I do care!

Project Based Learning is a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging and complex question, problem, or challenge.

The project we proposed in class was called "I do care!" and the challenging question my students had to answer was 'What can I do to help people from my community?'

My students wanted to do this project because every year for Peace Day we usually give money to- Save the Children and this year, my sixth graders complained. They wanted to give the money to the underprivileged in their local community. They found this project closer to their reality.

The project, in this way, was framed as a meaningful problem to solve. They had to engage in a rigorous, extended process of asking questions, finding resources and applying information.

First, they had to identify problems in their community and do a gap analysis to determine the nature and severity of the problems in relation to efforts to resolve the,. To do so, they had to find the places where they could ask (schools, charities, community centers, churches, etc.). Then, they had to decide how to present the questions. Would it be through questionnaires, interviews or polls?

Once they knew the different types of problems, students had to make some important decissions about the project, such as what they were going to donate (money, food, clothes or toys) and how they were going to garner them (advertising the event using posters, Twitter, writing an article on the school newspaper or the community newspaper, etc).

After that, students and teachers had to reflect on what was learnt, the effectiveness of their inquiry and project activities, the quality of student work, obstacles and how to overcome them.

Later, students gave, received and used feedback to improve their process and the product of their work.

Finally, students made their project work public by explaining, displaying and/or presenting it to people beyond the classroom.

In order to help visualizee the project, I used a mind map. According to the definition of Wikipedia 'A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks and drawings or other concepts linked and arranged radially around a keyword or a central idea.'

There are many tools to design mind maps. Here are some of them:

-Bubbl.us
-SpiderScriber
-Mind42
-Creately
-Coggle
-Mindmeister

The online tool I chose to design the mind map of our project was Creately. It is an amazing tool to create visual organizers.

There are many advantages of using this app. The most important one is that it is free. Creately also offers options for web or desktop installation. It has many free templates with a lot of options to customize your diagrams and edit them with some colorful labels, symbols, numbers and letters. Besides, you can embed videos on your mind map, as I did.

As disadvantages, I would say that is not very easy to use (it takes a while until you learn how to use it). This app cannot be used in your mobile phone and real-time collaboration features seems to slow down the application a bit.

In spite of these disadvantages, I am sure I will use Creately more than once! I found it really useful to present the project to my students. They were very engage with the project and had the ideas clear.

Here you can see the mind map of our project. I hope you find this post useful. If you liked it, don't forget to follow my blog!

USING COMICS IN THE CLASSROOM

Our students deal with many of the same emotions as adults. Children get angry, nervous, sad, embarrassed, happy, frustrated and insecure, but they often do not have the words to talk about how they are feeling or are too shy to express themselves. Comics are a thoughtful and accessible medium which appeals to students of all personalities. They offer a creative way for a reserved student to contribute his or her valuable thoughts and stories, which might otherwise be missed.

Our teacher MªJesús has asked us to create a comic in order to help our students to feel more confident with our subjects. She proposed several tools to create the comic. They are:
-Pixton: https://www.pixton.com
-Creaza: https://www.creaza.com/frontpage
-StoryboardThat: http://www.storyboardthat.com

I chose Storyboardthat. This app is very easy to use. The program provides pre-made scenes which can be easily customizable, characters, text boxes, shapes and other images to choose from. You can drag and drop these items into your chosen layout. Scenes are organized into locational and thematic categories (e.g. school). Characters are organized similarly and can be customized with hair color, eye color, emotions, gestures and other edits. Text boxes allow the student to give a voice to their characters. Shapes and additional images add props to the story.

The disadvantages of using StoryboardThat are it only contains still images (video is not supported) and that you are limited to the stock characters and scenes (unless you pay).

StoryboardThat is a great tool that teachers can use in class with their students. I will definitely use it!

Here is my comic. It was created for my 6th graders.


Made with Storyboard That

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In love with Genial.ly

Hi you all!

Today I’m sharing with you a great tool to create educational slideshows! Genial.ly offers us a new world of endless resources in order to present content of various subjects in an engaging way! But there are different tools to create slideshows and presentations:

-Google slides 

-Prezi 

-Powtown 

-Bitleslide 

On the one hand, Genial.ly is an easy-to-use and free web tool that people use to make presentations, infographics, reports, posters or guides.

I have only used it to create a slideshow and here are some of the advantages I have found:

One of the main advantages is that you don’t need to be a programmer or designer to create a stunning presentation. You just have to register on the website or use your accounts on Google+ or Facebook to register seamlessly. Once you create an account you will gain access to thousands of resources, templates, frames, images, etc.

Moreso, you can easily access or modify your creations from anywhere as you work with the cloud.

Another benefit of using Genial.ly is that your presentation can be easily shared through social networks.

On the other hand, I found it difficult to work with designed templates, as it doesn’t let you change the font and the size easily.

It takes a while until your project is saved and to work properly you need to have a good internet connection.

Apart from these trifle disadvantages, I am in love with this tool and I know all of you will get hooked on it as soon as you try it!

Here is the presentation I have created about Magnetism for my 6^th graders.

I hope you found this post useful. If you liked it, don’t forget to follow my blog!

CONTENT CURATION TOOLS

We are teaching in the twenty-first century and our students must be prepared to face a modern society that changes at a very fast pace. One of the causes of these rapid changes is the use of new technologies. Although most of our students are already familiar with these technologies and are naturally interested in them, they need to be trained in order to improve their skills in the use of computers and different programmes. Furthermore, the information that we may find on the net these days is overwhelming, so we as teachers should learn how to filter, organize and curate it and teach our students to do the same.

In this lesson Mª.Jesús has showed us different tools to start curating content for our lesson. Here are some of the tools: Pinterest, Symbaloo, Pearltrees and List.ly.

I have started using Pinterest and I love it! There are millions of teachers sharing resources and ideas! This social platform is used as a means for people to save website content. Users can choose to share the content with other followers and/or look at what other people are saving from around the web. This app is highly recommended!

Here is my Natural Science board! But you can find more about my account by clicking on it. In my desk I have added some interesting resources to work in the the subjects of Natural and Social Sciences, Arts and Crafts and English.

 
I hope you found this post useful. If you liked it, don’t forget to follow my blog!

Image attribution for a CLIL lesson about light

Hi you all!

Today I would like to share with you what we’ve learnt with M.Jesús in class. We have learnt to respect copyrights and to identify where we have found images. We have also learnt how to cite the sources of the images that can be used.

This lesson was very useful for us as teachers, as we have to teach our students to be respectful with copyrights. They cannot use any images they find on the internet and use it in their own projects or assignments without giving due credit to the owner. We must teach them to cite, attribute and licence usable images. Digital citizenship implies the responsible use of online images or videos, among others.

There are two main advantages of using visuals in the classroom. The first is that visuals clarify the material being taught and the second is that visuals make learning more permanent. Seeing is a dominant sense from which most of our learning comes. So this tells us that the most effective way to clarify and bring understanding to what is being taught is to actually show the children.

M.Jesús asked us to propose a CLIL activity, and here it is mine. This activity will be used after a video presentation about ‘Reflection,’ ‘Refraction’ and ‘Dispersion’. Students will have to classify the following pictures into these three categories. 

Photograph by DasWortgewand. CC0 Creative Commons

Photograph by Skitterphoto. CC0 Creative Commons

Photograph by Dirty Opi. CC0 Creative Commons

Photograph by Valeria Boltneva. CC0 Creative Commons

Photograph by Stux.CC0 Creative Commons

Photograph by Berkanbicakhan. CC0 Creative Commons

Photograph by Stevepb. CC0 Creative Commons

Photograph by Go_see. CC0 Creative Commons

These pictures were taken from ‘Pexels’ and ‘Pixabay’.

Students will do the classification individually. Then, in pairs, they will discuss possible answers (they will try to reach an agreement. To do so, they will use the functions and structures of agreeing, disagreeing and giving an opinion). Finally, students will share their answers with the rest of the class and the teacher will correct the exercise. This activity follows the following strategy: Think-Pair-Share.

I thought that using pictures for this topic, related with the light, was engaging as well as necessary for understanding.

After watching the video and classifying the pictures, students will know that:

The reflection of light is a phenomenon wherein beams of light strike an object and bounce off them, changing direction.

Light dispersion is an optical phenomenon wherein light is separated into colours when it passes through certain media.

The refraction of light is a phenomenon wherein beams of light change direction when they pass from one medium to another, such as from air to water.

I hope you found this post useful. If you liked it, don’t forget to follow my blog!

Let's start!

CLICK HERE TO SEE MY AVATAR

WELCOME TO MY BLOG!

• Avatar's name: Captain Jason
• Age: 25
• Gender: Male
• Occupation: Pirate
• Interest and talents: travel, learn from others, and teach and help teachers around the world.

Today, I have posted my first entry in my blog! This blog is going to be used as a learning journal. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Lorena. I am studying a bilingual Master’s Degree in Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid) and our ICT teacher, Maria Jesús, has just taught us how to open a blog.

The first activity we had to do was to create an avatar. The activity seemed simple, but it wasn’t at all. Many apps weren’t free; others did not have very interesting avatars as they were too simple or couldn’t talk or move.

Finally, I found ‘Plotagon,’ a marvelous app that I recommend to everybody. Plotagon is fantastic because it lets you create cool avatars that move and talk with different emotions in many different settings. It also gives you the option of using subtitles. It is a free app and I find it very useful for educational purposes as students can create their own plots in English. It is great because students don’t need to record their voices; they just have to type the text. In this way, they can practice their listening skills by listening to their avatars (that can have different accents) and their writing skills. Teachers can also use avatars as teachers' helpers (as I did with this avatar) or to flip the classroom.

From my point of view, there are two drawbacks of using Plotagon. The first one is that a mobile phone is required to create the avatar . The second one is that when you want to share your video, an embedded  code is not generated.
Having said that, I am sure I will use this App many times.

I hope you find this post useful. If you liked it, don't forget to follow my blog!