Sunday 24 April 2016

How can you assess your e-project?

Hi everybody! 
 
On this new post, I going to talk about how you can create your own rubric, what it is a good web tool to create a rubric is and an example, which can help you. 

Ok, are you ready???????? We are going to start. First of all, a good web tool that you can use to create an easy and free rubric is the app Quick Rubric. To create a rubric here, I advise you to create an account here. That is easy, you have to click in "log in" and choose the option "I´m a new user" in order to create a username, a password and introduce an email, because then you can save your rubric without problems and when you close session in this web tool, if you want to go back, you only have to click in "log in" and then in "I have an account" to introduce your email or username and the chosen password . 

Finally, you can create your rubric, and you can choose the number of columns and rows to create your personalized rubric. Then, you have to decide the maximum and minimum score, that means that if you have 3 different items in your rubric, you need a scale of rating of 3 progressive ratings (1, 2 and 3 points) then your maximum score would be 9 (3x3) and your minimum 3 (1x3). In my own rubric I created 8 items or criteria with 3 progressive ratings, for this reason I need a maximum score of 10 and a minimum 25. For me, this method was a little difficult in the beginning but then with practise and attention you can choose the best option for you.

Then, when you choose the structure and the rating of the rubric, you can write on your rubric, clicking on the square that sayst (Edit Me, Criteria Rubric, the titles on the ratings or Nameless Rubric). And as I said, if you want to leave your session, this tool allows you to save it. Finally, when you finish the rubric, if you want to share it, you need to save it, go to “My rubrics”, click on “View/Print” and then at the bottom of the page you will find the URL of your own rubric.

Now, I am going to show you my own rubric that I created with Quick Rubric:


In short, I think that this web tool is incredible, nice and easy to use. Although, some things could be improved or changed, it is the way of putting the ratings score and you can create your rating and you can edit the spaces for the texts. Moreover, I don´t know if you can copy the rubric to a word document, but it seems impossible, because the only alternative that I see is to print it just like that. Finally, I don´t know if you can take an embedded code either in the app, but you can solve this problem, if you upload your rubric in pdf to Google Drive (To do this, you have to click in the option of the Quick Rubric app "Print rubric" and then save it in your computer in PDF). When you have uploaded the document to Google Drive, there you can take the embedded code of your PDF.

Come on!!!!!!! I encourage to use this wonderful web tool and you can tell me what your opinion is about it.

Friday 22 April 2016

What type of reader am I?

Hello everybody!

In this new mission, I am working alone again :( . Well, don´t worry because  I am going to tell you new things on this post. 

You know that the Book Day (April 23rd) is coming and for this reason this post is dedicated to those incedible friends that have many letters in their pages, sometimes images or photos and that tell us interesting stories, which capture us with their topics, characters and scenes.

Now I will throw you a question, what type of reader are you? This is a difficult question that each one of us must ask for hereself/himself. In my case, I must confess that I am not reading many books now because I have many things and homework but in my free time I love reading books because with them, you can fly and escape from reality, learn values and new words, develop your imagination, and something important,  don't let your thrill escape by learning more things.

How can you get everything? By reading books that you like, for example, I love books about mistery, horror, fantasy, etc.  And my favorite book in the world is Black Wings in Spanish "Alas Negras", which is written by Laura Gallego García. First, I would like to say thanks to Celia because she showed me this fantasy world that was created by this great writter.


Well and now, shhhh I am going to tell you a secret and an incredible thing about books. I am going to present a marvelous web tool to create wonderful and magic things. This is the web tool and app "Aurasma", which have changed the way millions of people see and interact with the world, with the only use of the mobile, bringing images, objects and even physical locations to life with interactive digital content, such as videos, animations...  Using the step-by-step creation wizard within the app to create amazing things and with them, you will be left with your mouth open, and then you will be able to share them with your friends if you want to. Its use is very simple and easy, I didn´t find any dificulties to use it. If you want to see how this tool works, you can see this tutorial about this app, which was created by the group made up by AlvaroMara, Marta, Neus and Paula.


On the other hand, to create the photo (collage) and the video that I used in "Aurasma", I used  well known web tools for you and for me because I told you about in previous posts. These tools are  "Piktochart" and "IMovie", which are very easy to use and free.

And now, this is my Aura, I hope that you will like it. To see it, go to your Aurasma mobile app and follow me, my username in Aurasma is "VictorodRS92". Then put the special camera of the app, in front of my photo (collage) and you can see something amazing and magic. Enjoy it!



Moreover, in Pinterest you can´t only see this aura but also other amazing auras, in particular on the board "A wall of Books".

Monday 18 April 2016

Making of (LOL)


 
You can´t miss our Making of (laughing out load) about our videos, created by  Ana, Elena, Inma, Lola, Natalia and me, Víctor. Enjoy it a lot!

Saturday 16 April 2016

A collaborative tutorial "How can we use Piktochart?"




Hello everybody!!!
 
For this last mission in group, we have decided to record a tutorial in order to teach our children how to use an online  tool. In this case, the web tool chosen to explain all this is Piktochart.

We searched for different web tools to create our tutorial  and finally, we decided to use the tool “Screencast-O-Matic” which is an online tool that allows to create videos with screen shoots with high quality of images and sound. There are two versions, we used the free one, which we consider to be very complete. You can select the part of the screen you want to include in your video and  record it for 15 minutes. Moreover, you can use use the webcam so your image will appear in a little slide in the corner. Moreover, this tool also gives you the possibility to share your final product on YouTube or download it.

I only see one disadvantage which is that when we wanted to save the recording, sometimes we had some problems because we needed to click several times to save the work done because this tool was usually blocked. 

We have the recordings, we needed to create our final video about the tutorial and for this, we used the app "IMovie" with the support of an Ipad. As I said on the post "A video challenge", this app is intuitive and fast to work with. It allows you to introduce any music that you want, adding  different videos to create a film or a trailer and pictures, cropping videos, etc. The only bad thing that we found, is that we can´t make the title of our video bigger again.
Both tools can be used in our classes with our students to put in to practice their speaking and ICT skills and in the case of the "Screencast-O-Matic", you can also create a StoryJumper and then record the screen while turning the pages telling the story, all of this with your children. 

And now, here you can watch our video, we hope that you will like it!!!!!!!!!!!

Thursday 14 April 2016

Our LIVE Chocotalk

  

 
On Thursday the 7th of April, our master´s class celebrated a live Choco-Talk in YourTube about "How CLIL can contibute to having happier bilingual learners".


First of all, I would like to say thanks for the Chocotalk that my classmates, my teacher (Maria Jesús) and I held the last 7th of April live on YouTube. It was incredible and very interesting, we played different roles in the chocotalk. In my case, in my group I played the role of community manager on Twitter, promoting the event some days before, telling through Twitter the things that my classmates were going to disccus during the Chocotalk and remembering the Chocotalk, that you can see in YouTube, and here in my blog at the end of this post.

As I said, I was the community manager of my group along with Elena, wheareas Inma and Lola were our speakers in the Chocotalk, and Ana and Natalia were our curators who were in charge of collecting all the information told by all the speakers with the help of tweets that the community managers published every day along with those that were also published on the Chocotalk day on Twitter, to make up a little summary, that in our case, our curators wrote for you. They used the web tool "Storify" to create the summary. Come on!!!!!!!!!! Read it and enjoy!!!!!!!!!!


In the case of the community managers in my group, our experience (Elena and me, Victor)  with this role, we like because at the beginning was enjoyable and a little streesful because we had to pay to attention to different things at the same time, listening the Chocotalk and write tweets in Twitter about what our classmates discuss in the life talk.

In my case, sometimes it was horrible because I had some problems with the Internet Connection and for this reason, I was inactive during 10 min more or less but we I could recover the connection, everything was good and to the end, I could enjoy the Chocotalk while I was writing about the interesting things that my peers were speaking like social and emotional benefits, advantages and disadvantages of CLIL, the use of ICT, among other topics.

And now without further delay, if you missed it, you can watch it here:

Saturday 9 April 2016

A video challenge



Hello again!!!!!

In this mission, my group and I have created a storyboard template to record a short video to include it in our CLIL e-Project. As I said in my last post, my group is composed by Ana, Elena, Inma, Lola, Natalia and me, Víctor

To do the storyboard, we thought and chose one learning outcome, which was chosen from our common CLIL e-Project and this objective is:

To learn about the physical and political features and some of the most distinguishing representations of the European countries

Then, we were researching some web tools to create our storyboard template and we decided to use the tool called “Storyboard That”. This web tool is incredible, useful and very easy to use. For this reason, we recommended it. Some advantages of this app are: You can choose the number of vignettes that you want to create, and there is a wide range of scenes that you can choose to allocate in the vignettes. There are many different characters whose emotions you can change and different text tables to put in the storyboard too.

But there are some things that could be improved in this app, for example the work that you are creating, is not automatically saved and therefore, you have to be saving it all the time. Another important thing, is that you need to pay if you want to include or upload images and that option would be good, if it were free.

In short, this app is good so that children can create stories about a specific topic of one subject, learning that topic and putting in practice the ICT skills or as a simple support, so that children understand abstract concepts or routines in kindergarten or first grade of Primary. And this tool is wonderful to practice the communication with children with special needs like autistic children, who need to learn everything with many visual resources or materials.

Our final storyboard created with this app is the following:



THE STORYBOARD´S TEMPLATE HERE.

And now, we are also going to see  the final result of the InfoEdugraphic that we have created and it appears in the storyboard template. We have used the web tool “Piktochart” to create a poster about an European country, although children could use a video to present the country, as it appears in the InfoEdugraphic. In this example, you will learn the most important things about Norway. You can´t  miss it!!!!!!!! 

 

And finally, we presented our video challenge about the storyboard template that we created with "Picktochart". We have created our video with the app "IMovie" with the support of an Ipad. This app is intuitive and fast to work. It allows you to introduce any music that you want, adding  different videos to create a film or a trailer and pictures, cropping videos, etc. The only bad thing that we found, is that we can´t make  the title of our video bigger.

In the video we have schemed the steps that our students have to follow in order to achieve one of the activities of our CLIL eproject.

Here you can watch our video, we hope that you will like it.

Our InfoEduGraphic!!!! ("The Olympic games in Europe")



Hi everyone again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This time, I can't only speak for myself but also for my team because we have worked in different teams in this mission. At the beginning, this was difficult because we had done many different things in our corresponding CLIL e-Project prototype but with a similar topic, in our case, Geography. In the end, we have been able to work together and we could learn many different things from each other, creating our InfoEdugraphic about Europe.

In my group, I have felt very comfortable and I think that my peers worked very well and we have been a support to each other to complete the missions and as teachers we have to know how to work with other people and this was one of those moments to do it.

Depending on our CLIL e-Projects prototypes, we were classified in different groups, as I said. And we are the group about Geography, because in our CLIL e-Projects all members of my group had similar topics about this subject. My group is made up by Ana, Elena, Inma, Lola and Natalia. Although our topics were not totally equal, we could mix them in our common project. To do it, we created different learning outcomes, which are:

  • To identify the location of the European continent in a map. 
  • To learn the name of some European countries, their capitals and location in a map. 
  • To get in touch with the most distinguishing physical features (climates and animals) of these countries. 
  • To learn the name and location of the most important mountain ranges and rivers in Europe. 
  • To learn about different European cultures and their most distinguishing representations (costumes, flags, language, currency, food…).

After that, we started to think about how we could create the InfoEdugraphic, which are visual representations of data, knowledge and information about a specific topic.


The next phase was to think what the purpose of our InfoEdugraphic was and for it, we thought and thought until we had an excellent idea, which was the carrying out of the activity, with which our students could achieve the learning outcomes that we proposed in the beginning. The activity allowed us work with children in a fun way the European Geography and that activity is called “The Olympic Games in Europe”.


Then, we decided to create our InfoEdugraphic to show the final activity of our project. To carry out the design of our InfoEdugraphic, we chose the tool called Piktochart. I had heard about this program before because in the CLIL e-Project that I evaluated and that you can see in this blog, this tool was used and I love it because you can create many different things with this web tool. Piktochart is a marvelous tool to create attractive infographics, posters or presentations and it has many different features, such as templates, backgrounds, graphics, etc to create your project. Moreover, you can download it in different formats or share it if you prefer.

Come on guys!!!!!!!!!! You can use this tool to teach your students and explain different concepts in a different way that I know that children will enjoy.

Use the app and you will see good results because this tool could be a fantastic resource and support to create beautiful InfoEdugraphics that they allow you to organize information and concepts in a distinct way. And, it is also important that you remember that this tool is easy to use. For this reason, both teachers and children can use it to learn much better different knowledge  through the use of ICT. 

Next, you will see our InfoEdugraphic here. I can say in the name of my work team that we hope you will like it. Enjoy it!