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!