My webmix for future CLIL projects

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!

See you soon!

Image from Pixabay

Open CLIL bank of common knowledge:

Hello everybody!  Here we are with a new task of TICS. This time I have accomplished a really good idea. We shared a bank of common knowledge in pinterest, each of the 32 students of the class posted 6  resources free and without copyright in a common board of pinterest,  so from now we will surely find it easier to achieve fantastic free resources for our classes.

I liked this activity not only because its utility for our future, but also because it allows me to reflect on the importance of checking the copyright of the material we share.  Some pages of nice resources doesn't give you permission to distribute the content in any way and so it cannot used in a class. As a teacher we should bear this in mind before uploading things to our school blogs, or using these material for our lessons.
Thanks to this activity and to the subject in general I am becoming aware of this, therefore, I will take it into account for the future,


You are more than welcome to visit our pinterest board and from now you can also see a widget of our board on the right part of this blog.

These are the 6 resources/pages that I posted with a brief description:

1.  ONESTOPENGLISH

http://www.onestopenglish.com/about/

With over 9,000 resources, including lesson plans, worksheets, audio, video and flashcards, onestopenglish is the world’s number one resource site for English Language teachers.

Check the pin here


2. FUNENGLISHGAMES

http://www.funenglishgames.com/topics/spelling.html
Who said spelling was boring? Thanks to this page tou can put many spelling game ideas into practice!
Check the pin here


3. PRIMARYRESOURCES

http://www.primaryresources.co.uk/
 It is a British web page. However, it is very useful for CLIL too, it has many materials divided in topics (social sciences, natural sciences, arts... and also things related to behaviour) These resources can be freely used in primary classrooms in any part of the world.
Check the pin here

4. TES

 www.tes.com
It is dedicated to supporting the world’s teachers. Its mission is to enable great teaching by helping educators to find the tools and technology they need to excel and by supporting them throughout their career and professional development. They are home to the world’s largest online community of teachers, with 7.9 million registered users. This network is one of the fastest growing of any profession globally and helps to support, guide and inspire educators around the world.

Check the pin here

5. TEACHERS PAY TEACHERS

www.teacherspayteachers.com
Teachers Pay Teachers  is a community of millions of educators who come together to share their work, their insights, and their inspiration with one another. You can select the age as well as the age you want your resources for.
Check the pin here.

6. SPARKLEBOX


http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/previews/7276-7300/sb7283-astronaut-roleplay-masks.html#.Vs83k4-DPcs
 Masks for our children to do a role play about the space!  They can practice the vocabulary pretending they are really astronauts!  You can find more resources here: www.sparklebox.com
Check the pin here


Hope you like the resources and pages. Do not forget to post a comment! I am looking forward to hearing from you!






Image from Pixabay

The licence that I chose for this blog:

Hello everybody:

I have just posted my licence, you can see it at the bottom of this  blog:

I decided  to choose  this kind of licence wich allows adaptations of your work to be shared and  allows comercial use of my work, because I consider that as teachers we have to share our ideas and stop working individually. What is important here are the children, and they  are the ones who are going to benefit the most of our contributions and idea,s no matter what the source of information the ideas come from. For example I would be really proud to know that my work is being used in another school and children are enjoying and learning from it. At the same time, I do not mind if my work is used to commercial purposes, that would mean that they know how to take advantage of it, so for me it is completely right.

From my personal point of view we are not trained enough in copyright related issues, if I think about the past, I now realise the number of times that I shared  an image without taking into account the licence. Furthermore, I think my teacher did not know about that, consequently, they never said me anything.

In the future I want my students to reflect about this. I will make them aware of the fact that creating things is time consuming, therefore we need to value other's people work. I will explain them that it is completely fair that if a person created something, that person can decide how that material can be shared. That is the importance of Creative Commons Licence, and so they can use it too, probably it would be a wonderful idea to ask them to create their own work, and it is there where they could start by creating their first creative commons licence.

Here you can find the different licences available, depending on what you think you can opt for one or for another!

Generate your licence here!

Do not forget to post a comment if you have any doubt!


Image from pixabay

My PLE and PLN

Here is my PLE AND PLN. This challenge  allowed me to reflect about my profesional background, what I used and use to learn in CLIL..

First of all I would like to start by saying that I used paint to do it, it is a very easy tool  to use, However, I would not recommend to do this kind of things with it. As María Jesús wisely said, it is better to use others that give you the possibility to continue editing in case you ran out of time in one computer. Although at the end I did it and the result is very good I will take that into account for future challenges.

 There are so many programmes that I used and of course I use in the present that are part of my PLE

The most important ones for me, since are  the one which I use the most are  Facebook, Instagram, Skype and Twitter, they are known as the Social Networks. Probably you are already familiarise with them. However, do you really know how to take advantage of them to learn and to share CLIL content? In my case I use them in this way:

In pinterest, facebook, instagram, twitter and youtube I follow several pages which are related to CLIL, they post daily information, materials and ideas that allow me to learn a lot, I can also put some of these things into practice.

As far as skype is concerned, I use it to talk with people that I met last year in King's College School  who  are related to the education field, they give me advice and tell me about different resources that can be used in class. Although, all of them are also part of my PLN since I also share information there!

Coursera is without doubt something that you should know about! It gives you the possibility to take a lot of courses for free, not only can you choose among education related courses but also about maths, other languages... and everything you can imagine! Have a look at it here!

 I did a course about autism which was really good and it was also fantastic to prepare for the first certificate in English!

I had never heard about story jumper before but it helped me a lot to create fantastic stories for the children, and now that I know about it I used to tell the children stories that were already created like for example one about emotions (really good tool!!!).

Everybody knows google and wikipedia, you can find whatever you want about CLIL very quick and really easy too!

In regards of CNN, I would say that not only  is it useful  to consult things about CLIL but also to learn english as you can read news in this language.

My PLN is very simple, I had one blog that I created when I was in the degree in which we posted things about CLIL and now with my new one I will do exactly the same!

Whatsapp is the most useful tool when learning and sharing things about CLIL, as I can easily ask to my partners of the master of the degree doubts or we can even share ideas.

Of course the Master and the training period are my two main sources of information when learning about CLIL, but also to share, when we do presentations we expose what we have learnt, and when others do them we learn from them. The same happens in my training period, of course I am learning such valuable things from my teacher but she is learning a lot from me, for example about ICT (she did not know StoryJumper and I showed her last week).

In a nutshell, this activity has been really interesting since now I am more aware of  the tools I use, and I can see that they are not so many. Thanks to my peers presentations I will increase my PLE, (thanks Neus because I knew TED Talks but I have never used it in CLIL), now you have talked us about it, and it is part of your PLE, I think that I am going to take it into account for listening to my students and of course for listening for me to improve!

I hope you like it! Do not hesitate to ask me if you have any doubt!

I am looking forward to seeing your comments.

What is CLIL?

 Well, probably if you are reading this you  already know that CLIL means: Content and language integrated learning, although for me it is much more than that. Some days ago I posted a definition on twitter which for me reflects CLIL the best (click here to see it)
Why is that? Unfortunately, for many decades languages was only affordable for a little part of the population, for example inmigrants usually did not have the opportunity to learn english due to their economy. However, things have fortunately change, and now the vast majority of the schools are bilingual, what means that every single child can attend a bilingual school and so learn the language. For me that is fantastic, we all deserved to be taugh without distintion to race, gander or economical status.
Thanks to twitter I can share what I think with the world and I also interact with people about a common topic! It was good to know that one of my peers thinks exactly the same, that thanks to CLIL a wide range of students can learn English!

We could use twitter in class, maybe by creating a hashtag with our students we can take note of their work in class easily. We could also recommend that they follow special people related to education that will help them to learn a lot! 




Image from pixabay

3,2,1 Introduction  

Hello everybody and welcome to my blog! First of all let me introduce myself... Don't worry I will not bore you with a long text describing myself, instead of that I am going to use a fantastic tool that I would like you to see! This tool is Storyjumper!  I had never heard about it before  but it is relly easy to use, and very quick too!

You design the cover by choosing the colour and the tittle, and then you have a wide range of possibilities for the story: You can add characters ( I found it quite interesting that you add the face and then you select the emotion for that face), also the backgrounds, and many details to make your stories look nicer! Once you finish, you can share it in your social networks, or you can opt for copying the URL as I did:  
https://www.storyjumper.com/book/index/24454088/56bcfdbfc6b21


It also has a  special effect which makes it look  like a real book (it seems that you are turning the pages)!

For these reasons I think that it is a good resource to use in our lessons, you can addapt the story to talk about any topic and it is quite attractive for the children, I am sure that it will catch their attention!

I will give you an example and so you can think about the wide range of possibilities you can use this programme for. For instance in first year of Primary school they were studying the landforms in Science and the vocabulary related to fantasy in English, so what was my idea? We took advantage of the class of ICT and we create a story in which there were giants and mermaids who were in islands, or mountains! It is a great activity and they learnt by having fun! :)  You can ask them to work in pairs or as whole group, as you prefer, I opted for the first option and it had very good results! As they were very engaged in the activity they didn't shout!  I would really recommend that you try this activity, we can work many things at the same time, and from my experience I can tell you that the results will be really good!

I am looking forward to hearing if you used this programme or a similar one with your students! and if you hadn't the opportunity how would you use it?


Images from pixabay