Hello everybody! Welcome to my blog! I am a Primary School English teacher learning about TICS! In this blog I will tell you about different tools and ideas to use in your class! Do not hesitate to ask me if you have any question!
Hello readers! Today I am sad! Our ICT adventure #ictclil_urjc is about to finish! We have learnt so much, and it would be nice to look back and reflect about it..... At the beginning I created my final mission with Go animate. However, once I had finished I realised that the tool was not among the ones that teacher wanted us to use, furthermore I was not very happy with the final result. So I decided to change it.... This is ICT! you try and try until you come up with the tool that you like! Nevertheless, I highly recommend that you have a look at the instructions twice, in this way you will not have to repeat things! Despite all the drawbacks that I found, I can say that I am absolutely happy with my final result, Following the advice of my peer Raquel I decided to use Capzles, an online free tool to create time line stories. I had never used this tool before, but I liked it so much. You just need to log in and start creating! You can choose your background, selecting one from the options that the app has, or creating your own one with your images! Then you can start adding the material into your timeline- You have the possibility to choose between 2 options, upload one doccument or a "stack" with lets you place multiple files in a single moment. I decided to upload a "stack" and then include pictures of my challenges, in that way I consider that I achieved a neat timeline that fully describe my experience in this fantastic subject!
We had 7 different modules, and we learnt a lot from all of them. I still remember my first day in ICT class.... I have to confess that I was a little bit scared, I am not very good at using the computer, However, I have found out that there is a super ICT teacher inside me, able to do fantastic things with free online tools! If I had to choose one moment of this subject and the challenge that I enjoyed the most I would choose the choco-talk. We work hard together as a team, and that was really nice. thank you to my teacher and thank you to all the people who have taken part in this ICT adventure! Did you miss it? Don´t worry at all! You can click here and watch it again! And I really love the tool that we used to create the tutorial, because I like the idea of recording everything is happening on the screen! Do you want to see our tutorial again? Click here! Doing a final mission like this one has been really useful, in this way we can reflect on how much we have learnt! Seeing all my challenges together and talking about them I realise that I am a new teacher.... A SUPER ICT TEACHER !
Thank you to my teacher and thank you to all the people who have taken part in this ICT adventure! Thanks for everything everybody, this class would not have been the same without you!!! :) And thank María Jesús for teaching me all these things!
I can't wait to put all of them in practice!!! See you soon super ICT teachers! Check my final artifact here
- *All the images and gifs have creative commons license.
Hi readers! It's Ana again! Have you ever had problems when assessing your students? Do you want to create a rubric to make the process of assessing easier and you dont know how to do it? Keep on reading!This week we have been working in our ICT class with a new tool to create rubrics and I am going to tell you everything about it!
This mission consisted of creating a rubric that evaluates our eproject and in which we define the key aspects in our e-project, the expected progress and our own assessment criteria.
I had never created anything similar before. Of course I had evaluated things done by my students but never by using a rubric, let alone, by using my own rubric. For that reason I liked this challenge, it made me reflect on the importance of assessing in a fair way, giving our students clear feedback that they can take into account in order to improve.
In this sense, rubrics are a valuable tool, since you can let your students know the criteria that you used to evaluate their work. Furthermore, you can give them the rubric in advance so they know exactly what is expected from them!
Image from: http://freshspectrum.com/
Despite you can create one table with Word for example, it is important to know other options that are available on the Internet.
After having a look at different e-tools, I finally decided to use Quick Rubric, an online tool in which you can create your own rubrics.
Even though this tool is very easy and intuitive, I would like to tell you how to use it so you will not have any problem when working with it:
First of all you need to log in, otherwise you cannot save your final result. So you have to click “I’m new user”, then you fill in the gaps with your personal data, and once you have your account you can start creating your rubric.
You have to decide the maximum and minimum score, that means that if for example you have 3 different items to analyse and you want to have a scale of rating of 3 progressive ratings (beginning 1 point, emerging 2 points, and proficient 3 points) then your maximum score would be 9 (3x3) and your minimum 3 (1x3).
However, if you are not happy with the number of scales of ratings you can add a new one (add column) and you can also increase the number of elements to analyse by clicking the option "add a row".
This application offers you the possibility of saving your rubric in case you want to carry on working on it later (remember that you need to have an account for that).
You can add a title if you want to and also a description for your rubric at the top of the page.
In order to share your rubric with the world you need to save it, go To “My rubrics” then click on “view/print” and then at the bottom of the page you will find the URL of your rubric. In case you want to modify something, you have the option “edit” at the bottom too.
I consider that this tool is really good, I found it really easy and intuitive. Nevertheless, there are some things that, from my humble opinion could be improved: It would be nice to have an option to share your final result with the social networks, at least with the most famous ones such as twitter, blogger, facebook.... Moreover, you should be able to copy it for example to a word document, but it seems that it is not possible. The only alternative to this is to print it directly. I was not able to see an option to create an embedded code either. And finally I would personally include an option to save your work as a draft automatically, which is not currently available in this application
However, our mate Laura came up with a solution for all these problems and found the way of creating an embedded code to put in our blogs! When creating the rubric in Quick Rubric you have to click on print, and then save it as a pdf documment. Here you have two options: If you want to convert it into word you can convert it by using many online free programmes, for example this one called Nitro. And, if you want to create an embedded code for your blog you can do it too, you have to copy the rubric in google drive, and once you are there you have to make your documment public and then it gives you the possibility to get an embedded code and a shareable link. This is the final result:
Despite all its drawbacks I consider that it was a really nice tool since it allowed me to accomplish the task of creating a rubric and as I said before it was really easy. In fact I used it to evaluate one CLIL e-project and it works very well. The CLIL e-project that I used was the one done by my peer Víctor : Education is the beginning After having a look at his blog in depth I can conclude that taking my rubric into account he has a score of 26/27. I scored his blog with 3 points of scale of ratings in all the criterias except in the one in which the criteria says "License usage". Even though I know that all the images that Víctor uses are from pages such as Pixabay or they are creative common images in some of the entries he forgot to attribute them. But overall I can say that it is a perfect blog, and I highly recommend that you have a look at it because you will learn a lot! :)
What do you think? Do you like my rubric? Did you find it useful? Had you ever created a rubric before? Please let me know your opinion and experience by posting a comment!
Hello! It's Ana again, a student of the Master in Bilingual education at Rey Juan Carlos University! You can follow our tweets in the hashtag #ictclil_urjc
This week we have been working with Aurasma in our TICS subject. Do you know what Aurasma is? If not, don't worry because at the end of this post you will understand it!
Aurasma is an augmented reality platform, you can download it for free in your iOS or Android mobile device. This application's technology uses the camera of your device to recognize real world images and then overlay different media on top of them (animations, videos, 3D models and web pages). You need to have Aurasma in your mobile in order to be able to check if the "Aura" (the augmented reality) that you created works well or not.
But first of all you need to start working in your augmented reality in your computer! How can you do that?
The steps that you have to follow to sign up in Aurasma and start creating your own Auras in your computer are not difficult. I would like to recommend that you see a fantastic tutorial made by my partners @nepeuspu@Alvaro_Gope@Marta_Gayarre so you can understand all the steps.
As you can see it is not difficult at all! Don't you think so? So this is exactly one of the challenges that we have been working with in our TICS subject. As you probably now, next 23rd of April we celebrate the World Book Day. For that reason our work is related to this topic:
Our teacher María Jesús asked us to create our own augmented reality but with one condition, we had to tell the world what type of books we read, which our favourite book is and why we recommend it and finally what features define us as readers. This was going to be the overlay of our augmented reality.
From the very beginning I knew exactly what I was going to talk about.
I consider myself as a super reader since I try to read as much as possible, my favourite genre is fantasy and without doubt my favourite book is Harry Potter and the Philosopher Stone, However, not only do I read fantasy books, but also other kind of genres. I like when people that I read books, when these books are different from the ones I am used to reading. If it hadn't been for these recommendations I wouldn't have read these books:
"La piedra de toque" by Monserrat del Amo.
"El curioso incidente del perro a media noche" by Mark Haddon "El niño con el pijama de rayas" by John Boyne "El mundo azul ama tu caos" by Albert Espinosa
"Wonder" by R.J Palacio.
Once I knew what I wanted to say, I recorded my voice with my mobile phone. When I liked the final result I thought that, apart from my voice I wanted to create a videoclip to appear in my overlay. In this subject we have been working with some video editors. However, I wanted to investigate and look for something new. I had a look at internet and I came across with KIZOA which is a free movie maker online tool, what's more, you are not required to register if you don't want to. I started trying how it worked and the thing is that I liked it so much, so I decided to create my video with this programme. To create videos with this application you can use a template already done or create your own video from the beginning. I decided the second option. Then you can add your photos, music, animations, trasitions between the photos, and effects (for example to make your video look like an old film). You can also choose how much you want your photos to last in your video adjusting the seconds. At the end you can download your creation or share it in several social nets such as YouTube, twitter or facebook. I decided to share it in YouTube, here you can see it:
Once I had the video I moved to the next step and I create a meaningful collage of create a meaningful collage of myself portrait as a reader. Always using Creative Commons images. To create my collage I used Piktochart since it is an online e-tool that I am already familiarise with. I chose the option create a poster and I started creating the collage by adding photos, choosing a background and deciding a title:
This image is a really good one to define myself as a reader. In the collage you can see me in the platform 9 3/4, just about to get the train to Hogwarts! hahaha and then I am surrounded with Harry Potter images.
When I had both (the video and the collage finished) I followed the steps of the tutorial that I told you above. I signed up, then I completed all the gaps accepting the terms. I click in create a new Aurasma, once I was there I selected my trigger image (the collage about Harry Potter) and I saved it, after that I uploaded the video, selected it and click saved! Then my video appeared on top of image, I made it bigger and then I pressed next again. Then, I decided the name "What type of reader are you?"and I saved it! I had already created my aurasma! In order to make sure that I had done things right I tried with the Aurasma application for mobile phones and .... What a surprise! The overlay media came out! Would you like to see it? Here you are the image, go to your Aurasma mobile app and put the camera in front of the image! What can you see? Isn't that fantastic?
As a teacher, I think that we can use this application for many purposes. For example to flipped our lessons. In this way we could create Auras and then give our children the images, so they can have a look at them at home. I let you a video in which you can watch a full explanation of flipped classroom. Or we could ask our students to do a similar activity like the one I have done. Why don't we ask them to talk about their favourite book and create an Aura to do so? That activity would be really nice to put in practice in our lessons as our children would be practicing their speaking skills at the same time the discover the fantastic world of the TICS. Furthermore, they could encourage other peers to read their books!
The final result was added as a pin to the collaborative board "A Wall of Books" that our teacher María Jesús created. So we can celebrate the World Book day all together! I like having this open resource bank shared with a lot of people since I am sure that it is going to be useful for the future to work with my children. Thanks to these walls I will find it easier to find resources! I hope you enjoy this post! Do not hesitate to ask me if you have any question! And have a nice World Book Day!
*All the images and gifs used in this blog have Creative Common License.
Friday, 15 April 2016
Create a collaborative slideshow that supports learners:
Hello! This is our last mission working in teams. It consist of creating a collaborative slideshow/animation/screencast/story/comic about a CLIL goal that matches our eprojects and that supports learners.
We all agreed to create a tutorial to explain our children how to use Infographic, since it is the tool that they are required to use in the final activity of our CLIL e-project to present the candidatures of their countries.
To create our
tutorial we have used “Screencast-O-Matic” which is an online tool that allows
to create videos with screen shoots with high quality of image and sound. This
tool also gives you the possibility to share your final product in YouTube or
download it.
There are two versions, we used the free one, which we
consider that is very complete. You can select the part of the screen you want to appear in your video and record it for 15 minutes. Moreover, you can use use the webcam so your image will appear in a little slide in the corner.
From our personal point of view, we can use this tool
in our classes for many purposes. For instance, we could ask our children to create a StoryJumper and then record the screen while turning the pages telling the story (they can imitate the characters´ voices). In this way, they would be able to practice their speaking skills at the same time they practice their ICT skills, and all of this in a meaningful and engaging way.
We appreciate this activity, as it made us reflect on the need of creating tutorial in our classes. Even thought working in groups make things easier, there are some tools that are
difficult to manage and need clarification from the teacher. Some children can feel stress because they are not good at using ICT tools. However, if the teacher knows how to solve this problem and scaffold those children, we can integrate the TICS in our lessons without any problem!
Therefore, creating a tutorial is a good thing to bear in mind when introducing difficult e-tools in our classes.
To make it look even
nicer we edited the video with “IMovie”, exactly the same we used for the
previous challenge. We were really happy with the results we had in our video
and we thought that this app was perfect to create the tutorial as well! In our opinion it has little details that could be improved, although in general it is a good e-tool.
Creating tutorials is
something really good that even our students could do! As Vygotsky said peer
learning is quite beneficial, why do not ask our students to share what they
know? We could ask them to create a tutorial explaining how to cook, or
something they are really good at, in this way they could feel special,
practice their ICT and speaking skills and teach their peers at the same time!
Isn’t this fantastic? What do you think? Do you use tutorials in your class?
This is going to be part of the AporTICs nationwide collaborative project, so when we finished it we submited our tutorial to their blog and now we are looking forward to having it published! We also included a common license to our tutorial. As we have seen in this subject we have seen the importance of using them. In this case we chose this one
As we want others to be able to share our work but withouth modifying it and we do not want anyone to benefit economically from our creations.
I am looking forward to hearing from you! Let me know your opinion by posting a comment!
Thanks for reading!
gif from: http://www.gifanimados.com/
Thursday, 14 April 2016
Our chocotalk!
Last thursday (7th of April) we celebrated our chocotalk! Do you know what a chocotalk is? You can read all the information here
I will described the chocotalk as the best challenge I have had in this subject! It was really funny and we learnt so much! We were given different roles: Víctor and Elena were responsible for writing tweets during the chocotalk so everybody could read what was going on! They did a really good job almost like proffesionals! They used the hashtags #chococharlas and #ictclil_urjc in case you are interested in having a look at them. Inma and Lola were the speakers, they participated in the chocotalk giving their opinions about the different topics. And finally Natalia and I who were the curators, we tried to summarize the most importtant aspects of the chocotalk. You can see the final result below. In order to do that, we used the tool Storify. I have to say that I had never heard about it before and I was impressed with its results. I think we can use this application in our classes with our students, for instance I remember that in the school where I did my training period they did one activity with twitter. The students were asked to tweet the events that happened during the 23F as if they were really living them. It was an interesting activity in which everybody collaborated. I believe that after having done it, it would have been interesting to summarize the final result with the best tweets, and they could have used storify to do that. You can see the twitter here I also think that we could use this tool to comment and work with important news that we want our students to know. They could summarize them and add their comments. This is a good activity since apart from concepts, it is important to teach our students to be competitive and critic citizens. So here you can see our final result:
We hope you like it! You can also see the whole video again:
We are looking forward to doing this activity again! I have seen that there is one school that does chococharlas as well! Have a look at its video. In my opinion it is really nice. Not only do they practice their speaking skills but also they have fun at the same time.
Gifs from: http://www.gifanimados.com/
For this mission we have been asked to complete a storyboard for a short video challenge to include in our CLIL eproject, which we will later make.
First of all we thought about one common learning outcome and we all agreed that it could be “to learn about the physical and political features and some of the most distinguishing representations of the European countries”. So we created our story board using StoryboardThat
We would like to recommend that you use this fantastic tool if you have the chance since it offers many possibilities. You can choose the length by choosing the number of vignettes. You can choose among a wide range of scenes (you can choose among the typical ones such as the school scenes but you can also choose castles, islands...), characters (you can even change their emotions and create angry and sad characters.) and text tables. Therefore, you can adapt your stories for any purpose. For instance, we could use it in our class to introduce one topic in a more visual and fun way.
However, we found out some things that from our humble opinion could be improved. For instance, we did not like the fact that the work you do is not automatically saved. Therefore, you have to be saving it all the time. Even though the page reminds you to save, it would be fantastic if it could be done automatically.
It would also be very nice if SoryboardThat could have an option to record voices, that would be awesome. Our students could practice their speaking skills, writing, computer skills and also their creativity when creating their comic!
Furthermore, students could create their own stories about any topic of the curriculum (for example we could ask them to create a story in which they had to include information about Egypt or any topic they are studying). In this way not only would they work one subjects but also they would put in practice and would improve their ICT skills!
Of course these kinds of tools are fantastic to communicate with children with special needs. Sometimes, they find it difficult to understand abstract languages and concepts, and this tool makes the process of communication easier. We can also use this comic for the routines: think about first grade of Primary School, at the beginning they find it difficult to get used to the routines of Primary, we could help them to remember them all by creating comics around the class (For example, before going to the playground take your snack, make a line and keep in silence).
Made with Storyboard That And also the final result of the Infographic created by the children of our story using Piktochart (the same tool we used for the previous challenge)! You will learn some things about Norway and why they think it is the best country to host the next Olympic Games!
Norway: Norway | Piktochart Infographic Editor
All the images included are from Pixabay
Once we created our Story Board we started working in our video. Thanks to the story board that we had created previously we did not have any problem with the video as we already knew what we were going to say. To do the video we used "IMovie" with the support of an Ipad. We would really like to recommend that you use this tool if you have the opportunity because it is really easy and intuitive. You can do many things with it, for example adding music to your videos, images, cropping your videos. Defenitely this tool was fantastic to accomplish this challenge! As it is so easy to use you can even use it with your children in your class! Just imagine the results presenting their candidatures for the Olympic Games.... they would enjoy this activity as much as we did and they would be practicing their speaking skills and learning new things without realising! You can see our video here:
Both of our final products (the comic and the video) are going to be part of a nationwide educational collaborative project, theESL times click here to know more information about this project! Without doubt, it is a really good initiative for students, since it encourages them to use the new technologies while they learn English! As teacher we should be aware of these kinds of blogs in which our students can participate, since it is a motivating activity for them! Click here to see our post in the ESL blog We hope you enjoy as much as we did! Do not forget to post a comment! We are looking forward to hearing from you!
gif from: http://www.gifanimados.com/
Infographic:
Dear peers:
For this mission we were asked to work in teams. What a fantastic idea! We had not had the opportunity to work in groups before, and even though it can be difficult sometimes to get an agreement with so many people, I really liked to work with my group since I saw different points of view, and I learnt so many things, for example if it had not been for them, I would not have known the fantastic tool that we used for our infoedugraphic.
I really think that we should be allocated in groups more often, as teachers we have to get used to working with people as a team, sharing materials and ideas. And of course the best moment to start doing it is at the university!
After having done our CLIL-e-projects, and according to the topic we chose, our teacher did different groups. In my case I was allocated with my partners Víctor, Natalia, Inma, Elena and Lola because all of us had a topic related to geography. Despite it was not exactly the same, we mix our projects, and agreed the learning outcomes we wanted to achieve. We decided to choose these ones:
To identify the location of the European continent in a map. To learn the name of some European countries, their capitals and location in a map. To get in touch with the most distinguishing physical features (climates and animals) of these countries. To learn the name and location of the most important mountain ranges and rivers in Europe. To learn about different European cultures and their most distinguishing representations (costumes, flag, language, currency, food…). Once we had it, we started to think about the Infographic. Do you know what an Infographic is? Infographics are visual representations of data, knowledge or information in general. The next step was thinking about the purpose of our infographic. What did we want to use it for? At the beginning we thought that maybe we could use it to describe our project, but we did not have to do that because we had already done it! So we came up with an excellent idea, why don’t we create an activity for the children
and we explain it to them by using the infographic?
So we started working hard!
We wanted our students to work in order to achieve all the learning outcomes we had agreed at the beginning, so we thought about an activity that could allow them to work them in a motivating way. “The Olympic games” was the name we all agreed, and we will do it at the end of the lesson, so they can put in practice what they had been learning throughout the unit.
Next, we had to create our infographic, as we said, we used it to show the explanation of the final activity of our project.
To carry out and design our infoedugraphic, we chose Piktochart as some of my partners had evaluated an e-project in which the author used this tool to create an infographic and they liked how the final result looked. I personally had not heard about this programme before, that is the reason why I loved working in teams, I learnt something new from them! We tried it and since we absolutely liked it we carried on doing our project with Piktochart.
Piktochart is a perfect tool to create attractive infographics, presentations or reports for our lessons. Among its features we can highlight the templates, backgrounds, graphics and different types of letter. When you finish your design, you can download in different formats or share it.
Think about your class, seldom does it happen that the whole class understand difficult concepts the first time you explain them. For that reason these kind of online programmes that allow the teacher to organize information in a visual way are really helpful. Think about special needs students. This infographic could be a fantastic support for them.
Not only can an Infographic be done by the teacher but also by the students. We could ask them to summarize what they learnt by using for example Piktochart as we did! Therefore they will be working subject contents but also improving their ICT skills!
Hello everybody! It took me some days to decide the topic that I am going to use to create my CLIL project, but at the end here it is! I am going to create a project to work the 5 continents since it is the topic I am currently studying with my students in the training period. I have created a video with a fantastic application that I had never used before! it is called Buncee and it is really easy to use. First of all you need to register. Once you do it you can start creating. You decide the background and then just by clicking the "+" you can add animations, text, you can upload your own images (do not forget to bear in mind if they have copyright), stickers, youtube videos and you can even draw! I love this application because I think that it is easier than the ones we have used before, and so, it can be used for little children as well. In my opinion these kinds of applications are perfect to use in our lessons! We could use them in many different ways, we could ask the children to create a story or we can create it to explain something to them in an attractive and funny way! However, there is a bad thing about this application that you should be aware of.... Buncee doesn't dive you the opportunity to record your voice and add it to the presentation unless you for it (prenium account), so unfortunately it is not very useful if you are thinking about creating a video. But you know what? It is when you have problems the moment in which you start thinking solutions, and as I did, you can come across with new tools like the one I found out. I solve my problem and I added my voice to this Buncee using atube catcher. I recorded the presentation and I talked at the same time, it is like a video but much more original don't you think so? :) I hope you like my project, I think that not only does it work communication, content and cognition but also the culture which is the "C" that is normally neglected in our CLIL lessons! I am looking forward to hearing your feedback!!!
Sunday, 6 March 2016
Evaluating CLIL eprojects
Good afternoon! Here is my evaluation of one CLIL project
I chose this one because it was quite similar to the one I had in mind to create, and I could pick up some ideas.
I think this task was very useful since now I am more aware of what I want for my project, and what I don't want. I have seen some things that this project could improve and I would try to include these improvements in my own project.
To show you my analysis I have created a presentation with "Pearltrees", although I have to say that I was a little bit dissapointed when I found out that the vast majority of the options were only for prenium users (you had pay). Anyway, I find it quite useful and the result is brilliant and very visual.
This activity can be done with children as well. We could ask them to evaluate their peers projects and in this way we would be working cognition (HOTS) according to the Bloom's Taxonomy.
Hi everybody! How are you doing? I am glad to tell you today about my webmix for future CLIL projects! My colleagues and I have been selecting CLIL material in a common board in pinterest. Wait what do you say? You don't know pinterest? Don't worry I am going to explain you! it is social webpage in which it is really easy to create an account, and you can start using it today, it is completely free. We can say that it is like a virtual cork board in which you can find, share and post images, videos of any topic. Then you can create your own board, as we did, and start "pinning" (adding other people images) to your board. You can have a look at our class board here or even in the right side of this blog. Once we have enough I started selecting those materials which I consider that were going to be useful for my future CLIL projects. Although we were free to choose other pages to do our webmix I chose to carry on using pinterest since I am familiarised with it already and I love it! And... this is the final result!!! click here (I also created a widget to make it easier to have access to it, you will find it in the right side of this blog) What do you think? Feel free to follow my board if you like it! Furthermore you have to know that before selecting the materials we take into account the copyright, so you can use them in your classroom and lessons with your kids! Isn't that fantastic? :) If you are a teacher probably you know how important being organised is, and having a board like this one can save a lot of time when creating attractiuve lessons for our students! Let me know what you think by posting a comment! And do not hesitate to ask me if you have a doubt about how to use pinterest! I will be more than happy to help you! And come soon, the TICS adventure has just begun, we still have a lot of challenges to take and a lot of things to learn together!
