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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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 blogThe 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.
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.
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.
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!
