We will keep in contact!

Hello again 21cenTeachers!

Today I want to share with you a brief post in which I will mention three aspects of our ICT subject that I have liked and one that I have found suboptimal. For me, this post is a bittersweet task. Why? On one hand, this is the last challenge that I have to overcome in my ICT class so I feel quite happy since the course is finishing and at the same time I can clearly see my whole learning process and all the knowledge that I have acquired unconsciously. On the other hand, as this is the last challenge, it will be quite strange to stop sharing with you all my experience within our ICT class so I will try to keep writing about my project and other educational topics.

Today I will share with you my 3x1 review of our Master´s Degree Module of ICT. As I said before this review will contain the 3 things I liked most about the module and one thing that can be improved. I create a poster with canva to overcome this challenge.

Life is an adventure de Daniel Marques

And here is a great truth about our ICT module..

Author´s own. Created with Generador de memes

I would like to thank you for reading and following my posts!

Keep in contact!

A live online class

Hi again 21 cenTeachers!

Today I would like to talk about an amazing event that took place last Thursday 4th of May. We, students of the Master´s degree in bilingual education of Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid), had the opportunity of taking part in a worlwide educational conference. This conference was part of a bigger educational event: Moodle Mooc 10 (MM10). 

Moodle Mooc 10 is a set of online conferences related to different educational issues. This set of conferences took place from 1st of May to 4th of May 2017. The main purpose of MM10 is to connect educators from all over the world to share their different points of view, teaching strategies, digital learning experiences and cultural aspects. The online class of 4th of May in which we participated was titled Open Educational Digital Projects for CLIL Primary Education.

Retrieved from Pixabay

Now I would like to share with you my experience and all the steps I followed during this challenge. First of all, I have to confess that when we were told by our ICT teacher María José that we were going to take part in a live online classroom we got quite impressed. But, at the same time, we realized that this would be a great opportunity for us to connect with other teachers from all over the world and let them know what we learnt throughout our ICT course. 

Moreover, we had not only to show the world what we had learnt but also to present them our open educational projects. For this reason, as soon as we were told that we were going to participate in this conference, I started to think about what I would say. Then, I decided to draft my speech in order to organise my thoughts and make it easier for me. In this speech, we had to talk about our experience in our ICT course, the challenges that we had to overcome and our OEP (open educational projects). We had to communicate all these aspects in only 5 minutes!

Here you can take a look at the outline that I prepared for my speech. 

Speech outline (Author´s own creation)

After doing this, we were told to design a personal slide to support our speech in the online conference. To carry out this task, our teacher created an online presentation in Google Drive. When everyone finished his/her slide our teacher upload the whole document was uploaded to SlideShare to share it with the world. Here it is the slide collection.

      

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

My slide is the nineteenth slide one and, as you can see, I kept it quite simple. I only included a photograph of myself and some data that I considered relevant and I did not want to forget: the link of my learning diary, the tittle of my open educational project, the collaborative movement I collaborated with and my twitter handle.

After having everything prepared we only had to rehearse for the real conference. To make this rehearsal as similar as possible to real conference, we were challenged to do it from home. In this manner we had the possibility to get used to giving an speech through the webcam. We also tested that everything worked properly and our devices were suitable for the conference. To do this research we used this online platform.

After a week, it was finally the day of the live online class. I connected from home by using the online software WiziQ which enables collaborative and engaging learning experiences. I was really nervous when I started my speech but then I was calming down gradually while speaking. It was such an amazing opportunity since I was given the opportunity of sharing my work with teachers from all over the world.

The whole conference was recorded and uploaded to YouTube.

            


To conclude, I would like to reflect on the learning that I have acquired thanks to our ICT course and the online conference. First, I have to say that by the time our ICT course began I did not know too much about digital learning and online tools. I had the impression that ICT were being introduced in schools due to the current society but I did not find them useful at all in the learning process. Now, I realise that I was wrong and ICT are essential in the primary classroom. New technologies enable us, as teachers, to design and implement more interesting and engaging activities in the primary classroom. They also promote the development of key skills such as critical thinking, creativity and group work. Furthermore, ICT give students the opportunity of driving their own learning and collaborating with other schools.

Regarding the live online conference, I would like to thank our teacher María Jesús and Nellie Deutsch for giving us this fantastic chance. It is the first time that I take part in an online educational conference and I will have a really positive memory of it. I could not even imagine how much effort is required to set in motion an online conference. Thanks to this conference I realized that everything must be planned in advance and rehearsal is crucial.

I hope you like my post and enjoy the MM10 conference!

See you soon!

Assessment of the project

Hello again 21cenTeachers!

As you know, it has been a while since I started to design the prototype of  my open educational project: Live a healthy life. Meanwhile, I have had to ovecome a bunch of challenges which have given me the opportunity of realising that a new sort of education, in which students are motivated through cooperative and collaborative work, is truly practicable. Additionally, I have learnt to manage many online tools which will be really useful for me and my future students.

Today I am going to share with you the steps I followed to overcome this challenge of our ICT class. This challenge consists in designing a rubric that assesses a part of my open educational e-project. This rubric has to include the key aspects of my project, the expected  improvement for my students and the assessment criteria that I consider necessary. 

As you know, one of the key aspects of CLIL is the assessment process. The assessment in CLIL has to be summative and formative. In other words, it has not only to evaluate and grade student´s work at the end of certain unit but also to monitor their learning and provide them with ongoing feedback.

Retrieved from Pixabay

When it comes to assessing our students, we, as CLIL teachers, must take into account different aspects. First, we must decide in advance what is the focus of the assessment: language, content or both? Then, this assessment process will be based on clear criteria which must be set in advance and in accordance with the expected outcomes. In this context, a complet rubric must include the following aspects:

• Focus of assessment

• Assessment criteria

• Scale of grading

• Clear descriptions

A rubric is an useful tool for both teachers and students to evaluate different aspects of the learning process. Rubrics are normally used to grade students´work but they can also serve as a tool to evaluate teacher´s work. When used in a CLIL context, rubrics have the potential to help students understand and develop high order thinking skills (analysis and evaluation). In this way, students should be able to use rubrics in many of the same ways that teachers use them.

Now I would like to share with all of you the rubric that I have created with an online tool called QuickRubric. This tool provide us with the necessary options to create accurate and complete rubrics for assessing our students´work. It help us save a lot of time since it provides its users with a practical template to fill up with the evaluation and grading criteria. Below you can have a look at said rubric which I uploaded to SlideShare. You can also take a look at my rubric by clicking in this link.

Rubrica de Daniel Marques

As you can see, the focus of assessment in this rubric is a combination of language, content and skills. This rubric will provide the teacher with valuable information about different aspects of students´ learning process. By using this rubric, we will try to assess the whole learning acquired while overcoming the mission (content related to the topic, language used, creativity, digital skills and group work capacity). Moreover, this rubric will help teachers know better what they evaluate and what criteria they have to follow.

Before finishing I would like to make clear that the assessment used in my OEP is alligned with InfoEDUgrafías since this collaborative movement I joined promotes the usage of rubrics when it comes to assessing the students´ learning. You can take a look at a rubric that InfoEDUgrafias provides as a sample to assess infographics by clicking here.
_________________________________________________________________________________

To conclude, as always, I would like to reflect on my own learning process and the different steps I had to follow to come up with the final product (rubric). As far as assessment is concerned, it would be very quick and easy for us, as teachers, to evaluate our students like we were evaluated some years ago. Do you remember how we were evaluated at school? Yes, the whole assessment process revolved around an isolated evidence of learning: the exam. We were taught in a passive way an evaluated with different tests or exams. But, would that be fruitful for our students? Do they deserve it? The answer is absolutely no! It is well known nowadays that there are many other ways and tools to evaluate students´ learning process and they are proved to be much more beneficial both for teachers and for students.

Regarding the creation of rubrics for evaluating students, I have to say that I did not know too much about them. But I have learnt that rubrics are an excellent tool to evaluate our students´work. Moreover, I have learnt that rubrics must include different aspects that will help teachers know clearly what and how they want to evaluate. 

To finish, I would like to recommend the tool QuickRubric to anyone interested in creating rubrics. This online tool is very easy to use and it fully meets user expectations. For this reason, I truly believe that it should be taken into account by any teacher when designing and creating rubrics.

I hope you like my post.

See you soon!

SUPER LEARNING MISSION 2

Hello again 21cenTeachers!

In this post I am going to share with you the second super learning mission that you are waiting for. As I said in my previous post this mission has been developed in collaboration with my peer Raúl Oviedo, a primary school teacher specialized in physical education. If you want to find out more about him go to his blog The Science Corner or check is Twitter account @ScienceCorner1.

As we wanted to work collaboratively, we started to think about how we could mix our projects in order to design and create a challenge in which the content and language from both open educational projects can fit in in a realistic way. After a while, we came up with an interesting idea which would enable us to fulfill our ambition. This mission is going to be explained below.

Retrieved from TheScienceCorner

• MISSION 5: Advertisement of a company related to healthy lifestyle.

In this mission, students will be divided into the small groups (3-4 people) and they will be given a task to overcome. (After searching information and learning about the three main sectors of economic activity), students will have to create a company and advertise it to attract costumers. To do this, they will have to think about a product that they would sell or a service that they would offer to their customers. Moreover, all these companies will have something in common; these will have to advertise a product or service related to healthy lifestyles such as a healthy food and a fitness center. So, the final activity of this mission consists recording and editing a video in which students have to appear doing and promoting healthy habits while offering a product or service. After that, the teacher will upload all these videos to the blog of the class.

Retrieved from Pixabay

Now, I would like to share with you, the video that we have recorded in order to provide our students with an example. The different scenes of the video were recorded with the video recorder of a mobile phone and then edited with the online tool Wevideo. This video editor is a free online tool which is easy to use so students would be able to create their own videos with the aid of the teacher. After this, the video was uploaded to Youtube and you can have a look at it below.

• METHODOLOGY AND TEMPORALIZATION

The methodology to follow during this mission is going to be in concordance with the methodology applied in the whole project. This means that the teacher will act as a guide in order to push the students in the right direction but, at the same time, students will work independently while collaborating with the members of their groups to overcome the challenge. In other words, students will drive their learning process by discovering and experimenting.

As far as the temporalization of this mission is concerned, the mission will last two or three sessions and it will be carried out within the subject of Natural Science. Although, it could be carried out in different subjects such as Physical Education and English.

• OBJECTIVES AND COMPETENCES

Regarding both the objectives and competences of this mission, Raúl and I wrote them down cooperatively by using one of the great variety of options that Google offers us. We created a shared Google Doc and we designed not only the objectives and competences but also a summary of the mission and the online tools that will be used. Then I shared it by uploading it to SlideShare. You can have a look at all this information in the document embedded below.

           Mission 5. Advertisement of a company related to healthy lifestyle de puchi_dani88

To finish, I would like to finish my post by reflecting on the knowledge and the experience that I have acquired as well as the process of learning itself.

I must say that I have realized how important is to keep students motivated through super missions that encourage them to continue learning. These missions provide students with the opportunity of taking part in reality-based activities and creating meaningful and public products. Moreover, this challenge has given me the chance to learn how to turn traditional activities into super learning missions, which is not easy at all.

Furthermore, I must say that we, as teachers, should collaborate with each other. We have to share our ideas and projects with other teachers and take advantage of the great number of collaborative movements on the net. If we do this, we will be able to learn from each other´s work. Also, I have learned that we have to change our minds in order to create engaging and coherent missions that could be carried out in the classroom.

Regarding the online tool that we have used, Wevideo is an online video editor which is quite easy to use. I had used it before to create my elevator pitch when I was looking for partners and I was really satisfied with this tool. It allows its users to change, add and remove countless elements. In addition, I truly think that our students will familiarize with it easily in a short period of time.

Finally, I would like to thank our classmate Jesús Cárdenas. He helped us to record the video and I would like to congratulate him for his outstanding performance. He is a good friend of us and I would also like to recommend you his blog about physical exercises (visit it by clicking here). You can also follow him on Twitter: @Yisustheteacher.

See you soon!

SUPER LEARNING MISSION 1

Hello 21cenTeachers!

This post is part of a challenge that is divided into two parts. To overcome this challenge I will have to work on my open educational e-project in order to turn two of its plain and boring activities into super learning missions which engage and motivate students. So, in this post I am going to explain to you in depth the final mission that I just prototyped for my open educational e-project: Live a healthy life. The second part of the challenge will be published soon and I will share with you all the steps I followed to turn another mission of my project into a super learning mission in collaboration with my peer Raúl Oviedo. If you want to find out more about him visit his blog The Science Corner or have a look at his Twitter account @ScienceCorner1.

Now, I would like to share with you all all the steps I followed to turn the final missión of my open educacional project into a super learning mission.

• ALLIGNMENT WITH THE COLLABORATIVE MOVEMENT 

As you know, I decided to join the collaborative movement Infoedugrafias to turn my educational project into a collaborative one. As I joined this collaborative movement, I must allign at least one part of the project with its style so I decided that one mission will consist in creating a healthy magazine with different infographics. 

What is an infographic? An infographic is a representation of information in graphic format and it is designed to make the data easy to understand at a glance. People use infographics for different purposes: to communicate a message, to simplify the representation of large amounts of data or to monitor changes in variables over time. An infographic can be used as an interesting educational resource since it helps students to develop high and low order thinking skills. Below, you can have a look at a visual created by Proyecto Infoedugrafías which will help you to know better what the main characteristics of infographics are and what they are used for.

Retrieved from Infoedugrafías

I decided to do this, because I have been searching information about ways to make students work in groups and cooperate in the classroom and I think this option will provide them with that opportunity since they will have to follow little steps and overcome differet mini-tasks cooperatively to come up with a nice final product. Some examples of the mini-tasks that the will have to face are mentioned in the next paragraph.

• FINAL MISSION

This is the final mission of the unit and students will be divided into small groups of three or four to carry it out. As said above, in this activity students will create an infographic of a topic related to healthy lifestyle such as ealthy eating, physical activity, hygiene, etc. In order to come up with a nice and useful infographic students will have to work in groups to achieve different mini-tasks such as looking up information, selecting relevant information and avoiding non-relevant, organising this data, selecting an online tool and managing it to create the final product and present it to the rest of the class.

Retrieved from Pixabay

After creating the infographics in groups, students will have to present the information to the rest of the class. But this is not  an ordinary presentation, the presentation consists in recording a short video (< 5 minutes) with a video camera or with a mobile phone (all group members must appear in the video). For this purpose, the teacher will take the class to the playground during a session and will monitor that they work properly. To ensure that this challenge is carried out efficiently, they will be given enough time to prepare it in advance either at home or at school and they will be encouraged to create a draft of what they want to explain in the video. In addition,before finishing the unit, students will self-reflect about the learning they have acquired.

• METHODOLOGY AND TEMPORALIZATION

As I explained in previous posts, along this open educational project I would like to use and active and cooperative methodology in which students are the centre of the process. By doing so, children will take part actively in their learning process and this will make a positive difference. I would also like take advantage of the flipped classroom technique to carry out most of the activities.

To accomplish this goal, I have been looking up for different ways of doing so. Thanks to it, I found a very interesting tool that will allow me to design a project in which students will be able to look up information, acquire both content and language and overcome challenges by themselves. This tool is called Exelearning and it was designed by a group of software developers in collaboration with different organisations related to the Ministry of Education of Spain, I have to say that I am currently trying to learn how to use this tool in order to create a real open educational project which can be carried out in a primary classroom. 

Moving on, this whole educational project consists of 5 missions and a final task and it is intended for fourth grade of primary school. Regarding the final mission that is explained in this post, it will last 4 lessons and it can be carried out within different subjects such as Physical Education, English and Natural Scence. It will promote cooperative learning and group work as well as other important skills mentioned above.

• OBJECTIVES AND COMPETENCES

Regarding the objectives to be achieved and the competences involved in this mission, I started to think about them as soon as I chose the mission that I wanted to develop in depth. For this reason, I wrote a Word document trying to explain carefully every aspect: objectives, competences and online tools that are involved in this mission. Then I uploaded it to SlideShare and embedded it here so you can have a look at it below.

Final task project from puchi_dani88

As you can see in the document, this mission will contribute to the development of certain abilities that are crucial in the current society. Through this activity students will improve different skills such as communicative, digital and cooperative skills. At the same time, it will offer them the opportunity to improve cognitive skills because they will have to do LOTS and HOTS activities.

Below you can see an infographic that explains some benefits of doing exercise. I created it in order to give it to the students as a sample. This way, it will be easier for them since they will know exactly what is expected from them. I created this infographic with an online tool called Canva that provide us with all the options needed to create a nice infographic.

Benefits of doing exercise de Daniel Marques

To finish, as always, I would like to reflect on my own learning experience. First of all, I have to say that creating this educational project is one of the most challenging tasks that I have faced during my university years.

Regarding the online tool Canva, I had already used it before and it is an useful tool which is easy to use. It allows us to create dfferent visuals and it also has an specific option to create infographics in which we can use different templates depending on how we want to organise the data. 

Then, as far as new methodologies are regarded, it have realised how important it is to use appropiate methodologies that are student-centered and allow children to acquire content and language in an active and participative way. It is also important to chose appropiate materials and take advantege of the integration of new technologies in the learning process which is very motivating for our students.

If you have any suggestions or comments do not hesitate to leave a comment! 

I hope you enjoyed my post! See you soon! 

Enriching my educational project with a visual metaphor

Hi 21cenTeachers!!

Today I will explain to you all my last challenge that has been quite fruitful. Also, as always, I will show you the artifact that I have created and explain my opinion about some online tools and how I handled with them.

But first, concerning my educational project, I would like to share with you some strategies and activities that I have been mulling over and I think could be useful in order to turn my open educational project into a collaborative one. 

So, I started to read about different possibilities to turn normal projects into collaborative ones. I analysed some of them and I have choosen some options and activities that could fit with my project in a realistic way. Below you can see some aspects that I think could be implemented in my project.

Retrieved from Pixabay

• Collaboration within the classroom: Cooperative learning will be one of the cornerstones of the project. Students will have to collaborate (pair work and group work) in different ways to look up information and achieve several missions. For instance, I have thought of an activity in which students will be divided in pairs. They will carry out an interview following the 3, 2, 1 technique and questions will have to do with the topic of healthy lifestyle. Moreover, students will collaborate whether face to face or through the internet to create the final product of the class: a health magazine.

• Collaboration out of the classroom: This kind of collaboration includes connection with other classes, other communities and with the real world. In this context, pupils will create a learning diary in an online platform such as Blogger or Weebly. This way, it will enable them to share their learning evidences and reflections and upload their product to make them public and visible. In addition, it would be fantastic if this project could be done jointly with another class or school, so students will get to know more ways to do things and other styles while they communicate and develop their interpersonal skills. Finally it woul be great if we could join a collaborative movement on the net. I am already browsing different websites to know more about them and I will try to fulfil this ambition in my next post!

• Collaboration back to the classroom: This kind of collaboration consists of taking external agents into the class whether in person, via the internet or otherwise in order to enrich the learning process. From my point of view, this is a more complicated task since it will be hard to find someone who has direct experience in this field or topic, And even finding it, this person has to take the activity which is not always easy. So, I will keep mulling over this way of collaborating in order to find an idea that is realistic and contributes positively to the project.

Moving on, I would like to introduce to you the callenge that I have had to overcome during the last few days. Do you remember that I prototyped my own educational project? I am sure you remember the title of it: Live a healthy life! Now it is time to make it more attractive to the world. I have been challenged to design an online visual metaphor to turn my educational digital project ino a collaborative one. So, let´s get to work!

Once I knew what to do, I started to look up for information an online tools that might be useful for me in order to accomplish this task.  I got information about different different tools that could fulfil this aim such as Canva, Pixton, Smore, Piktochart, Caccoo and Mindmeister. Then I took a deeper look at the characteristics of each one by going into their websites and fiddling with them.

I finally decided to create and infographic with Piktochart. An infographic is a graphic visual representation of information, data or knowledge intended to present information quickly and clearly. Below you can see the infographic that I have created with Piktochart and I have shared by using Evernote. You can also see it by clicking here.

Created by Daniel Marqués using Piktochart

To finish, I would like to share with you my opinion about the online tool I have used to create this infographic: Piktochart. I strongly think it is a wonderful tool. It is free and it offers its users the chance of creating attractive and striking visuals such as infographics, posters, visual organisers, flyers, menus and even book covers. For example, the template and the images have been retrieved from the application itself. In addition, it enables them to add different elements, to upload photographs, to choose different templates and many other options to change other aspects. However, when I was finishing my work I had a very unpleasant surprise. As I did not have the "Pro version", it did not allow me either to download my creation in PDF or to share my creation where I was thinking of (Slideshare). Nor did it let me download the infographic with all the aspects that I had inluded in it. For instance, I included some links (to my blog, to my social networking sites, etc) that are now no noticeable.

Moreover, I have used another online tool that I had never used. It is called Evernote and it allows us to create notes and other things in order to remind ourselves to do something or to share it with collegues and family. I have used it to share my visual metaphor and I found it useful for this purpose.

Apart from that, I have learned about the different ways in which we, as teachers, can collaborate with other others to turn our learning adventures into collaborative ones. This is very important for our students because we will provide them with the opportunity of collaborating while learning and this makes their learning process more beneficial.

If you have any suggestions or questions, please let me know by dropping a comment here or by contacting me on my Twitter (@21cenTeachers).

See you soon!

SEARCHING FOR PARTNERS

Hello again 21cenTeachers!

Today I am going to share with you all the steps that I have followed to overcome a new challenge: searching for partners. After prototyping my open educational project and enriching it with a visual, it is time to look for partners on the internet.

First, I was given the links of some on-going collaborative projects so I went to all of these sites to have a glance at them. By doing this I could have an overview of these collaborative sites and their main features. Then, among all of this collaborative projects, I picked up three of them to analyse in depth. I decided to browse these three carefully to find the one where my project could best fit in.

Retrieved from Pixabay

By doing this, I got to know great collaborative movements on the net such as The 30 Goals Challenge and The twima Project. After spending considerable time on anayling each collaborative project, I chose InfoEDUgracias as the collaborative project that I would like to work with. I am going to summarize the main reasons for this choice.

• It is a collaborative movement that contains projects of different ages and topics so I think they would accept mine.  In addition, I have seen many projects in which students have came up with amazing infographics of different topics that have aided them to learn certain content in an active way.

• Teachers that are interested in joining this page send to the administrators the required information. Afterwards, they have to uploud their collaborative projects and the whole illustrated process with the students so other teachers and students who belong to this community can benefit from it.

• All these projects follow the same pattern. The teacher act as a guide. He helps students and encourage them to look up information, select the right information, organise it and present it to the rest of the class, hence, to the rest of this online community. So, it is the same methodology that I will use in my project. 

• Infographics are one of the resources that this collaborative website uses most. I think my project could fit quite well in it. For instance, the final project of my project consists in creating a healthy mazagine so I think they could create it by putting different infographics together of different topics related to healthy lifestyles such as: healthy eating, physical activity, personal hygiene, etc.

Retrieved from InfoEDUgrafias

Below, you can see my elevator pitch. The steps I followed to create it are the next ones:

• First, I looked up what an elevator pitch is on the internet.

• After getting to know that it is a short video or presentation in which you present a product to other in an appealing way in order to find partners or investors, I made a draft in GoogleDocs in order to make sure that I was covering all the necessary points in my short speech

• Next, I recorded myself with the video recorder of my mobile phone.

• Then, it was time to make it more visually appealing. I did not know whether use Imovie or a new online tool to edit it. As I had already edited a video with Imovie, I went for the other option to experiment new applications. So I edited it with Wevideo.

• Finally I shared my elevator pitch using YouTube. I shared it in muy YouTube channel and then I embedded it here in my blog.

Before finishing I would like to share with you my opinion about a couple of aspects. First, as far as the collaborative project that I would like to join is concerned, I must say that I found InfoEDUgrafias a very useful site in which both students and teachers can share their work with the world. Wherefore, the rest of teachers and students who belong to this community can benefit from it.

This collaborative movement promotes essential skills such as ICT skills, english communication skills, cooperative and collaborative work and active learning. From my point of view, we, as teachers, should provide students with full opportunities to improve these indispensable skills that will enable them to succeed in real world.

I have also learned how to present a product and look for partners on the internet. I found out what an elevator pitch is and I found it extremely helpful. In this context, Additionally, I learnt how important is to have the ability to catch others´attention with few words, rather than making a long speech that may bore them.

Regardind the application that I have used to create my elevator pitch, I think that Wevideo is a wonderful video editor that allows its users to change, add and remove countless elements. I am almost sure that I will use this online tool and take advantage of its fantastic options.

See you soon!