27 May 2015

Dracula

Today we share a new work from students 3rd ESO at IES Vicente Medina in Archena (Murcia).

Inma López, the teacher, tells us:

Students from 3º ESO B/C have been reading Dracula and working on it in two different ways. On the one hand, 3º B have been working on a task to show the difference between Victorian women and women nowadays. On the other hand, 3º C had to try and relate Dracula to Banksy’s graffiti to show how greed is still present in society and how the desire to advance at all costs can also have negative consequences. However, before organising the groups for such tasks, we had to work on the reading and learn about the characteristics of the Gothic novel or the ideal woman in Victorian England. We used the following reading guide to prove that Bram Stoker’s novel is not just a story about vampires:

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How did 3º B show the evolution of women since Victorian times? They had to imagine that they were Jonathan in the 19th century and Mina in the 21st. Jonathan was a prisoner in Dracula’s castle and Mina wasn’t going  to sit and patiently wait for him like a 19th woman would do. She was going to stand up and make sure she wasn’t going to be there forever. They did a great job. Check out some of their videos:

Screen Shot 2015-05-06 at 10.41.11Screen Shot 2015-05-06 at 10.41.213ºC also did an excellent job trying to connect Dracula’s greed with some of Banksy’s graffiti. Most of them try to show that the desire to advance at all costs without bearing in mind other people’s feelings or opinions is not always a positive thing. Here are some of their awesome works:

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You can also have a look at some photos of the whole process:

25 May 2015

Across the music

If you are a CLIL Primary teacher and your major is Music, you might be interested in surfing this open e-publication by @utopicmarta, 'Across the music'.

This e-publication is the digital outcome Marta S. has come up with after three months of solid work using ICT and Web Resources for Primary Bilingual Education along her Master's Degree at URJC in Madrid.

Her site is born with the aim of becoming a cooperative project for 10-year-olds to publish about two periods of the History of Music and it is approached from a fresh, colourful, fun viewpoint by the author.

Worried about digital literacy and changing the roles when teaching and learning, Marta S. has included a section for surfing safe,



as well as a social list where she curates content for other Primary teaching peers.



One of the most enjoyable sections in Marta S.'s e-publications is her collaborative video story about Charlie, the kid who disliked studying Theory of Music until he met Mozart and Vivaldi. Do not miss this imaginative clip designed and produced together with another of Marta S.'s peers from the Master's Degree, @koralinda.



But there is much more to this e-publication and its connected author that you are bound to find inspiring if you just spend a while surfing it all. 

Your feedback will be very much appreciated!


20 May 2015

Time to be healthy

 3,2,1 ... Time to be healthy! is the CLIL e-publication for Primary Education that Nora Lomas has been designing for the last 3 months at her Master's Degree Module for The Use of ICT and Web Resources for Primary Bilingual Education at URJC in Madrid.

Her cover already proves innovative, as she has come up with an augmented front page that you can scan with your free Aurasma app from your mobile device and, if you follow NoraLomas there, it will surely surprise you and give you a glimpse of what Nora is offering inside her e-publication.

After thinking of the target audience, goals, missions, timing, competencies and assessment of her e-publication, Nora evaluated several ebooks from the Crafting the e- perfect Textbook EbookEVO 2015 Session, and taking visual principles into account, she was able to design a mindmap and a skeleton that showed her intentions when e-publishing, while she started to curate resources, tips and so forth in order to have them ready when the time for opening her showcase would be close.



But e-publications nowadays must not under any circumstance be a mere reflection of what you would have published in paper format, so the first step for that requirement to be met is to choose a digital tool where to showcase the digital outcome and to choose it because it meets the target audience needs, not just for the sake of choosing a digital tool. That is why Nora has gone for blogging as her digital showcase, since bloogging allows her to design a dynamic e-publication, which at the same time works as a journal and it is easy to update, but which is also useful for interaction with her readers and can be turned into a collaborative showcase any time.

Of course, an e- publication cannot be empty; blog-goers expect to be challenged and to find missions and various proposals to carry out online, and as a Nora is a connected CLIL educator, she has begun to establish her e-connections with collaborative projects worldwide, where she has both found and given inspiration.
One of those collaborative projects is @infoEdugrafias, an educational blogging project itself that feeds on teachers and students' work with infographics, where Nora visually explained what 3,2,1 Time To Be Healthy! was like. Click on the image below and check for yourself:


Following the same thread of e-collaboration, Nora has also engaged her e-publication in The Twima Project, an internationally collaborative writing project in two stages: writing your own dream and building a digital artifact for somebody else's dream. This second stage is maybe the most interesting part of the whole project, as you are requested to interpret a dream by a kid from the other part of the world, whom you don't even know, and build a multimedia outcome about how you see that dream. Being a Primary pre-service teacher herself, #twima2 also gave Nora the chance to be in touch with the way kids write, their interests and ambitions, judging from their dreams, which is a nice first approach to the target audience of her-epublication too, apart from being able to be in touch with teachers coming mainly from USA and Canada, and to have one's first iBook at iTunes.




It is live and available now for free downloads!

But for a blogger to be connected with blogging, the best option is to surf around ways other bloggers work, and if they are kids, that's added value for an author like Nora, who is seeking for a teaching career among infants. That is why she jumped into mentoring young bloggers for Ms Wyatt's Student Blogging Challenge, another international project through which teachers who foster blogging skills among their young learners in Australia, USA and so on, connect with teaching blogging mentors that help these young blogging learners to see the benefits of educational blogging.

Of course, collaboration does not only take place out of class and online, but also inside the classroom and through team work with your closest peers, and that is why Nora's e-publication cross overs with other e-publications by her pre-service teacher colleagues with whom she has created great support material, such as this storybird that proves that health is not only a personal matter but a global one too. Click on the image below and read 'Living in Cleanly':


And, last but not least, when one is putting into practice a project based learning orientation, wrapping all the learning process up and disseminating it is part of it all, and an excellent way for others to understand one's work and outcomes too. So, her participation in live online sessions such as the Spring Blog Festival and Moodle MOOC 6 were the window for this pre-service teacher to show her e-publication to the world, as well as to go back in time to her starting point at the beginning of the Master's Degree, realize about what she had accomplished by doing it and reflect on her learning process.

Here you go her own thoughts and final conclusions about her ICT CLIL cruise around creating an open e-publication for Bilingual Primary teaching and learning:



And, do not forget to check 3,2,1, Time To Be Healthy! Do not miss all the missions Nora's e-publication has ready for you!



11 May 2015

Music is fun!


Music is fun! is the CLIL e-publication for Primary bilingual learners by @koralinda27.

Coral Mg is a pre-service teacher who has just designed her first open educational digital publication as part of her Master's Degree Module on The Use of ICT and Web Resources for Primary Bilingual Education at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid.

She has been working hard for 3 months in order to be able to come up with this digital resource, which I am sure will be inspirational for any CLIL Primary teacher and learner interested in Music and English.

If you surf around her e-publication you are bound to find engaging missions aimed at 3rd graders to be collaboratively challenged into learning by doing while having fun. Just check this awesome video challenge where learners meet the notes with Mozart that @koralinda27 has designed in cooperation with her peer pre-service teacher @utopicmarta and have a glimpse at what Music is fun! has to offer:


And if you are more into audio challenges, the e-publication also includes a podcasting channel where CLIL learners are introduced into speaking and listening skills in an easy straight forward way that will lead them to grab awards and have their findings gamified:



But Coral has gone a long way in order to be able to publish this digital CLIL OER. From a drafted mindmap, crossing evaluation of visual principles, diving into licences, citing, attributing and connecting with other educators worldwide, up to attending online sessions and co-presenting, while designing CLIL artifacts and rising up to collaboration, and so forth.

But why reading this post when you can actually listen to Coral herself narrating her own learning through ICT? There you go her reflections on this three-month cruise around CLIL and ICT:



Congratulations, Coral, for such a nice e-publication!


7 May 2015

Famous people in History

Today we share a work from CPR Barranco de Poqueira in Capileira (Granada). Students at 5th and 6th grade primary while were studying simple past, they wrote a simple biography about some famous people.
First they chose the characters
Then they found out an important dates of interest
They filled this sheet with the results
Finally, we uses line.do (one web 2.0 tool to create Timelines) to present the works.

I hope you like it.


5 May 2015

Chef of Volume


Chef of volume is the e-publication that Marta Plaza, a pre-service teacher taking part at the Master's Degree Module on The Use of ICT and Web Resources in CLIL Primary Education at University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, has designed for bilingual third graders.

She has been working on it since February 2015, and now it is time to spread the word about her open educational resource that aims at Primary Bilingual learners to acquire various key competences, such as Maths, Digital competence, Communication skills and some others which can well be acquired by accomplishing the wide range of missions and challenges that she is proposing.



If you check her e-publication as a learner you will be able to create presentations on geometric shapes, online write recipes of creative imaginative sandwiches, or create brief animated video clips on daily food. Besides, you will also be able to take part in audio and video challenges as well as viewing other kids who have already done so, such as Holly and Phoebe, who Marta has augmented thanks to Aurasma:


If you are a CLIL teacher, checking Marta's site will surely inspire you for designing your own learning missions and you will also be able to track Marta's evolution along her journey through ICT and CLIL from scratch, as she is providing the very beginning of her e-publication through the design of its skeleton and mindmap, evaluating visual principles from other epublications, towards the participation in collaborative projects worldwide so as to become a connected educator, such as #twima2, @infoEdugrafias or Spring Blog FestivalMoodle MOOC 6 and Student Blogging Challenge.



Do not miss this promising young Primary teacher's e-publication and stay tuned for upcoming challenges and missions. Now meet Marta and visit her site.

Feedback will be appreciated!




Congratulations, Marta Plaza, for your awesome educational resource!