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!