Looking for a partner!

Good morning everyone!

Have you already started to think of creating your own educational projects? I honestly encourage you to try it, you will enjoy it!

Today, I'm going to continue with collaborative learning. If you still don't know what it is, I recommend you to read my last entry where I explained it.

The next step I'm going to take regarding collaborative learning and my open educational project is to try to collaborate in other people's projects with my own project. It may sound weird to you, but I'm going to explain it.

When I first started to prototype my educational project, I was just thinking on carrying it out with a group of children in a class. However, later on, I discovered collaborative learning and I felt like turning it into a collaborative project, so I started to look for activities that involved collaboration among the children and with children from other schools. Now, I want to go a step further and take part in other people's projects, collaborating with them by sharing my project and adapting it if necessary to accomplish all the requirements. 

First, I have visited several projects in the net and I have to say that it's been difficult to choose one since each of them has something different that I like. I'm going to show you a brief review of the ones that impressed me the most: 

• The 30 goals challenge: it's a collaborative project for educators all over the world, where they are suggested to reach certain goals a year, in order to transform their teaching, and share it on the blog. For instance, last year this was the list:

What I like about this project is that it's extremely useful for teachers like me that are at the very beginning of their career, and would like to learn successful practices, as well as any educator who really wants to innovate in his or her lessons and get better results.

• "No me cuentes historias, dibújamelas" ("Don't tell me stories, draw them"): it's a project about visual thinking that seeks educators worldwide who design, produce and share visual narratives drawn combining images and words. Visual thinking is a powerful tool that consists of connecting ideas through mind maps created with simple pictures.

What I like about this project is the importance it gives to visual support. As I told you in the previous post, visuals are indispensable to make the content understandable, and teachers should take this into consideration in the development of their lessons.

• "Tertulias con sabor a chocolate" ("chocolate chats): it's a collaborative project that intends to promote the dialogue among all the members of the educational community in order to reflect, improve and create new projects. It caught my attention because conversations is something that is currently disappearing in our society, where it's included the school. However, it's extremely important not only for communication but also for developing tolerance, respect and other values. 

I eventually decided to go for "The ESL Times" because it is the one that best matches with the project I'm creating. As you can infer from its name, this project is a digital magazine where different members of the educational community (teachers and students) share articles about their teaching-learning experiences in English. I like it because it turns the idea of collaboration into a great reality where people of different ages and with different roles (teachers and students) are learning from each others' experiences. And this was exactly what I was looking for, to share my ideas in order to help other people that perhaps one day could become my inspiration. In this way, both of us are going to benefit from each other.

Once I already knew the project I'm going to collaborate with, and after having filled the registration form in, it was time to work on the elevator pitch I wanted to send them presenting my project. If you don't know it, an elevator pitch is a very short speech (in this case recorded) used as a technique for finding financial support, selling a product, define a process, etc. I've used it with an educational purpose which is to explain how my project could contribute to "The ESL Times" running project. 
Before recording the video, I drafted what I wanted to say in a post-it that you can see below. 

The reason for choosing a post-it was that since it is smaller than a regular sheet I was going to do it briefer. 
Then, as you can see, there are 4 steps to follow in order to do an elevator pitch:

• Hook: introduction to catch the audience attention and prepare them for the speech
• Problem: definition of the problem, main concern, need or current situation
• Solution: explanation of the solution or approach to the problem and why it is different and better than others.
• Close: What are you going to do next? And talk also about what it means to you.

Finally, I recorded the video with my smartphone and edited it with Windows Movie Maker, because reading other classmates posts, I saw that with WeVideo it gets a watermark. Then, I uploaded it to YouTube, and there you are the final outcome: 

My reflection:

Through this challenge I have mainly known some collaborative open educational projects with real students that work amazingly well and that I will keep in mind for my future career. You should also visit them and verify it by yourself. 

Apart from that, I have gone on developing myself as an innovative teacher drafting and recording an elevator pitch, a technique that for sure I will use some day whenever I become a teacher, because it's useful to learn to summarise and explain things briefly, essential skills to learn to learn and strategies for the future of the students. At the beginning, I thought that it would be a challenge to draft such a short speech since last year I used to give speeches of about 5 minutes. But, I eventually wrote it quite fast, maybe because we had previously rehearsed it in class. In spite of this, and reflecting on the job done, I admit that part of the solution appears in the problem and that it lacks a comment on what I am going to do next. I will take this into consideration for future improvements in the following one.

In addition to this, I'm taking the important step of sharing my ideas with other people as well as learning from them, something I think it's the essence of education and it should be part of any teacher's life. 
I will hopefully tell you how everything is going in the next post!
In the meantime, I recommend you to keep everything collaborative!