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!