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!