Learning with Ana

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!

Moreover, we had the pleausure to participate in a nationawide project, so we sent our Infographic to InfoEdugraphics nationwide collaborative blog and they published it in their blog and they also gave us an award