March 26, 2017

Prototyping an open educational project


Hello everybody!

How did you find my last post?
As I told you, I'll shortly share a whole project for you to get inspiration from. For the moment. I bring you a prototype that of course needs to be improved, but that gives you an idea of how I'm going to approach it.

 I've used the template below provided by the teacher of my Masters. I've uploaded to Issuu in order to share it with you, a great publishing tool, to share documents, that I've discovered. It's very easy to use since you just have to upload the pdf and then give it a title and a description. It's absolutely free and you can log in with a Facebook account or a Google account. 
  

As you can see, I've decided to do a project on the weather and atmospheric phenomena for second graders which is based on the Region of Madrid's curriculum. The specific objectives are: 
  • Describe the weather including specific data such as temperatures, precipitation and wind
  • Explain the causes of certain atmospheric phenomena
  • Identify and use different tools to measure and record information about the weather
  • Compare the weather changes across the seasons
  • Compare the differences in the weather of different countries from Europe
  • Make predictions
  • Create a weather map with ICT and record a TV weather forecast program
It's going to be a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) project. CLIL is a method of teaching based on integrating content with a non-native language. It has 4 components that are called the "4 Cs":
Content: the contents from the curricular subjects that sometimes may appear linked (cross-curricular link)
Communication: learners need to develop communicative skills for the curricular subjects. It is necessary to analyse the content for its language demands and to present it in an understandable way.
Cognition: promotion of thinking skills
Culture: it involves the understanding of our own culture as well as other cultures and the development of positive attitudes and awareness of the responsibilities as citizens.

 I've used Prezi, a presentation tool, to show you how I am going to work with the 4 Cs within my project. It's another tool I find very useful to use at school and it's very visual and easy to use for the students. There is a free version that you can use and the only thing is that you cannot download the presentations.


Finally, although you have probably seen it in the template above, I'm going to explain a little bit the final outcome I'd like the students to create. First they are going to create a digital weather map. It has been difficult to find an online tool for free to do it but I eventually achieved and is this one: 
If you go through it, you will be impressed of how easy is to use it even for kids!
The second step will be to record a TV weather forecast program that they will prepare in groups of 4-5. On child will be the presenter, another one the one in charge of projecting the map, another one for recording it and the other two will be prompters. 
In order to reach that task, we will be working throughout the project on the description and illustration of atmospheric phenomena, measurement, recording and interpreting data and reading maps.

I've made the following video summarizing the basic aspects of my project. When looking for a tool to create it, I wanted to use Pixiclip, however It didn't work with me so I went for Mysimpleshow. I chose the free version and then in the following step the "explain your vision and strategy option". 

It gives you then a whole templete to complete and then some icons to add and that's all. It's very easy even for students, isn't it? The problem is that you can only choose the default voice unless you pay for a pro-user. Anyway the good thing is that it's a native voice reading your tapescript! Have a look at the video of my prototype and you will verify it yourself.
***
REFLECTION ON WHAT I'VE LEARNED WITH THIS CHALLENGE
With the experience of prototyping an open educational project I've learned that before creating any project we have to make a prototype of what we exactly want and start looking for the resources available for us to use. For instance I knew I wanted to do the digital map but then I has been difficult to find out a website that children can easily use. 
Apart from that, I've used 3 different tools brand new for me that I've found interesting and especially useful for explaining my ideas visually: Issuu, Prezi and MySimpleshow. I really encourage you to try them and check it yourself. In fact, I've also discovered a tool called Easel.ly to make mind maps that I couldn't use for the 4 Cs because it was a lot of information for an image. However I will use it in the future or maybe with the students.
Now folks I have to say goodbye! I hope you have found this post helpful and feel free to make suggestions for my project!
See you soon!
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March 23, 2017

Analysing an Open Educational Project

Hi there again!

Are you interested in project based learning?

I’ve been recently analyzing a project for Third of Secondary Education and I'd like to share some of my conclusions.
To start with, I’ve followed the rubric below which is the one provided by my teacher of the Master’s. I have to say that it’s a very complete one if you ever need to use one.



The project is "English Speaking Cities" is an English educational project from Proyecto EDIA for Third Secondary Education students, that you can find in this webpage:


This particular project is about Dublin and it suggests a journey around the most famous parts of this city with different tasks at each location.

Like in all project based learning, the students have to come up with a final outcome which this time is about creating, publishing and leaking out a multimedia campaign for protecting the environment and being respectful with the nature. The following objectives are addressed within this project:
  • To acquire vocabulary about weather, animals and the environment
  • To design a multimedia campaign to protect the environment and to be environmentally friendly
  • To learn different things about the city of Dublin, capital city of the Republic of Ireland
  • It seems to be a really interesting project for the students isn’t it?
Now, there we go with the analysis in depth.

KEY KNOWLEDGE, UNDERSTANDING, AND SUCCESS SKILLS
The project offers a great variety of the knowledge that the official curriculum of Madrid establishes for the students of this age.

You can check the curriculum in this website :




English and ICT are the subjects that it most covers since it’s a project thought for that purpose but it also involves Geography (they are learning about another country and another city, provinces, flags, they have to do a map, and of course the main object is to design a campaign for protecting the environment), History (they will learn history of Dublin through the different monuments and important places of the city they are going to visit and especially with the starting video), Literature (there is one challenge related to the Trinity College and The Book of Kells), Biology (with the visit to the zoo), Maths and Economy (for instance they are asked to calculate the cost of a room at the Croke Park Hotel, or to count the people walking through Grafton St), Arts (with the visit to the National Gallery of Ireland, Abbey theatre, and the visit to Irish Film Institute, even in the Cathedral they might learn something about Arts).

One more thing I must highlight at this point is the great use that within this project is made of the critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, public speaking and self management skills. The students are going to greatly develop these skills, something very important in the 21st century education.
Here it's an example of what I mean with learning Geography (Dublin is the capital city...) and thinking skills (Do you recommend...?)



CHALLENGING PROBLEM OR QUESTION
We can consider the task that the students must tackle along the project a meaningful and engaging one since it’s based on a real problem that concerns all the population. Furthermore, it’s open-ended enough to develop the autonomy and creativity of the students as well as show all what they’ve learnt.

However, from my point of view, it’s not very related to the journey to Dublin they propose to do in each session.

In spite of this, the project is adequate to the age of the students although it requires autonomous students who have some experience in working within this approach.


SUSTAINED INQUIRY
The project is very well structured with driving questions, most of which are open and involve thinking skills, that guide the student along the whole project.

I would indeed say that there are many questions and that fact makes it difficult for the students to come up with further ones and consequently being creative on that aspect. For instance:


All in all, it seems to me a very active project where the students are not going to get bored but rather motivated to answer every question using the resources provided.

AUTHENTICITY
I can assure that this is a real-world project since I spent last year in Dublin and I know very well all the places suggested.

Moreover, nowadays we are suffering some of the consequences of not taking enough care of the environment, for instance the pollution, and we need to urgently raise awareness among the students and the population about the importance of being environmentally friendly. For this reason, the final outcome that this project aims is not only a substantial fact but also an essential one.

In addition to these, it’s unbelievable the amount of different digital tools they are encouraged to find and use within a contextualised learning. For example they are asked to do a digital poster, to use twitter all the time to share their discoverments and work, to do presentations, to use a blog to reflect on what they’ve learnt (learning diary), to use Google Sites, websites to brainstorm in groups, etc.




The only thing I find less authentic is the phonetic section and the one about quantifiers because it gets out of the project itself and I consider it’s not contextualized enough.

STUDENT VOICE AND CHOICE
"English Speaking Cities: Dublin" is a project where all the steps that the students must follow are precisely defined and explained in a way that gives not much freedom to the students. I find this appropriate because otherwise they would get lost very easily trying to deal with the new information and new tools without explicit guidelines.

Nonetheless, they do have spaces to act freely such as in any open-ended question or questions of opinion, and obviously in the campaign they have to design. They also are encouraged to make decisions for instance on what tool they want to use for particular activities (as it can be seen in the image above).

In the end, the students are given opportunities enough to express what they think, to develop creativity, self-management and to make decisions, some of the major problems that employees of many companies have to face up nowadays.

I have selected some examples below.

REFLECTION
Through a blog turned into a “learning diary” the students reflect on what they’ve learnt and keep track of their progress. From my little experience on doing this, I can claim that it actually works, and I consider that only by being aware of our own mistakes we can learn and improve for the future.

Apart from that, in almost every task there are one or more higher order questions that invite reflection and critical thinking. At this point, I’d like to remark the importance of creating this habit of questioning and critically evaluating things rather than taking them for granted. In fact, within this project they’ve got what they call “The thinking routine”, an excellent activity for reflection.


CRITIQUE AND REVISION
As it should happen in any PBL approach, the students are given at the beginning of the project the stated, assessment rubrics that are going to be used in order to evaluate the different tasks. In this particular case we find the following rubrics:


These tools can be used by the students to self-evaluate their work and to evaluate other classmates’ work and giving them some feedback. In fact, there are certain tasks where the students are wisely asked to assess others using the rubrics.

In addition to these, teachers are provided with a document on Didactic Guidelines to carry out the project, including evaluation patterns. They may use it together with the rubrics to provide the students with the necessary feedback.


As for the revision, it’s not very clear whether they are offered the opportunity to rectify possible mistakes or not. Personally, I’m of the opinion that they should be given this right at least once since it’s a demonstration of their interest on continuing learning and improving.

PUBLIC PRODUCT
Although I’ve previously said that it was difficult for me to find the relation between the project itself and the final outcome, I have to admit that students are very well trained throughout the different tasks and challenges to succeed in the completion of the final product. I also like the fact that their creation is something really useful that it might go to great lengths, because it’s the solution to a current issue that the population need to tackle.

Furthermore, they are supposed to present the final artifact to parents, other teachers and students, something that not only reinforces the contents learnt but that also develops self-confidence, public speaking skills and the feeling of pride and satisfaction with the job done.

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Drawing further conclusions, if I was interested in PBL before, now I’m very impressed of how wonderful it is and absolutely engaged. I encourage you to visit the following websites and verify it by yourself. I have learnt a lot and you will see it soon in my own open educational project!


I’ve also done this brief presentation summarizing all the ideas just in case you need to revise them in a short time. I’ve used GENIALLY because almost everybody knows perfectly Power Point and we are here to INNOVATE! So there you are I hope you enjoy it and don’t hesitate to contact me or comment for any doubts or suggestions.
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March 09, 2017

Engaged in flipped interviews

Hi there! 
I would like to set this blog in motion by presenting to you my latest discovery regarding ICT (Information and communication technologies), bilingualism and education. 
It's called a flipped interview and it consists in working in pairs interviewing the partner to find the necessary information for, eventually, making a presentation of him or her to the world. 

The first step was pairing up the students. There are many ways of doing it but we found it interesting to do it according to our shoes' sizes. The biggest size matched with the smallest one, the second biggest size with the second smallest one and so on. I had the pleasure of working with Ana who is a really nice colleague of mine, you will see later on. We gathered together and started to design the questions for our interview since they had to be the same for both. 


We decided to do this through  a Google Drive Document, which is an excellent tool for working simultaneously with somebody within the same document. Once we had it all done, we went ahead recording ourselves interviewing each other with our smartphones. Afterwards, we began to work on our own on the presentation of the other, and it was at this stage when I started to struggle with it. I wasn't sure about what to do with that audio because what I really wanted was a video; the thing was that none of us wanted to actually record a video of ourselves. I checked several websites in order to create a motion avatar that actually talked but it was rather difficult unless I spent money in certain apps. I finally went for making an avatar picture in this site: http://avatarmaker.com/. 


The following step was making the video. Since I wanted to try something brand new and I'd always used Movie Maker, I chose Powtoon (https://www.powtoon.com/home/g/es/) this time. If you don't know it, it's a free website to create videos that offers you a great variety of backgrounds, objects to insert in, topics and many useful things. In addition to these, it gives you the option to directly upload your project to Youtube. The only thing I struggled with, was that when uploading my recorded audio it was kind of delayed with regard to the images. I fortunately managed to fix it. And there we go, here you have my final outcome: 


Now you'll probably be asking yourself what the point on doing this at school is. Well, you'll be surprised of the many advantages it has:
  • The most important thing is that students love using ICT at school because it helps them to get away from routines and it's attracting for them. 
  • Teamwork is something they will benefit from in their future lives. In fact it's one of the so called 21st Century skills they should develop at school for their professional careers. Moreover, there is nothing more important than knowing their peers and improving the relaitonships. 
  • Creativity, which is one of the other 21st Century skills that we should target at schools, is also encouraged within this project. For instance Ana and me decided to give the project the form of a Radio program, but it could have been anything else. 
  • Even if they speak in Spanish, the final outcome must be in English so it's a really good practice of the 4 different skills of the target language: writing, listening, speaking and reading. 

And that's all for today folks! I hope you find it interesting and start applying it in your English lessons. You're students will be excited! 

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