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Sunday 28 February 2016

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.



     

Wednesday 24 February 2016

My Creative Commons License :)

Good afternoon everybody!

I would like to explain in this post why I chose a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
       
                    

What does my license allow others to do with my posts?
First, I used the license generator Creative Commons in order to get mine. According to their website: Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools.Their free, easy-to-use copyright licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work — on conditions of your choice. CC licenses let you easily change your copyright terms from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.”Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They work alongside copyright and enable you to modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs.

The license I chose lets others remix, tweak, and build upon my work non-commercially, as long as they credit me and license their new creations under the identical terms. This means that everyone can share my posts but without modyfing them. Besides, I strongly believe that education is not any kind of business and for this reason I chose a NonCommercial license.  

What are good ways to motivate our students to use Creative Commons material and attribute properly? 
Regarding how I would work Creative Commons materials with my pupils, first I would work with them in moral values  such as respect and empathy. They would have to create their own video, text or something related to Arts and then think about how they would feel if someone modified their work without their permission or distributed it without recognising them as authors. They should understand the importance of respecting others creations and effort and that they cannot use every material they find on the Internet for free. Therefore, they need to know how to cite and attribute the information they find and later use in their homeworks. It is also a good idea to teach them how to create a Creative Commons license for their blogs, websites, etc.

Sunday 21 February 2016

My PLE and PLN for CLIL!

Good afternoon!

The first time I heard about CLIL methodological approach was at Complutense University, when I was studying my Primary Education degree. I studied some basic concepts about CLIL in the English teaching subject and in a brief way.
After finishing my degree, I studied CLIl approach deeper in The Master´s degree at URJC. During this course I´ve learned more about this approach, resources that can be used at a CLIL classroom, what kind of activities can be done, strategies to carry out at class, etc.. I´ve also learned how to plan a CLIL lesson in a correct way.
In my mindmap you can see which tools I use to get information about CLIL. I´m going to explain briefly how I created my diagram:
Once I had an idea about what my PLE and PLN were, I used in first place the web tool called Popplet. Then, I discovered Coggle and I found it more colourful and attractive to create my mindmap, so I went for it. Although I prefer Coggle because of its variety of shapes, I have to say that Popplet is also a easy tool to use in which you can make neat and visual diagrams.
As you can see in my Coggle´s diagram, I have divided my PLE in different sections depending on the purpose of each tool I use to learn about CLIL:
To surf: Although I use Safari and Mozilla also, I prefer Google Chrome beacuse of its convenience. Everything you do inside your google account and with Google apps and tools is authomatically saved.
To organize: I use both Google Drive and Dropbox because I find them increadibly useful to create collaborative documents, resources and materials and share them with people.
To seach: There are lots of sites where you can find information about CLIL or any other topic you are interested in. Some of them are Google (and Google Scholar for more academic information), Wikipedia, blogs, Moodle (for the University classees), Youtube, some social networks (Pinterest is very useful when you need original ideas to create materials or find online resources to use at you class) and some official websites such as the Ministry of Education website, AAICOLE website, educaplay, etc.
To create: With Microsoft Office you can create documents and materials to use at the CLIL classroom or to write articles, homeworks... about CLIL. I included here webtools like Pxton, Coggle, Popplet and Paint because I´ve recently learned that are really useful to do activities with children and create materials.
To communicate: I use some social networks, Whatsapp and my personal email to look for and recieve information and learn about strategies or find out amazing websites related to education. Some of these tools are also part of my PLN.
And finally, my PLN: some social nets sucha as Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr are parte of my PLN since I use them to publish and share information about CLIL that I find useful with other peers. I also interact through Skype when working in groups and add my submissions to moodle in connection with my university homeworks. In moodle I also comments on my peers works.
Here is the link to my mindmap: https://coggle.it/diagram/VsXrXos-o0NjyQSk



Learning by Twittering!

Here is my Twitter account in case you want to follow me: https://twitter.com/celiagon92

I have been twittering for one week some concepts and ideas I know and I have learned about CLIL methodological approach. As you might know, CLIL means Content and Language Integrated Learning. This approach to teach both content and language simultaneously is being used in bilingual education nowadays because of its efficacy. 
If you´re interested, you can find more information about CLIL reading my TL at Twitter!
Besides, I consider Twitter to be a perfect and useful tool full of posibilities to learn from other teachers, share resources and information, learn about different kinds of topics and being up to date with the latest news about education. This is way I encourage you to create your own Twitter account and be connected to this amazing world that education is!


My 3,2,1 Introduction!

Hello everybody!
To create my 3,2,1 Introduction I have used the tool called Pixton. After investigating other online tools such as  Domo Animate and Animoto, I decided to use Pixton because of its simplicity. Besides, I found funny the idea of making a comic about myself.
As I said, this tool is useful to create comics. First, you can create your own character, which can be similar to you because you can personalise the hair style, the colours, the accesories, the clothes, etc. Then, you can select the novice way or the advanced way. I chose the  the novice way, in which you can choose different designs for the clothes, the backgrounds, the landscapes, add different objects to the scenes, change their colours, add some text, change your character´s position, gestures, etc. You can create your own comic full of details and incredibly colourful, and for free! I only had some troubles when saving the comic because I didn´t realise that you have to save what you do in each scene and not just at the end of the whole process.
If I could change something about this web tool it would be the posibility to create an animated video (as Laura also  said) or to make a GIF of each scene of the comic. This option would make this tool even more attractive to children.
Finally, what I´ve most enjoyed of this tool is that is easy to use, intuitive and with a lot of options to personalise your own comic. In my opinion, this online website tool is suitable for fifth and sixth graders. It could be used in Arts and Craft, to recreate historical events in comic style for Social Science or tales and stories in English class and Spanish Language. Therefore, it has a lot of possibilities in the CLIL classroom and I recommend you to use it if you like.
Here is the link to my introduction: Celia´s 3,2,1 Introduction