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!