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!

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! 

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!