FINAL REFLECTION OF MY ADVENTURE IN ICT!

Hello everybody!

After a long trip travelling around the ICT world, I am pleased to inform you that this is the finish line! It has been a hard path where I have learnt many things, even I have surprised myself!

To finish this trip, I have created a final reflection abour the subject. To this end, I used Genially to do the presententation. It is one of the most useful tools that I have known during the course because it offers a great range of templates and options to whatever you want. Moreover you can use pictures, videos, animations...etc. 

In addition, I have added an audio clip to complete the task which is explained my learnin process an what challenges have been the most interesting for me. For this, I used Screencast. This tool has surprised me a lot because it allows you mix the sound with the video in an incredible easy way! I recommend you try it!

Here is my video of my final reflection about the subject. Hope you find it useful and interesting!

Without nothing more to add, I say see you soon!

Don't forget follow me on this blog and my Twitter profile: @gonzaalo10

CREATING A RUBRIC TO ASSESS MY E-PROJECT

Hello everybody!

Assesing is one  of the most important things of the learning process. It is key that students know how is growing their knowledge and, in this way, they learn from mistakes.

This time I have created the rubric for my e-project! For this task, I used "Quick rubric". I found this tool very useful and interesting because I didn't know this way to assess students. Its handle is incredible and you can create your rubrics very quickly. Students will be able see their progress in a very easy way!

My rubric consists on weighing levels which are: excellent (3 points), good (2 points) and poor (1point); and features to evaluate which are: Content, use of multimedia tools, dissemination, creativity, attractiveness, team work and e-portfolio.

Concerning to the challenge, I condider rubrics as one of the most useful tools to assess students.
Sometimes, students complain that their papers are graded unfairly. They don't understand why they receive the grades they do, and that produces an impact in the relationship teacher&student and produces lack of motivation. A rubric takes away most problems like these. With a rubric, students have a clear list of where they lost points on a project, so they don't have to wonder how they got the grade they did. In addition, in my future labour as a teacher, I will like my students to be active learners, as well as content creators and assessors. By doing a rubric to asses any peer´s work, I hope they can get a lot more out of the classroom experience.

Here is my rubric! Hope you find it useful and interesting!

WHAT TYPE OF READER AM I?

Hello everybody! 

As you already know, we are in the reading season! That's why this beautiful and useful way to get closer to the book's world. What is this beautiful way? Aurasma. This application allow us to increase the size of somenthing. We call it augmented reality, a digitally enhanced view of the real world. 

Thanks to Aurasma we can make that a photo or a poster comes to life through our mobile phones or other devices. The process is very easy: Download the Aurasma App in your devices, point out to the screen and you will see how the reality change! 

In my case, I chose Harry Potter as my favourite book. The main reason for my election is that I love magic and fantastic books. In additon this story offers to the readers many values and advices for the life! It's absorbent and magic! 

Here is my trigger image used to do my augmented reality! You can follow me in Aurasma through my profile "GonzaloMon". Hope you like it! 

INTERACTIVE SLIDESHOW

Hello everybody!

I am here again to explain you the new challenge from our TIC subject. We have worked with the same group as in the two challenges before. If you don´t remember, the components of the group are @celiagon92, @GMEestrellaa, @lainez_ortega, @gonzaalo10 and me (@cristinarisueno).

For this new task, we have decided to make a tutorial about how to use Piktochart in order to help our students to take advantage of it. We are not going to extend more talking about Piktochart because you can see all its details in the tutorial. However, we have to say that we have chosen Piktochart since we claim that our children might be able to create their own infographic and we have used it before successfully.

First of all, we have screencasted our computer while we are recording orally step by step the process to use Piktochart. We think that, in this way our pupils will be familiarised with it better. To do that, we have used the free tool called aTubeCatcher. We have found that program suitable for this task because it is very easy to use and it has all the features we were looking for. However, a disadvantage that we have found is that aTubeCatcher doesn´t allow us to edit videos. For that reason, we have used the program Moviemaker and we have also add a final image with our Twitter handles in order to give the viewers the possibility to contact us with their doubts and questions.

You can see the tutorial here:

I hope you enjoyed it! See you very soon!!

OUR VIDEOCHALLENGE: TIC AND THE MAGIC PLANET!

Hello everybody!

This time, for this group task, we had to become both writers and film directors! We were requested to create a clip about our common e-project but, first of all, we had to plan what it would be about. Therefore we started to create a storyboard with our main ideas. As our topics were about the Earth we decided to create a character based on the universe. What could be better than an alien? Everybody wants to know about life from outer space! That’s how TIC was born, our main character. Can you guess why he is called TIC?

To create our storyboard we chose the web tool Storyboard That. Since the moment we started to use this tool, we were surprised how amazing the pictures were: backgrounds, characters and different shapes, which allow you to create exactly what you want. What we liked the most was the possibility of modifying the position of the main character, which makes the story more real.

However, while using the tool, we discovered that a normal account doesn’t allow you to create a board with more than six scenes. This is why we had to shorten the story. It was not a problem because the final clip will include the whole story.This storyboard is a guideline for the video challenge and it is meant to be a tale the teacher could tell their students at class.

Here you have our storyboard! Are you ready to meet TIC?

Made with Storyboard That

Second, we started to film the scenes, but… We needed an actor! Who was the actor? Me (@gonzaalo10) became TIC thanks to our make-up team! Look at the awesome result!

                                  

Then, we were ready to record the video challenge. For this purpose we use decided to use the chroma key technique. By using Camtasia and this technique, we could substitute the green background for a picture of our choice. Regarding Camtasia, it seems quite difficult to use at rhe very beginning. However, after practicing with it for a while we discovered all its possibilities. We downloaded the free version with a free trial for 30 days. Thanks to Camtasia, we have learned how to use chroma key and how to organize the video clips, the pictures and the audios in order to get the final video. The only problem we didn´t like about this tool was the fact that, because of the free version, a watermark appeared in our video and the quality of it decreased.

Despite this little problem, the result was fantastic! We created a video in which TIC travels through the Solar system and discovers the Earth and its layers. Tic also has doubts and makes questions during the video in order to encourage participation in our pupils. The teacher could stop the video whenever TIC makes one question to let the pupils answer him. This video can be used to introduce a topic, so the teacher can know about their prior knowledge, or to make a review at the end of the topic. Hope you enjoy it!

With this mission we have participated in the nationwide educative project The ESL Times. It is an English digital magazine that encourage participation while learning and enjoying.

Finally, I would like to say that, despite a few problems in the editing process, I have enjoyed this experience a lot! It has been really funny to record the video. I have certanly laugh a lot :). Moreover, I have also learned about the chroma key technique. It is something you always see in the movies' making off but you never think that is something you could also do at home! It has been increadibly interesting!

A LIVE CLIL CHOCOTALK!

Good afternoon to all of you :)

On the 7th of April, at 19 Spanish time, some of my university peers and I went live on Youtube to carry out one of our group task. This task consisted of participating in a collaborative project called Chococharlas. This project fosters the participation, opinion and inclusion of the entire educative community by organizing online meetings on Youtube or similar video platforms. In these meeting, people discuss topics related to inclusive education, special needs, new methodologies and so forth while eating sweets. 

The first thing we had to do was assigning roles. One of us would be the speaker (the one who will talk in the live debate), other two members would be the ones in charge of disseminating and commenting the event in the social networks before and during the live, and the other two people would be the content curators, what is to say the ones who collect all that happened during this activity.

The roles in my group were the followings: 

- @GMEstrellaa and me (@gonzaalo10) were the content curators.

- @lainez_ortega and @cristinarisueno were the ones who disseminate the information.

- Finally, @celiagon92 was the speaker. 

Secondly, in order to prepare this task, each work group had to think of how CLIL can contribute to having happier bilingual learners.

The speakers of each group were: 
@rpeinadog, @patimasie, @nepeuspu, @lolaberralraya, @Alvaro_Gope,@teacher_inma, @GLHmaster and I).
We met on Google Hangouts, along with our teacher @mjgsm two hours earlier before the event to prepare the live. We went live at 19:00 pm and the chocotalk started. We talked about four main topics regarding CLIL methodology: 

1. Advantages and disadvantages of CLIL: the main conclusions were the need of working cross-curricularly, despite the difficulty of it (specially in Secondary Education) and the possibility of solving this problem by working with projects in collaboration with the entire educative community.
2. Social and emotional benefits of CLIL: Patricia remarked the importance of Krashen's Theory based on language acquisition, that establishes the need of motivating students to learn. Besides, emotional intelligence plays and important role in education since we, as teachers, are working with humans, as Rubén highlighted.
3. ICT in the CLIL classroom: we talked about some tools that can be used in the classroom, including video games. However, the main conclusion was that the most important aspects of ICT are the purpose they are used for and the students' learning process rather than the tools. Moreover, Inma added that using ICT is not time consuming but just the opposite.
4. The last topic was relating to our e-projects: we described briefly each project in order to give ideas and examples of how ICT could be incorporate in the CLIL classroom. 

While the speakers were debating, the rest members of the group were disseminating the event on Twitter, sharing our comments and conclusions and giving their opinions. You can see a summary of our tweets and the entire process made with Storify here: https://storify.com/GMEstrellaa/the-chocotalk-event

As a content curator, I was a little bit overwhelmed with the collection of all the information exposed in the talk; but thanks to an incredible tool as Storify, we could collect all the information perfectly through Twitter. 
Having concluded the task, I hace realised that it was an incredible experience! Moreove, I am so proud of my classmates who did an excellent job and they will be fantastic teachers in the future, for sure!


Finally, here you have our CLIL chocotalk. Hope you enjoy it! :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWyv1b63yxI#action=share

THE EARTH'S ADVENTURES INTERACTIVE INFOEDUGRAPHIC.

Hello everybody!

For this task we had to work in groups to create an InfoEduGraphic. The members of my group are: @lainez_ortega, @cristinarisueno, @GMEstrellaa and @celiagon92. To do this we surfed the InfoEduGraphic Project Site to look for tips, instructions and ideas. 
Since all our e-projects (Planets in the Solar System, The Hydrosphere, Environmental care, The Mysteries of Earth) are connected with Social Science (planets, Earth, landscapes and so forth), we decided to make an infographic as an introductory tool for a common topic. Our main learning outcome is for our students to know about the planets of the Solar System, The Earth`s layers (Hydrosphere and atmosphere) and landforms as well as environmental care.

First we assigned the roles:

- @GMEstrellaa was the coordinator. She had to direct and check that each member did his part of the job. She also encouraged us to keep working on the infographic.

- @lainez_ortega and @cristinarisueno were the secretaries. They made and create the InfoEduGraphic using Piktochart and Thinglink.

- (@celiagon92) was the speaker. This is why she is spreading our work by Twitter and through this blog, as well as my classmates ones.

- Finally, I @gonzaalo10 was the supervisor and I was in charge of controlling the creation process and remembering each person's task. We also had to take notes of everybody's ideas.  

To accomplish this task, we had to face two problems:

How to link all our e-projects' contents: After thinking about it for a while, we decided to structure the infoedugraphic from the most asbtract content (the space) to the most concrete one (landforms). This way, we could include all our Social Science contents in a structured and well-organised way. In order to motivate them, we added a badge that they could get once they finished the learning process.

How to adapt the contents to the different school's levels: this challenge was harder to face but finally we though of making an interactive InfoEduGraphic. What does this mean? We did not only a infographic (which is an image) but also an interactive image. By doing this, we foster an active learning and allow students of different grades to access to different activities of different difficulty. The teacher could guide all this learning process to do the activities corresponding each course.

How did we create our InfoEduGraphic?

We decided to use the tool Piktochart due to the fact that some members of our group had already used it and they said that it could fit the purpose of the project perfectly. It gives you the possibility to create infographics, posters, presentations or reports depending on what we need. The one we chose is an infographic as it is divided into different blocks which were suitable for each difficulty level. The quality of the pictures and icons that the tool offers is quite high and very attractive, exactly what we were looking for: to captivate students’ attention. Finally, we would like to highlight that Picktochart would be perfect if it offered the possibility of making those graphics interactives (pictures with movements, sounds, link to other webpages and so on) instead of being just an image.  

Once we had our infographic finished we went to make it interactive to promote and active learning and to increase pupils' motivation. We did this part of the project using the online tool Thing Link. With this tool you can make an interactive image by putting links in small spots inside your picture. Therefore, we included a video to expand knowledge, interactive activities to review each content and an Arts and Crafts activity about environmental care.

As you can imagine, this tool is inreadibly useful to create you own CLIL materials because, by linking resources, you can work the 4Cs. However, we think this tool would be nicer if it offered a wider variety of forms to insert the links, not only spots. 

From this task, we can conclude that Infographics have a lot of uses in our classrooms. They can be used to introduce content, to review vocabulary, to explain the steps of a process or activity, to help children with special educational needs. Infographics present information in a neat and visual way that can clarify students' doubts.Moreover, students can also create their own infographics to learn about content and ICT skills.

Our final artifact is this amazing interactive InfoEduGraphic to introduce and learn about different contents regarding our planet. Click on the spots to see the activities: