Today, I present you the last task related to my e-project, which consits of creating a rubric to evaluate all the different aspects connected with it. It is important to be able to assess one's own projects and artifacts as well as being able to assess others'. Assessment plays an essential role in the learning process because it helps to improve one's self knowledge and learn from the mistakes. 

In order to accomplish this challenge, I explored several options to create a rubric and, in the end, I chose Quick Rubric because it is incredibly easy and intuitive to use. The template is neat and clear so you just have to give it a tittle, a description, set up a score rating of your choice, write the criteria/topic and fill each gap. Once you have completed the rubric, you click on the save button. You can find a quick tutorial for using this tool in my peer's blog: Laura's blackboard.

Apart from being a easy tool to use, it has the advantage of allowing you to edit your work whenever you want, due to the fact that it is an online tool. However, as I have commented with my peers, the great disadvantage of Quick Rubric is that it does not allow you to share your results in any social network and it does not generate and embedded code either. 

Because of these reasons, I leave you my rubric in this post in JPEG format, so you can see it easily. Anyway, you can also find my rubric here.

I encourage you to evaluate my e-project using this rubric and let me know if you find any way of improving it!

2. Evaluating an e-project with my rubric.

Once I finished my rubric, my teacher @mjgsm suggested me putting it into practice. This is why I decided to assess one of my peers' e-project. I chose the one created by @LauraGonGar5, @rpeinadog, @Salvador1987lop, @Anafuertecan and @nievesyan317. You can fin their amazing History e-project in Laura's blackboard's blog.

Now, I will start to explain the score they get and why:

• Quality content: score 2. I think that the contents are coherent since the three activities are directly connected with History. However, it would be more complete if the e-project was linked to a concrete history topic, in order to work a specific content of the curriculum. 
• Multimedia artifacts: score 3. I believe that my partners have created engaging artifact taking advantage of each tool's possibilities to the maximun. Moreover, the artifacts accomplish their objectives clearly.
• Posts reflections: score 2. Although the posts are quite complete, I miss details related to the work group and the participants roles in the working process.
• Citing and attributing content: score 3. The authors have attributed and cited all the materials and information extracted from another source correctly.
• Instruction compilance: score 3. They have posted all the information required and included the URLs of the outcomes.
• E-portfolio: score 3. I find my peers' e-portfolio eye-catching and engaging. Besides, all the URLs provided are meaningful.
• Dissemination: socre 3. All the participants have spread the e-project through the social netwoks using the appropiate hashtags. 

So, their final mark is: 19/21. I strongly believe that they have created a really good e-project and I will use it when I have the chance :)

Book Day with Aurasma

My mom made me a reader :)

After completing some group challenges, we came back to work individually. The new challenge our teacher had prepared for us was related to the Book Day, which is the 23th of April. Because of this event, we were requested to created an aura.

First, I will explain what Aurasma is. Aurasma is a HP Autonomy's augmented reality platform that can deliver any content (videos, audio, pictures, animations...) in real time. The final artifact is called ''aura''. If you want to learn how to use Aurasma step by step, you can read this interesting and detailed post of one of my classmates with an explanatory slideshow: 

http://learnwithclil.blogspot.com.es/2016/04/supporting-learners-to-use-aurasma.html

So, first I had to decided what kind of content I wantes to upload: a videoclip or an audio track. I chose the videoclip beacuse I wanted to show viewers the books I liked the most. I recorded the video with my iPad and edited it with Movie Maker to make it less heavy.

Then, I had to choose an image for my aura. At the begining it was ging to be the cover of my favorite book. However, after giving it a thought, I chose to create a collage with pictures of the books I have in my room. This way, viewers could know more about me and the genres I like. I created the collage using the free tool PhotoScape, which is a efficient and easy tool I have been using for years. Once I had everything prepared I entered in Aurasma Studio to create my aura. It is increadibly easy to use since all the steps are clearly explained in the website and it is very intuitive. However, if you have any problem, you can see the steps in the blog's link I put above or watch this tutorial (also created by my peers):

If you feel curious about my reading experience, you can follow me on Aurasma app: celiagon92 and then scan this image to find what is behind:

I also pin my aura on the Pinterest board A Wall of Books. There you will find also more auras created by my genius peers. 

                                      Sigue el tablero A Wall of Books de Mª Jesús en Pinterest.

Piktochart slideshow

Hello again!

Today, I would like to explain you the new challenge my group and I faced from our ICT subject. 

I have worked with the same group as in the two challenges before. In case you don´t remember,they are:  @GMEstrellaa,  @gonzaalo10, @lainez_ortega  and @cristinarisueno.

For this new task, we have decided to make a tutorial about how to use Piktochart in order to help our students to take advantage of it. We are not going to extend more talking about Piktochart because you can see all its details in the tutorial. However, we have to say that we have chosen Piktochart since we claim that our children might be able to create their own infographic and we have used it before successfully.

First of all, we screencasted our computer screen while we were recording orally step by step the process to use Piktochart. We think that, in this way our pupils will be familiarised with it better. To do that, we have used the free tool called aTubeCatcher. We found this program suitable for this task because it is very easy to use and it has all the features we were looking for. 

However, a disadvantage that we have found is that aTubeCatcher doesn´t allow us to edit videos. For this reason, we used the program Movie Maker and we also added a final image with our Twitter handles in order to give the viewers the possibility to contact us with their doubts and questions.

You can see the tutorial here:

This time, we took part in the AporTICs project. This website shares tutorials created by teachers and students using ICT tools and this is why we sent them our Piktochart tutorial. Hope you find it useful!

Our video challenge with Tic!

Good morning!

This time, for this group task, we had to become both writers and film directors! We were requested to create a clip about our common e-project but, first of all, we had to plan what it would be about. Therefore we started to create a storyboard with our main ideas. As our topics were about the Earth we decided to create a character based on the universe. What could be better than an alien? Everybody wants to know about life from outer space! That’s how TIC was born, our main character. Can you guess why he is called TIC?

To create our storyboard we chose the web tool Storyboard That. Since the moment we started to use this tool, we were surprised how amazing the pictures were: backgrounds, characters and different shapes, which allow you to create exactly what you want. What we liked the most was the possibility of modifying the position of the main character, which makes the story more real.

However, while using the tool, we discovered that a normal account doesn’t allow you to create a board with more than six scenes. This is why we had to shorten the story. It was not a problem because the final clip will include the whole story.This storyboard is a guideline for the video challenge and it is meant to be a tale the teacher could tell their students at class.

Here you have our storyboard! Are you ready to meet TIC?

Made with Storyboard That

From the storyboard, we brought TIC to live! First, if you want to film a movie you need to write a script so we became writers! Our clip was divided into eleven scenes in which our alien would travel through the Solar System to discover the magic planet. TIC was dying to find it out!

Second, we started to film the scenes, but… We needed an actor! Gonzalo @gonzaalo10 became TIC thanks to our make-up team! Look at the awesome result!

Then, we were ready to record the video challenge. For this purpose we use decided to use the chroma key technique. By using Camtasia and this technique, we could substitute the green background for a picture of our choice. Regarding Camtasia, it seems quite difficult to use at rhe very beginning. However, after practicing with it for a while we discovered all its possibilities. We downloaded the free version with a free trial for 30 days. Thanks to Camtasia, we have learned how to use chroma key and how to organize the video clips, the pictures and the audios in order to get the final video. The only problem we didn´t like about this tool was the fact that, because of the free version, a watermark appeared in our video and the quality of it decreased.

Despite this little problem, the result was fantastic! We created a video in which TIC travels through the Solar system and discovers the Earth and its layers. Tic also has doubts and makes questions during the video in order to encourage participation in our pupils. The teacher could stop the video whenever TIC makes one question to let the pupils answer him. This video can be used to introduce a topic, so the teacher can know about their prior knowledge, or to make a review at the end of the topic. Hope you enjoy it!

With this mission we have participated in the nationwide educative project The ESL Times. It is an English digital magazine that encourage participation while learning and enjoying.

Finally, I would like to say that, despite a few problems in the editing process, I have enjoyed this experience a lot! It has been really funny to record the video. I have certanly laugh a lot :). Moreover, I have also learned about the chroma key technique. It is something you always see in the movies' making off but you never think that is something you could also do at home! It has been increadibly interesting!

A live CLIL chocotalk!

Good afternoon to all of you :)

On the 7th of April, at 19 Spanish time, some of my university peers and I went live on Youtube to carry out one of our group task. This task consisted of participating in a collaborative project called Chococharlas. This project fosters the participation, opinion and inclusion of the entire educative community by organizing online meetings on Youtube or similar video platforms. In these meeting, people discuss topics related to inclusive education, special needs, new methodologies and so forth while eating sweets. 

The first thing we had to do was assigning roles. One of us would be the speaker (the one who will talk in the live debate), other two members would be the ones in charge of disseminating and commenting the event in the social networks before and during the live, and the other two people would be the content curators, what is to say the ones who collect all that happened during this activity.

The roles in my group were the followings: 

- @GMEstrellaa and @gonzaalo10 were the content curators.

- @lainez_ortega and @cristinarisueno were the ones who disseminate the information.

- Finally, I (@celiagon92) was the speaker. 

Secondly, in order to prepare this task, each work group had to think of how CLIL can contribute to having happier bilingual learners.

The speakers of each group were: 
@rpeinadog, @patimasie, @nepeuspu, @lolaberralraya, @Alvaro_Gope,@teacher_inma, @GLHmaster and I).
We met on Google Hangouts, along with our teacher @mjgsm two hours earlier before the event to prepare the live. We went live at 19:00 pm and the chocotalk started. We talked about four main topics regarding CLIL methodology: 

1. Advantages and disadvantages of CLIL: the main conclusions were the need of working cross-curricularly, despite the difficulty of it (specially in Secondary Education) and the possibility of solving this problem by working with projects in collaboration with the entire educative community.
2. Social and emoional benefits of CLIL: Patricia remarked the importance of Krashen Theory based on language acquisition, that establishes the need of motivating students to learn. Besides, emotional intelligence plays and important role in education since we, as teachers, are working with humans, as Rubén highlighted.
3. ICT in the CLIL classroom: we talked about some tools that can be used in the classroom, including video games. However, the main conclusion was that the most important aspects of ICT are the purpose they are used for and the students' learning process rather than the tools. Moreover, Inma added that using ICT is not time consuming but just the opposite.
4. The last topic was relating to our e-projects: we described briefly each project in order to give ideas and examples of how ICT could be incorporate in the CLIL classroom. 

While the speakers were debating, our peers were disseminating the event on Twitter, sharing our comments and conclusions and giving their opinions. You can see a summary of our tweets and the entire process made with Storify here: https://storify.com/GMEstrellaa/the-chocotalk-event

As a speaker, I was feeling terribly nervous at the beginning. Actually, I spent the whole live quite nervous. However, when the debate finished I realised how much I have enjoyed the experience. Sharing knowledge and opinions in a calm and friendly way with my peers while going on live was increadibly funny and enriching. Besides, being able of the work of the rest of my classmates and seeing the collaborative result at the end felt like a success. It was very intense and I would totally repeat the experience!

Finally, here you have our CLIL chocotalk. Enjoy :)

The Earth's adventures interactive InfoEdugraphic

Hello everybody!

For this task we had to work in groups to create an InfoEduGraphic. The members of my group are: @lainez_ortega, @cristinarisueno, @GMEstrellaa and @gonzaalo10. To do this we surfed the InfoEduGraphic Project Site to look for tips, instructions and ideas. 

Since all our e-projects (Planets in the Solar System, The Hydrosphere, Environmental care, The Mysteries of Earth) are connected with Social Science (planets, Earth, landscapes and so forth), we decided to make an infographic as an introductory tool for a common topic. Our main learning outcome is for our students to know about the planets of the Solar System, The Earth`s layers (Hydrosphere and atmosphere) and landforms as well as environmental care.

First we assigned the roles:

- @GMEstrellaa was the coordinator. She had to direct and check that each member did his part of the job. She also encouraged us to keep working on the infographic.
- @gonzaalo10 was the supervisor and he was in charge of controlling the creation process and remembering each person's task. They also had to take notes of everybody's ideas. 

- @lainez_ortega and @cristinarisueno were the secretaries. They made and create the InfoEduGraphic using Piktochart and Thinglink.

- Finally, I (@celiagon92) was the speaker. This is why I am spreading our work by Twitter and through this blog, as well as my classmates ones.

To accomplish this task, we had to face two problems:

1. How to link all our e-projects' contents: After thinking about it for a while, we decided to structure the infoedugraphic from the most asbtract content (the space) to the most concrete one (landforms). This way, we could include all our Social Science contents in a structured and well-organised way. In order to motivate them, we added a badge that they could get once they finished the learning process.
2. How to adapt the contents to the different school's levels: this challenge was harder to face but finally we though of making an interactive InfoEduGraphic. What does this mean? We did not only a infographic (which is an image) but also an interactive image. By doing this, we foster an active learning and allow students of different grades to access to different activities of different difficulty. The teacher could guide all this learning process to do the activities corresponding each course.

How did we create our InfoEduGraphic?

We decided to use the tool Piktochart due to the fact that some members of our group had already used it and they said that it could fit the purpose of the project perfectly. It gives you the possibility to create infographics, posters, presentations or reports depending on what we need. The one we chose is an infographic as it is divided into different blocks which were suitable for each difficulty level. The quality of the pictures and icons that the tool offers is quite high and very attractive, exactly what we were looking for: to captivate students’ attention. Finally, we would like to highlight that Picktochart would be perfect if it offered the possibility of making those graphics interactives (pictures with movements, sounds, link to other webpages and so on) instead of being just an image.  

Once we had our infographic finished we went to make it interactive to promote and active learning and to increase pupils' motivation. We did this part of the project using the online tool Thing Link. With this tool you can make an interactive image by putting links in small spots inside your picture. Therefore, we included a video to expand knowledge, interactive activities to review each content and an Arts and Crafts activity about environmental care.

As you can imagine, this tool is inreadibly useful to create you own CLIL materials because, by linking resources, you can work the 4Cs. However, we think this tool would be nicer if it offered a wider variety of forms to insert the links, not only spots. 

From this task, we can conclude that Infographics have a lot of uses in our classrooms. They can be used to introduce content, to review vocabulary, to explain the steps of a process or activity, to help children with special educational needs. Infographics present information in a neat and visual way that can clarify students' doubts.Moreover, students can also create their own infographics to learn about content and ICT skills.

Our final artifact is this amazing interactive InfoEduGraphic to introduce and learn about different contents regarding our planet. Click on the spots to see the activities:

With this artifact, we have taken part in the InfoEdugraphic project and, in return, they sent us this logo:

Landscaping!

Good night everybody!

After evaluating the Minecraft Planet ebook, I thought that I could make my own e-project getting some inspiration from it. This is why I decided to create my ebook about landscapes (which is the topis I have taught to my pupils during my internship) and using also Minecraft as a learning tool.

Here I leave you the link to my outline e-project ''Landscaping'' in Google Docs: 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13o6XD43ItHVUHQPB7aZH9byuEpOd-dwHGuFb_nmxJkc/edit?usp=sharing

I used the template given by María Jesús in order to plan my ebook in detail. I hope you find it interesting :)

To follow with, I created my videoclip with Powtoon. I chose it because I was curious about it since I saw some awesome videos created by my peer for the 321Introduction. I wanted to learn how to use it and see its features and possibilities. I didn´t know that Powtoon can be used also to create presentations. I find it really easy and inntuitive to use. It has plenty designs and characters to use. I missed some options such as changing the clothes' colours of the characters, their positions, more facial expressions and backgrounds. However, I think that is a very suitable tool to use with primary students.

I didn´t want to create a long videoclip because I consider that is more attractive and engaging a short one directed to the pupils to catch their attention.

Hope you like it!

Evaluating ''Minecraft Planet'' e-project

Hello everybody! :)

In this post I´m going to reflect my conclusions about my latest Master´s task, which consists of evaluating a CLIl e-project. I chose an ebook that is directed to fourth graders and its main learning outcome is for students to learn about the Solar System. You can find the ebook here: http://minecraftplanetforkids.weebly.com/. In order to evaluate this project I have used the following rubric and the essential PBL checklist. In this post I will analyse the positive aspects of this website, as well as its negative ones.

To start with, I would like to say that I chose this ebook because I find the idea of using Minecraft as a learning tool very interesting and innovative. If you are interested you can have a look at the ebook outline here. 

On one hand, this e-project has plenty advanteges to catch students attention and keep them motivated because it is connected with children´s interests. It is an e-project divided into missions. In each one, students have to generate questions, find and use resources and develop their own answers. After that, they have to create their own products (videos, audios, blog, etc.) by using different online tools, so they develop critical thinking skills, problem solving and collaborative strategies. Therefore, the use of multimedia elements is part of the e-project content. The teacher acts as a guide in this Project Based Learning and allows the students to make some choices about the tools they can use and how to create their products. Regarding the ebook layout, I would like to say that is well-organized with a neat index, an attractive and engaging design and the contents are adequately licensed.

On the other hand, despite the fact that the contents are adecuated to the pupils´level and to the official standars of the curriculum, there is not a clear concordance between the ebook tasks and the learning outcomes they have to achieve. Moreover, the e-project creator says that each task will be evaluated following a rubric, but that rubric does not appear anywhere. Although the students have to reflect their learning by publishing their creations in the website, there is not a feedback from peer to peer. Besides, pupils don´t have to publish their results in their blogs and make some reflections about them. In connection with the website design I would like to underline that this ebook is not completly accesible to people with visual disabilities due to the fact that some letters, because of their font and colour, are difficult to read and distinguish from the background.

Here is the link to my Genially presentation that summarizes my evaluation of ''Minecraft Planet'' ebook: http://www.genial.ly/View/Index/56d87ee01561e80f14716e52

I chose the online tool Genially to create my presentation following my teacher´s piece of advice. I find this tool very attractive, innovative and colourful. It has a very creative approach and allows you to create amazing and original presentations, Cvs, infographics, postcards and posters. However, it is a new tool with some beta functions so it has to be improved. While making my presentation I missed some Power Point options such as inserting written links, figures and forms, some effects, etc. Despite all that, I have enjoyed this tool and I will keep on using it!

Hope you find this post interesting!

Some indispensable CLIL resources!

Good afternoon, teachers!

Regarding my previous post (Bank of common knowledge), in which I talked about our Master´s Pinterest board Open CLIL, I would like to tell you about my new mission. 

For this task, I had to choose one tool in order to curate and organise useful contents related to education. After having a look at Listly and Symbaloo, I decided to create a new board in Pinterest to carry out this task. Although Symbaloo seems very atractive and inntuitive tool, I took this decision because I prefer having collected all the resources that I find interesting in the same tool. Moreover I love Pinterest because of its boards to collect contents and the variety of resources of any topic you want to look for. It is also very inntuitive and easy to use.

Having explained that, I  would like to introduce you my own Pinterest board: CLIL indispensable resources. Here I have chosen and organised some of the resources my classmates posted in our Open CLIL board. I have chosen the ones that I consider more full of materials and activities to use in my future teaching experience. Have a look if you like! :)

                                                 

Bank of common knowledge

 

In this post I would like to talk about Pinterest as a tool to find and collect educational content and resources. 

Pinterest is a social network that allows people to share images, videos and information from their own personal collection or from websites.In Pinterest you can create a collection of photos on any topic you want to (education, beauty, make-up, clothes, animals, music, series, etc.). When you ''pin'' something it means that you are adding images, videos...to Pinterest and having a ''board'' means having a ''set of pins''. You can follow boards of your interests.

At my Master´s degree we are collecting lots of recources for educational purposes in our Open CLIL board. However, our chosen resources have to be free from copyright, they must be Creative Commons Open Educational Resources. In this way, there are no legal problems to distribute them and use them at CLIL classrooms.

To the Open CLIL board I have added six links to websites which are full of materials, lesson plans, games, interactive activities, etc. I have preferred choosing these kinds of resources because I think they are increadibly useful for our future teaching experience. By using these websites, teachers can carry out activities for different purposes: prior knowledge activities, introducing new contents, reviewing and evaluating knowledge.

Here are the six resources I pined in our classroom board:

Educaplay: here you can find, create and share multimedia educational activities related to different areas from the curriculum. 

AICOLE: is a virtual community of digital educational contents and materials created by the Consejería de Educación of the Region of Madrid.

TeachingEnglish (British Council/BBC): website with lots of materials, lesson plans and articles about CLIL.

Busyteacher: nice site to find lots of worksheets to teach the 4 basic skills for different levels. There are also articles, courses and tips for teahcers.

Woodlands: this website belogs to a school and here you can find Natural Science resources for Primary Education students.

Audio-Lingua: this webpage offers mp3 recordings in several languages to use at the classroom in order to develop listening skills.

As you can see from our Open CLIL, we have created a collaborative bank of common knowledge and resources to use in our teaching process. By doing this, we are incorporating the use of ICT as a teaching tool in our CLIL lessons. The use of this technology is also motivating for students and allows an innovative and active approach to the contents. Pinterest is an excelent tool to recopilate all types of contents and classify them in topics.