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:

CLIL E-PROJECT PROTOTYPE

Hello everybody!

After learning to evaluate the my colleagues's e-book about animals, I decided to create my own e-project. In this case, it's about "The Hydrosphere". Why did I chose this topic? I thought that this topic had a lot of possibilites to develop. In addition, the vocabulary, processes and features of the hydrosphere are key in the curriculum of Primary Education. Moreover, I can use many different resources and applications to work the contents, hence I think it's a very rich topic in learning.

Here is the link of my e-project!: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uYm4zJl7OR6nNL4drNMplIOXnFCY56oNrB8A6OBXkHE/edit?usp=sharing

Regarding to the creation of my prototype videoclip, I used Pow Toon because, in my opinion, it's one the most useful tools to record a videoclip for children. It's very visual and easy to handle. Moreover, it offers a great quantity of templates with many images, animations, shapes...etc. I have tried to be as concise as possible to attract better the client attention.

Here is the ling of my protptype!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnMnPhiqizY&feature=em-upload_owner

I hope you like and find it useful! 

Best regards!

                             

EVALUATING CLIL E-PROJECTS

Hello everybody!

Here is the link of the CLIL e-project chosen by me to evaluate it!: https://sites.google.com/site/clilanimals3g/

To carry out this challenge I decided to use the tool called Genially, a beatiful way to create multimedia presentations. It allows us to use many templates, images..etc. Moreover it offers us many options to  create whatever we want! Initially, it was a little bit complicated for me to master the operation of the tool but, once you have acquired  the skill to work with it, things run smoothly!

This activity has made my eyes open about the importance of the evaluation. It is key that children learn to evalutate their peers because, in this way, they will develop thier critical thinking and their capacity to judge!

Here is the e-project link!: http://www.genial.ly/View/Index/56e19d111561e809f06dab4f




I hope you find it interesting!

Best regards!

BECOME A CONTENT CURATOR

Hello everyone again!

As I said in the last entry, Pinterest is a very useful tool to share and find out new methodologies, resources and project. What is the another key thing for being a good teacher? Organise your learning, don't you?

Pinterest allows us to organise our favourite web sites, projects, articles or ideas for our class in an incredible easy way! All you have to do is create a new board and select the content that you want and pint it on your board. Extremely easy!

From now on you will have all your contents organised in the same place and it will be easy to find the information that you consider interesting for you and for you labour as a teacher!


Here is the link of my webmix. Have a look at Gonzalo's learning world, you will find it very useful!
https://es.pinterest.com/gonzalomonton/gonzalos-learning-world/

I hope you like it!

OPEN CLIL: BANK OF COMMON KNOWLEDGE

What are the most important tasks for being a teacher?

In my opinion, being in contact with new materials and resources is one of them, for sure! Nowadays, there are many tools that allow us to collect this kind of information and knowledge easily. We have to take into account that if we take advantaje of them, we will have a long road travelled!

Pinterest is one of the most useful tools is the teaching-learning world. Thanks to it we can be soaked of knowlege and know many new methodologies and resources. Whatever resources that you want to find out or investigate, it will be on Pinterest. It is one of the biggest banks of common knowledge online and a fantastic way to share with other people your concerns, projects, works, articles or web sites. I recommend you if you want to be a good teaching professional!

Here is the link of our board, made by Master's in Bilingual Education's students, called Open CLIL:
https://es.pinterest.com/mjgsm/open-clil/

And here are my first six pins shared in the board!:
https://es.pinterest.com/pin/269653096417231262/
https://es.pinterest.com/pin/269653096417231193/
https://es.pinterest.com/pin/269653096417231046/
https://es.pinterest.com/pin/269653096417230878/
https://es.pinterest.com/pin/269653096417230928/
https://es.pinterest.com/pin/269653096417230691/

Follow me on Pinterest in: gonzalomonton

You will find out many useful resources! Have a look at it!

Visita el perfil de Gonzalo de Pinterest.

CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE

 Before starting this entry I would like to answer two questions that I consider to be key for the understanding of the property sense.


- What do my license allow others to do with my CLIL e-materials?
I used this licence because I found it very useful to share and use material and information. In addition it has many possibilities for restrictions.
My lincence allows others to use my information or different contents created by me with the condition of  naming me. Moreover, people are not allowed to use the material for commercial purposes. I have not additional restrictions, so everybody will be able to use or share the material if they follow this two points.

- What are good ways to motivate our students to use Creative Commons material and attribute properly?
Students have to know what is the creativity. Creativity belongs to each of us, that's why is extremely important protect our creations or ideas. Students have to learn to attribute properly because it's a fair way to learn.


You can check below of my blog the creatice common licence chosen. Have a look a it!

Anyway, here is the link http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/


                            


Gonzalo.