Making things collaborative and visual!

Hi there again!

How are you finding my blog? I hope it is useful. You can also participate by commenting and making suggestions. In fact, today I'm precisely going to write about something related to sharing ideas and working together; it is cooperative and collaborative learning.

But, what do these terms exactly mean?

According to Joanne M. McInnerney and Tim S. Roberts, collaborative learning is a learning method where the students have to work in pairs or groups to achieve a common goal respecting at the same time each individual's contribution (McInnerney & Roberts, 2004). Cooperative learning is similar but it isn't exactly the same. Cooperative learning refers to working together in small groups in order to maximize their own learning as well as the other peers' learning (McInnerney & Roberts, 2004). 

You will probably understand it better in the following Venn's Diagram made with Easel.ly:

You can also check the following website for more detailed information: http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/coopcollab/

As you know, we nowadays live in a world where it's absolutely necessary to work collaboratively so as to share knowledge, to learn from each other and achieve greater goals. In fact, collaboration is one of the 21st century skills that teachers are encouraged to develop in their students. For this reason, I've decided to enrich my project about The weather turning it into a collaborative project. Moreover, I consider that it's time to change the concept that many teachers have of the fact that the process of teaching-learning has to be something behind closed doors. Who has never run out of ideas and has searched the net looking for inspiration? 

We never stop learning, for that reason we need to cooperate with other teachers in order to learn from each other and become better ones. I'm starting to share my knowledge through this blog and in the next post I will write about partnership and collaborative projects deeply. For the moment, I'm going to get my prototype ready to become a collaborative project by following the steps below:

Look for one or more tasks that involve collaborative learning within the classroom. 

Connect with other schools from Spain and the rest of Europe in order to work together in gathering and sharing the information required to complete a mission. 

Back to the class, reflect on what we have learned and prepare a final presentation to share it with our school and our partner schools. 

Hereafter, I show you how I'm going to apply these steps to my project turning it into a collaborative project. I have used Piktochart to do this presentation.

The reason for doing a presentation like this is to show the usefulness of visuals when presenting new information to anybody, specially to children. If we give them thick texts without visual support, they are going to get lost easily and probably they are not going to get the meaning of it. By using visuals we can catch their attention, motivate them to read it and help them to organize the information contained. 

Last but not least, since I'm talking about visuals to make information clearer, I'm going to show you a brief metaphor of the enrichment of my open educational project made with Canva.

The weather by @crishesgarden

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SELF REFLECTION

Thanks to this challenge I had an initial contact with three different tools:

• Easel.ly: it's a free online resource to make diagrams. It is very useful to present information in a way that helps to remember it later on. It is provided with many different diagrams that you can use. I have chosen Venn's Diagram since I wanted to emphasize the similarities and differences of the concepts of collaborative learning and cooperative learning. It can be used with children because it is very simple. 
• Piktochart: it's an infographic maker that is also free and full of resources. You can choose working with a template or start something brand new. I started using the template called Education Basic but I eventually changed all. What I most like from this website is the amount of icons and backgrounds available to use. It doesn't matter the topic because they have all kinds of things! 
• Canva: it's an amazing tool for designing banners, flyers, posters, advertisements, or anything graphic. Like in Piktochart, you have many models and elements free to use or get inspired and you can create impressing outcomes. I have fallen in love with this tool since I can do anything I want in a beautiful way. I will continue using it for sure! Moreover, it offers the possibility to download the images created, something that I wasn't able to do so far. 
• Apart from those ones, I used Smore to create a flyer where I uploaded the image of Canva, however I eventually didn't use it due to the fact that it seemed overwhelming. I will try to improve using it more efficiently. 

I knew the importance of using visual support in class in order to make it easier for the students to learn the contents. Nevertheless, by visiting my peer's blogs and developing my own visual metaphor, I experienced the range of advantages it has and the variety of tools, such as the ones above, we count on to make plenty of things with/for the students. Some of the advantages might be:

• The information is presented in an organized way
• They help to remember information
• Any difficult content can be easily understood
• They catch the attention and motivate the learner
• They require synthesizing the main ideas
• They may become a strategy of learning for the future ("learn to learn")

Finally, as far as PBL is concerned, I have learned so much about collaborative learning because, apart from the things mentioned in the post, I've also discovered other things that for the moment are not suitable for my project, but that are pretty useful for future projects. I'm referring for instance to service-learning, an approach where the students learn through solving real-life problems that take place in their community. If you go to the following webpage you will find out more information with regard to this concept:

https://www.edutopia.org/blog/what-heck-service-learning-heather-wolpert-gawron

I also visited some of the projects in this site to get an idea of what collaborative projects were like, and I was particularly amazed with this one 

http://emociolabras.blogspot.com.es/2014/11/el-proyecto.html; 

because it fosters creativity, something that many schools insist on eliminating. Besides, I'm a poetry lover and that fact caught also my attention.

Now it's time to continue working on my project! I hope you enjoyed reading this post although it has taken longer than I expected!

See you soon bilingualism gardeners!

Bibliography used:

Joanne M. McInnerney, Tim S. Roberts (2004). Collaborative or cooperative learning?. In Online collaborative learning: theory and practice. Chapter IX (pp. 205 - 206). Idea group publishing. Retrieved from: http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/39314588/_Tim_S._Roberts__Online_Collaborative_Learning_ThBookSee.org.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1491177538&Signature=p81HLIRqoav5cd7eUl0TVCvnOJ4%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DOnline_Collaborative_Learning_O_C_L_Theo.pdf (on the 31st of March 2017).