Reflect on your own super learning

Hello everyone!
How is everything going?

Today I would like to share with you the reflection I did about my learning on ICT subject. To do this reflection I decided to use different apps because I wanted to join together video, audio, and a presentation.

In the presentation, I described how my learning process was along the ICT course. Mainly I divided the Prezi into ten slides. In these slides I explained which were my expectations when I started the course, the prior knowledge I had before taking it and how it was structured. To explain its structure I just went through the different units and the activities we did. Furthermore, I told what I liked the most and least, and which were the activities I found more and less useful. In the same way, I commented which tools I will use as a teacher in my lessons, the key idea I take from the course and what the participation in this course has meant for me.

I used Prezi to create my presentation because I really like the app and I think you can create more visual and interactive slideshows. I've been using for many years and it never disappointed me. Moreover, it gives you a lot of options to present the slideshows or to share them. Another important thing is that is a free app.

After I designed my presentation I recorded myself presenting it using Screencastify. It is a Google Chrome screen recorder. It is one of the easiest ways to capture your entire desktop, browser tab or webcam. It was the first time I used it and I found it very useful and easy. Besides, it is for free, so you do not have to pay to use it. The only thing you need is to have a Google Account. When you record something it will be automatically saved at your Google Drive.

I recorded different videos until I have the right one. When I had it I just go to my Google Drive and I downloaded the video to upload it to Youtube and share it in my blog.

Here you have the Prezi I created to do my reflection on my super learning:



This is the link to my Prezi presentation: Reflection on my super learning about ICT subject

Also, you have here the video I recorded to explain my presentation:



I hope you like my presentation and my reflection.

This is my last post on this blog and it was a pleasure to share everything I learned with you.

See you!

Do not never forget we as teachers should continue our training because...

#twima8 - The World is My Audience

Hello!
How is everything going?

Today I would like to share with you the video I recorded using Flipgrid to take part in an international educational collaborative project called The World Is My Audience (TWIMA 8). In this project you record a video telling something about your life and share it online so every project participant can watch it. Besides, the project has a hashtag on Twitter so you can share your video there too.

Flipgrid is a social learning platform that allows teachers to ask a question about any topic and the students respond to it in a video. Students are also able to comment on their classmates' videos creating a kind of web of discussion. It is an easy tool to use and also it is safe for students. When the teacher logs in and asks the question, the website will provide him/her a code which students will use to respond to the question.

In this video, I explained why I decided to live and study in Australia for 3 months and how was the experience. As well, I told you about a funny thing that happened to me before I moved to Australia. In the beginning, it was difficult to live so far away from my family, get used to living with new people and speak in English all the time. But without any doubt, it was an amazing experience!


This educational project is fascinating because it allows people from different countries to tell their stories. Moreover, when you take part in this project you can comment on the videos and give them likes. This is wonderful because you can share content and interact with the other partners, so you feel like part of it.

I think this kind of projects help us to meet new people around the world and interact with them. Furthermore, projects such this one give the opportunity to students to develop their communicative skills through ICTs.

I hope you like my video.

See you soon!

Record your video clip

Hello!
How is everything going?

Today I would like to share with you a Video clip my classmates and I recorded. This video clip shows the story I mentioned in the last post about a girl called Lily. As I told in the previous post, the story tells us about a little girl called Lily who one day woke up in the middle in the forest. She will try to find her way back home with the help of some new friends, but she shouldn't trust everyone. We performed the different characters that appear in the story: Lily, the rabbit, the squirrel, the owl, the bear, and the fox.

We use the free version of Filmora 9 to join the different scenes we recorded and to edit the video. We didn't know about this programme before, but it was easy to use. It provides you a lot of options to edit backgrounds, images, and letters. As well, it has some templates to add letters like titles or credits. Moreover, it allows you to join videos, cut videos and add music to them. The only bad thing is that when we exported the video a big watermark appeared at the bottom of the video.

The creation process has been quite long but amazing and very funny because we have had a wonderful time recording and editing the video. It was also interesting to create our script and the storyboard to organize and visualize all the scenes we will record later. Besides, it was useful because we have discovered new programmes which can be used with our students to create and share digital content. Nevertheless, we found some problems with the fabric we used to create the chroma key because it wasn't totally smooth.

Here you have our video that is called: Finding Lily's house.



Also, you have here the link to our video: https://youtu.be/wgdaWwXCHmQ

This video has been created to literacy subject and it teaches one of the most common and well-known children's literature genre, the fable. It can be used at any level because the language is easy to understand for most of the students. Through fables, a lot of values can be taught to students in an attractive and close way, because the characters are animals, and they love them. Furthermore, they usually have illustrations and these are striking for kids. To introduce fables using ICTs is a way of updating and keeping them in children's life. In the same way, if students create a fable by themselves they could understand better the values it teaches, and they identify with the characters. Without a doubt, recording a video like this one is really advisable and rewarding for children.

Both my classmates and I think that the objectives we have planned at the beginning of this project have been achieved. These objectives are to teach some values to the students, to teach that every action has a consequence, and to teach that you have to be responsible for your acts. In addition, using this video we want to introduce traditional stories through another ICT tool. We think in this way the students will be more motivated and the literature genre will be more attractive form them.

So as I promised, you have now seen the second part of our activity.

I hope you enjoy our video clip of Finding Lily's house.

See you soon!

Storyboard a video project

Hello! How is everything going?

Today I would like to share with you a Storyboard that my classmates and I created. We created a storyboard which title is Finding Lily's house. We decided to create a fable because we think is a good way to teach and introduce values to the students. For this reason, we use forest animals as characters and a little girl so the students can identify with her.

The story tells us about a little girl called Lily who one day woke up in the middle in the forest. She will try to find her way back home with the help of some new friends, but she shouldn't trust everyone.

The main objective of this story, which is a kind of fable, is to teach some values to the students. They will learn that every action has a consequence. Moreover, we want to teach that if someone makes a mistake he/she should recognize it and learn from it in order not to repeat it in the future. Besides, it pursues the introduction of stories through another ICT tool. In this way, students will feel more motivated and the story will be more attractive to them.

Before I share with you our storyboard, I would like to comment briefly what is a storyboard and the tool we used. A storyboard is a kind of drawing about a video you will record later, and it consists of some drawings that represent each scene and some notes about each scene.

We created it with Storyboard That. We chose to create 6 frames or scenes in 2x3 format because is what offers the free version of this app. It is quite easy to use and understand. You can find in this app a lot of different backgrounds, characters and decoration elements that you can personalize. Generally, I like the tool but it can offer more frames for free. However, it is a good tool to storyboarding short videos which you would like to record.

This is our storyboard: Finding Lily's house.



This is just the first part of one activity because the final purpose of this storyboard is to make a short video using it. Don't worry, you will see soon the whole activity.

I hope you like our Storyboard!

See you soon!

Plan an audio project and welcome your students

Hello everyone!

Today I would like to share with you a new CLIL project that I planned. This project, called Superheroes, is a PE project for 2nd Primary. Through different superheroes, we will work the four physical abilities and one of the basic skills with students of 7-8 years. This proposal is different because it offers to children the opportunity to learn and practise sport in a contextualized environment. This fact will help them to achieve more significant learning.

You can see the whole programming below. I used Google Docs to write it down and to share it, and Creative Commons to add a licence to it.

To present this new project to my students I decided to create a podcast. In this podcast, I welcomed them to the new project and I explained briefly what it is about. This way of share with them the project is a good idea because I created a collaborative playlist where they can upload their comments and opinions about it. Moreover, is a different way to present them the new topic.

To create this podcast I just recorded on my mobile phone the message that I want to share with my students, and then I downloaded it on my computer. Once I had my audio I added an intro and an outro to it using a free jingle song from Youtube called Payday. After I found a free licence song, I downloaded it with Online Video Converter, a useful tool to download videos or songs from Youtube. After that, I used Audio Trimmer to cut and select the parts that I needed from the song. Finally, I joined the intro, the podcast and the outro using Merge Audio. 

All the apps that I used are free and really easy to use. Besides, they are online so you do not need to download them into your computer. They offer a lot of options to download, cut or join audios or videos. Actually, with Merge Audio you can also cut parts from audios, so if I had found it before I wouldn't probably use Audio Trimmer for shortening the process. 

After I did all this process I logged in on Sound Cloud to upload and share my podcast. Firstly, before I could share it, I had to create an audio channel to upload audios. Secondly, I created a public playlist so my students and I can share our audios. Thirdly, I upload my Superheroes podcast and I chose its licence. 

I think Sound Cloud is a good online platform for audio distribution. It allows you to upload audios, promote and share them for free. In addition, you can categorize your audios and organize them into playlists. It is a good tool to use it in your lessons if you want to create a collaborative playlist with your students to share their projects, opinions or tasks. As well as that, it is a safe website for them to use.

Here you can see... 

My audio channel

My playlist



My podcast


I hope you enjoy my welcome podcast and you like my project about Superheroes.

See you soon!

Create an infographic about your subject

Hello!

Today I would like to comment my experience in creating an infographic about vertebrate animals for Natural Science subject. 

But before I share with you my infographic, I will explain the app that I used to create it. The app that I used is...

I think Piktochart is a really useful tool to create infographics for free because it gives you many options. You can choose between some templates or you can create your own infographic step by step. Moreover, inside the app you find a lot of different frameworks or images to personalize your infographic. As well, it allows you to choose the type of letter that you want to use and its size. There are many images or photographs to decorate your infographic according to your topic. Another thing that I consider important is that you can share your infographic for free. Although, I would like this app gives you the opportunity to embed directly your Creative Commons License, due to the importance of naming your work.

I really recommend this app because is easy and interesting to use. Besides, it allows you to develop your creativity.

This is my infographic about vertebrate animals. I've been working with my students about natural kingdoms, and one of these kingdoms is animalia. Inside animalia kingdom, we can find vertebrates or invertebrates. My students have seen the differences between them, and they were asked to find out the subgroups that we can find in vertebrates animals. 

Taking all these reasons into account, I consider it was a good idea to create an infographic to resume all the characteristics we know about vertebrates and its main subgroups. I think infographics are a good tool to remind the information we knew easily in a more visual way.

Here you have the link to my infographich: https://create.piktochart.com/output/37635377-vertebrate-animals

I hope you like my infographic and you use Piktochart to create your infographics!

See you soon!

Design a mindmap for an educational project

Hello everyone!

Today I would like to share with you a mind map about the next project I will carry out with my students. This project of Natural Sciences is about Biological Kingdoms. But before I show and explain it to you I'm going to describe and comment my experience using some tools to create mind maps.

At the beginning when I decided to create a mind map to explain my project and make the explanation more visual I chose Bubbl.us because it is an app that I used before when I was studying at the university to make mind maps for different subjects. However, this app has changed a lot in the last year and now if you want to add images or videos you have to pay. The free version only allows you to insert URL. Moreover, you cannot change the shape of the text boxes.

For all these reasons I changed the app to create my project mind map. After looking for a while I decided to use...

This app is better than the other one and it gives you a lot of different options to create more visual and engaging mind maps. It has a free version that offers you the opportunity to create 5 mind maps. Besides, it guides you through the app showing the different tools when you create your first mind map. As well, it shows to you some examples of mind maps created by other authors, so you can see how your mind map could be. 

The main tools of this app are the three different letters size, three text position, and colours and shapes for the text boxes. In addition, you can insert images and videos or draw your own pictures to make your mind map more visual. Some time ago you could insert videos from Youtube, but now you can only add videos from Vimeo which is private. This is a pity because Vimeo does not offer as many videos as Youtube and this limit Popplet app. You cannot add sounds either. Nevertheless, it is a good app that I like because is easy to use and it offers to you nice tools to create mind maps in a more creative way.

This is my mind map about Biological Kingdoms. This mind map explains the activities that I designed for my students. As it is known, we can find 5 Biological or Natural Kingdoms. In the mind map each kingdom is distinguishable with a colour as well as their activities. I created two activities for work each kingdom. To make the explanation more visual I added some images about the different activities. These images are free images from Pixabay, or they are created by myself using Paint 3D app. This way of presenting a project makes it more visual and understandable for students. Like this they will be more interested in what they are going to do and the can follow the whole process in an organized way.

I hope you enjoy my review about mind map apps and my project mind map too.

See you soon!