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!

Creation of a comic

Hello! How is everything going?

Today I would like to share with you a comic that I have created for CLIL History subject to introduce the topic of Romans in 4th grade.

But, before I show it to you, I will talk about the resource that I used to create the comic. I created the comic with...

Pixton is a useful app to create and share comics. It gives you the choice to add as many strips as you want for free. Moreover, you can find a lot of different backgrounds to create comics of whichever topic and a lot of characters too. Apart from that, you can create and personalize your own characters with 60 steps that give you many options to customize the clothes, the appearance, the colours and the complements. Also, you can choose between some face expressions and this is really important when you are creating a comic. Moreover, you can edit body characters' positions to make them more expressive

It was the first time that I use this app and it is quite easily to use. The only problem that I had was that at the beginning I registered myself as a teacher, so the app didn't give me enough tools to create a comic for free. However, if you register as a teacher, the app give you the opportunity to create your virtual classroom and share comics with your students. So if you want to have more options for free to create comics, you have to  register as an entertainer.

Apart from that, I think it is a good tool for students too. It is a safe place where they can create their own comics and share them with their classmates. Besides, it is easy to use, and it can develop and increase their creativity.

I really like the app and I will recommend it to other people. Nevertheless, it can be improved including more characters for free, giving you the opportunity to create more than 5 characters for free. As well, it will be useful for new users to include a video tutorial explaining the app.

This is my comic about Romans. I decided to create a comic to introduce this topic of the curriculum because I think is a good and attractive way to teach history facts to our students. When you're teaching history you don't usually use this kind of visual aids, so I think is interesting to introduce new ICT tools in the classroom.




I hope you enjoy my comic.

See you soon!

Design and present a support slideshow

Hello! How is everything going?

Today I would like to share with you a new tool that I created to my CLIL lessons. This time I decided to create a slideshow to talk about Sea Animals topic.

To create this presentation I chose...

Genially is an app very useful to create so many resources, not only slideshow. You can create interactive images, posters, lists and more. I like this app because it offers so many templates to personalize our slideshow, but some of them, sometimes the most attractive and the most originals are for pay. 

Although it is a good tool, if you're not used to use it, it can be quite difficult to understand it at the beginning. However, I think it is important to know some new tools, which we can use as a teacher, like this one.

This is the slideshow about Sea Animals. I chose this topic because I'm working on it in my internship. 

This is a resource that I create to use in my CLIL lesson to teach Natural Science, as I said before. Here I explained easily six kinds of animals that we can find on the sea: the sea horse, the jellyfish, the turtle, the octopus, the whale and the shark.

Moreover, I added some nice free pictures of each animal, so while I was explaining its main characteristics, students could know what they look like. I chose the images from Pixabay, which is a website that offers free images. It was easy to insert them because we can just doing from Genially, so we don't need to download the images and after upload them. Besides, I included a song about sea animals and some animal gifts.

The experience of creating this presentation to my CLIL lessons was wonderful and exciting, because I discovered a new tool that I like and that I will use in the future.

I hope you enjoy my presentation about Sea Animals.

See you!

Twittering a Tiny Story

Hello everyone!

Today I will share with you my tiny story. A tiny story is a very short story that tells us something. They are similar to tales, but they are shorter.

To write it I use Twitter, one of the most popular social networks use nowadays in education. Twitter is really useful to share information between teachers and the educational community.

My tweet tells a tiny story about what true love is, because today is Valentine's Day, and I would like to celebrate it giving some love. This story is quite different since it isn't the traditional love story. It shows us what is the real meaning of true love. Here you can see and read my story.

#tinystory_URJC One day a granddaughter asked her grandad what true love was. He told her, smiling, that it is loving someone unconditionally, no matter what the other person does. The girl gave him a hug and told him she already understood it, true love was what he felt for her. pic.twitter.com/Y4U1enkgzO

— Nadia Valor Gómez (@NadiaValorGomez) 14 de febrero de 2019

I hope you like and enjoy my story.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Aggregated Content Curation

Hello!

In this new post I will describe a content curation tool that I have chose to collect useful resources for CLIL lessons.
In my case, I chose...

I decided to use this website to collect some resources which we can use in our CLIL lessons, because I think it is easy to manage and it offers a lot of different resources from many topics, not only educative ones.

I created a board that is called CLIL lessons and I added five different pins. These pins are different between them because each one is related to one of the school subjects.



The first pin is about classroom rules. In this case we can see some fantastic and colourful posters which we can use to create our classroom rules with our students. It is a different way to create a poster and share time with your students.

The second pin is related to animals. We find here a lesson plan which talks about how to take care of pets. This lesson plan could be included in the animals unit and it is really useful because we can teach values through it.

The third pin is a video that we can use in Science subject. This video shows in a simple way the different parts of a flower and explains the function of each part.

The fourth pin is about the classic fairy tale of The Three Little Pigs. It is a video that tells us the story of the three little pigs visually. We can include this video in the literacy subject to work values or classic fairy tales. The Youtube channel that upload this video, Oxbridgebaby, it is full of videos about classic fairy tales, and they are really nice. I hardly recommend you to have a look of it.

The last pin is an interactive game about a map of Spain. This game can be use in Geography subject to work the autonomous communities of Spain. It gives us an innovative way of work this topic and it is more attractive for students.

I hope you enjoy my post and I hope it is useful for you to teach or plan your CLIL lessons.

See you soon!

Image attribution for a CLIL lesson

Hello everyone!

Today we have seen how to create a Creative Commons Licence for our Learning Journal with

Moreover, we saw how to cite and attribute an image that we want to use. To practise this new knowledge we chose and cite properly some images, which we are going to use for a CLIL lesson to explain some contents.

Our CLIL topic is The Universe. This is the third lesson that we are going to teach and the main topic are constellations. To teach children some well-known constellations we will use these images to make them more visual to students.

"Leo constellation". Image by darkmoon1968/ 1332 imágenes. CC

"Ursa Major constellation". Image by darkmoon1968/ 1332 imágenes. CC

"Pegasus constellation". Image by darkmoon1968/ 1332 imágenes. CC

I chose these images from Pixabay, a page where you can find a lot of images about different issues or topics. It is really useful, because you can find there the author of the images and this information helps you to cite the image correctly.

These images will help me to show students how some constellations are and the picture that we associate to each one.

I hope you like this post.

See you soon!

Cartoonize myself

Hello everybody!

This is the first post of my blog. In this post I will talk about an avatar I created and the app I used to do it.

This is my avatar, Nadia Valor. She is 22 years old and she is a girl. She is an English Pre-Primary teacher and a student of a master's degree of Bilingual Education.

She likes listening to music, watching films, travelling and spending time with her loved ones. She is good at writing and dancing.

I created this avatar with

Bitmoji is an app that allow you to create your own and personalized avatar. It has a lot of different options like hair styles and colour, eye colour and shape, eyebrows, body shape, clothes and more. It is very complete and it gives to you a lot of tools to personalize step by step your avatar.

I really like this app, because I consider it offers to you a lot of tools and options to create an avatar that looks like as you.

This app or other apps to create avatars are really useful and interesting for everyone. Through creating your own avatar you will maybe pay attention to some aspects about you that you ignore every day, like your eyes colour or your nose shape. It is a good idea to create an avatar to rediscover yourself and know you better. Furthermore, it is an entertaining activity to carry out, which offers to you the opportunity to develop your creativity.

Here you can see a video that explains how to create an avatar with Bitmoji



Moreover, an avatar could be used to communicate with your students through internet in a different way, so the lesson can be continued outdoors the classroom. There are some types of avatars like Vokis that can talk, so you can use them to teach a virtual lesson or to create virtual tours to your students. Apart from that they are used in distance education to create virtual lessons for the students.

I hope this information is useful for you and you like my post.