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: 

http://bluesquarething.co.uk/geography/dragdropmap/europeweathermap.htm 

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". 

*Retrieved from https://website.mysimpleshow.com 

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.

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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!