Looking for partners

Welcome back to my blog!

My last post was about turning an open digital educational project into a collaborative one, now is time to look for partners to share my project and find collaborative running projects to fit in.

First of all, as you can check in my visual metaphor, I proposed a collaborative work for my open digital educational project. It was a collaboration work out of the classroom connecting fifth graders as mentors of third graders. The collaborative task would be named “Fifth-graders mentor their younger schoolmates”.

In the collaboration work “Fifth-graders mentor their younger schoolmates” that I suggested, the fifth graders students will explore the states of matter which is the main topic of my Open Digital Educational Project. Students will record an interactive video with a clear and dynamic explanation of the topic (The matter and its states) and the instructions for a macroscopic activity about the states of matter which are going to do with third graders in order to put into practice learned things. After the lesson and the activity all of them will have to write in their journals about the experience of sharing knowledge. The video will be made with the program called Wevideo.

For that challenge I have to browse some collaborative projects and decide on one to collaborate with. I will provide you the list and the link if you want to participate in some of them:

- The Other Kids EDU.

- The ESL Times.

- The 30 Goals Challenge.

- The Twima Project.

- Tertulias con sabor a chocolate.

- So on ..

I have been taken a look for a while to all of them, and I have chosen the one that was closest to what I am looking for! This is The ESL Times, a collaborative project where the reporters want to learn and enjoy together.

The reason of my choice is because The ESL Time has as an objectives use ICT when teaching/learning ESL and promote collaborative work valuing the four language skills: Reading, Listening, Speaking and Writing. Furthermore, I think I really believe my eProject fits into this collaborative projects as it encourages children to learn in different ways and it empowers and challenges teachers to use different teaching strategies and resources in order to teach.

After finding a collaborative running project to fit in, I had to record an elevator pitch to talk that running collaborative project into accepting me as a new partner. An elevator pitch is an enterprise technique to find financial support for a project in 20 seconds. We all know that nowadays, it is very important to be quick and practical when advertising something, we are always out of time. This is why we have to value the importance of going right to the point, and for this, I have prepared my Elevator Pitch! In which I explain the main reasons why they should accept me as a collaborator.

First let’s see what are the steps recommended to follow:

Stockholm de Andrea Judit Pérez

Here it is, my elevator pitch, I hope it convinces you to support me.

I would like to left you the draft of my Elevator Pitch as well, divided into four parts as I specified befour. The draft has been posted thanks to the Issuu program.

The steps I followed in order to accomplish this challenge a were:

1. Research about the different collaborative projects 
2. Describe which is the collaborative projects that really fits mine. 
3. Research about what is an Elevator Pitch. 
4. Use canva to design a poster with the steps from the elevator Pitch. 
5. Record a short video where I explain why they have to accept me as a collaborative partner. You only have to answer 3 questions: what, why and how. That is what I want to do, Why I want to do, and How I want to do it. 
6. Edit my video with WEVIDEO. It´s easy to use. 
7. Share my elevator pitch by embed directly from the tool to the blog. 

Every time that I start a new challenge I meet a new useful tool for my future job! Do not hesitate to have a look this and my previous posts to find out lots of new tools to work with!

Self-reflexion

Before finishing I would like to make a quick reflection of this challenge. This activity has allowed me to read the work of others, how they use their blog, how they manage them, every few they upload a post and so on. 

I was fascinated by the educational power of blogs, online classrooms, social networks, and so on; but definitely I am ready to jump into new collaborative projects to try and link teaching and learning ESL with the real word.

Visual Metaphor

Welcome back to the blog!!

Today I would like to share with you a new challenge related to my latest post. As all of you know in my latest post I made a Prototype of an Open Educational Digital Project and now I present to you a poster that shows how my project it is going to turn into a collaborative digital project linking fifth graders and third graders students in a very interesting journey of matter!

But first let's clarify what is a collaborative work?

Collaborative learning is a method of teaching and learning in which students team together to explore a significant question or create a meaningful project. A group of students discussing a lecture or students from different schools working together over the Internet on a shared assignment are both examples of collaborative learning. 

In this case, as part of my Educational project I will carry out a final session related to matter and the states of matter: solid, liquid and gas. It will be included in the last session of the project called: “How much do I know?”. 

The final session will consist of a collaboration task out of the classroom connecting fifth graders as mentors of third graders. The collaborative task will be named “Fifth-graders mentor their younger schoolmates”. Taking advantage of the Natural science lesson that third graders are taking about matter and their states, fifth graders will have a chance to help them by using ICT. 

In the collaboration work ““Fifth-graders mentor their younger schoolmates” that I suggested, the fifth graders students will explore the states of matter which is the main topic of my Open Digital Educational Project. Students will record an interactive video with a clear and dynamic explanation of the topic (The matter and its states) and the instructions for a macroscopic activity about the states of matter which are going to do with third graders in order to put into practice learned things. After the lesson and the activity all of them will have to write in their journals about the experience of sharing knowledge. The video will be made with the program called Wevideo. The video will be made with the program called Wevideo. This tool is very useful for making online videos and editing fun & easy. The activity will be part of the fifth grader’s teacher assessment. 

Here I leave you the visual metaphor (Poster) that I created. In order to create this I used the digital tool called Canva which is a tool utilized to create presentations, graphic content, posters, etc. This tool it is very interesting and I believe that it can have a lot of educational possibilities because of all the templates that offers.

Copia de MENTOR PROGRAM de Andrea Judit Pérez 

 By creating this visual metaphor, I wanted to show students the mentoring program. As you can see, the showed visual metaphor implies collaboration out of the classroom linking fifth graders students with third graders.

Thanks to this challenge I have had the opportunity to enrich my project. New useful tool learned! I really hope my work be useful for you too!

Thank you!!

Prototype your Open CLIL Educational Digital Project

Hello everybody!

In my last Post we learnt about the importance of analyzing in depth an educational project; analysing means finding its strengths and weaknesses and trying to figure out what I could do to take the most out of this project. By analysing and evaluating you could modify it and adapt it to your own profit. Now that we already analyzed an educational project, I think it's time for us to create one ourselves.

Today, I bring you my own open CLIL Educational Digital project. It is important to remember that this is just a prototype I created so it might need a re-examination. For that, I want you to take a look at it and give me your feedback and ideas for its improvement.

First, I will show you a template that can be helpful in the development of a CLIL educational project. This is the frame that I used to create the prototype of my own CLIL educational digital project. 

My project is called: MATTER IN OUR WORLD, and it is created for Fith grade of primary education.

Besides having to write the title and the level of the class that will benefit from the project, these are the following sections that you can find within the template:

1. The number of sessions of your project
2. The areas in which your project can be included
3.  Aims of the whole project and 4 Cs of CLIL: content, communication, cognition and culture
4. Key competencies
5. Assessment criteria including evaluation tools and the standards of learning
6. Skills developed through the project
7. The setting of the sessions
8. The final outcome or challenge of the project

Every point in the template is clearly structured and explained in depth.

Finally, to summarize the prototype of my open CLIL educational digital project, I will share with you an animated video, in which you will see the parts that need to be included when structuring or creating the prototype of your own educational project.

So, this was my Open CLIL educational digital project prototype, I really hope you like it!
See you in the next post!!

ICT CHALLENGE: Analyse, evaluate and present a reference open educational project

Analyze, evaluate and present a reference open educational project

Hello everyone! Here I am again!

Last week in ICT class we were working in a challenge about analyzing and evaluating an open educational project. Today, I bring you an analysis of an educational Project, which was designed to work on the English contents for the third grade of Primary school education. This project is called "Transport and pollution" and it was created by Teresa Guzmán Carmona. It is a complete didactic unit about means of transport and the best way of using transports. All the resources are available in GoogleDrive.

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B20ksNwtbkQFOWVJT2R6RkpqV1U&usp=sharing

I decided to choose this project due to my concern about taking care of the planet. Apart from the English content related to Transport vocabulary, I should specify that the main purpose is educating our students of the importance to implement behavior beneficial to the care of the environment.

I implemented a didactic unit in my internship related to the planet Earth and its protection and I guess that’s why I am into this matter of concern.

The content objectives will be:

- Identify different types of transport and their characteristics.

- Classify the transports and their incidences on the environment.

- Decide the most suitable mean of transport for each situation.

- Evaluate their own learning process through different tools.

Now, it's time to analyze this educational project deeper. For this purpose, I will use a rubric which has been made for evaluating if a project is a Gold Standard PBL or not.

Key knowledge, understanding and success skills

 The didactic unit consist of three parts. The first one is focused on vocabulary about transport. The second one is focused on interactive activities with the new vocabulary learnt. While they are doing these interactive activities they are reviewing and learning words and language structures (comparative and superlative structures and structures of action) they are going to use for the final project and also for their daily life.  Finally, the third one is focused on the project, which is a debate and the making of a poster with the means of transport and its environmental impact.

As we know “Means of transport” is included in the Spanish curriculum and “How can we protect the environment” too. Personally, I think is a good idea to connect this two topics considering that this gives a cause for talking about the expelling of CO2 and the global warming. Related to the cognitive skills I can see a lot of thinking skills developed by the different activities proposed (match game, mind map or debate and poster) such as remembering, identifying, ordering, defining, comparing, reasoning and evaluating. The students will accomplish some activities individually and some others in pairs or groups.

Challenging problems or questions

I consider that there is not really any question to begin with. A challenging problem to begin with this topic could be: Do you think is important to take into account the mean of transport we use every day? How can we protect our planet related to the means of transport?

Furthermore, the activities are decontextualized and the level of difficulty is not clear. Once are too easy for third graders while others are too difficult. Apart from this, the didactic unit is focused on developing lower order thinking skills than high order thinking skills.

Sustained inquiry

The activities are gradually planned from the less challenging ones which demand lower order thinking skills to the more challenging ones. However, the students don’t have to generate questions, use different resources, ask further questions, or develop their own answers. They work in the final project putting into practice what has been learned before and the text they have already read without any self-question to begin with. All of the questions and task are generated by the teacher. An alternative would be to prompt our students in pairs to write about “green alternatives” or “how can we pollute the air less?”.

Authenticity

As far as I concerned, I think this project is based on their real context and it is meaningful for students. Through this project, student have the opportunity to learn about the relationship between means of transport and the environment. I think that through this topic we could educate them about environmentally harmful methods of travel and an offer them a viable, 'green' alternative. Children love to talk about the planet Earth and its protection and means of transport can be the closest way to them.

Student voice and choice

I consider totally optimal this point. The students will have to work dynamically and cooperatively guided by the teacher. This are examples of the activities they will implement:

      -  Brainstorming

      -  Word play and matching games

      -  Make their own phrases using comparative structures

      -  Make a mindmap

      -  Create a display

      -  Debate

Reflection

There is no reflection about what and how they are learning, and on the project’s design and implementation. A possible alternative to improve this point could be to create a learning diary or to provide them with a rubric with some evaluating aspect to reflect on.

Critique and revision

As I said before, the students will have to work dynamically and cooperatively guided by the teacher. So, the process includes the student’s opportunity to receive feedback from the teacher but not to give it. To be more completed I recommend to have a learning diary in order to reflect on what they do and how and a presentations of the poster in groups., in order to receive and give feedback.

 The public product

The public product is not done properly. There is a final project about what they have learnt, which is a display, but it is not publish beyond the students. In my opinion, the teacher should design a session in which the displays were presented to the class. In this case the critique and revision will be completed by the both sides (students and teacher) and the public product will be properly done.  

In conclusion, the initial idea of the educational project was really good. The fact that it presents the relationship between means of transport and how can we protect the environment. However, in my opinion, the didactic unit has not been well design.

Now, to represent the key points of this analysis I have used the online tool Genial.ly here you can see the final result, I hope you enjoyed it:

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ICT CHALLENGE: Collaboration.

The best way to really get to know someone is to learn what they do (with their spare time), what they like (probably also shows up in what they do) and, sometimes, some tricky questions which are good to break the ice as well.

Here is Blanca. I have known her thanks to my Master's degree. Today I would like you to know her a little bit better by an interview I have made to her.  The interview starts with some tricky questions to break the ice and continues with questions related to educational matter.

But first, Would you like to see her?

Here it goes..

Blanca García

Who is she?

She is Blanca García, she is 22 years old and she is from Murcia. She decided to settle down in Madrid in order to do her Master's degree in Bilingualism.

The step by step process:

1. We designed the interview.
2. We did the interview and recorded it.
3. We created a personal account in Souncloud. We enblended the postcast.
4. We finally did the post following the step we have been said.

Self reflexion on learning:

Doing this challenge we have learnt about ourselves Podcasting on Soundcloud. It was an opportunity to know Soundcloud which is an online audio distribution platform. Also, we were working listening and speaking skills doing the interview.


Hope you like it!