Thursday 17 March 2016

My prototype videoclip of my CLIL eproject: "Are you an animal expert?"

After evaluating a CLIL eproject, I have decided to create my own eproject about animal kingdom and life processes, which I have named "Are you an animal expert?". 

Although this is a prototype of my eproject and I will probably change some aspects after getting feedback from my teacher and my classmates, I think that my idea is well-organised and students can enjoy learning about animals by using ICT tools. Some of the tools that I have included in my plan of this eproject are Pixton, Piktochart, Pinterest and Voki. I think that all of them can be very useful and attractive to children and they can use them to do different things, so whenever they need to create presentations, pictures, videos or comics they will know different webtools to make their creations. 

The main activities are eight, in which the teacher and the students will design different products using the ICT tools described bedore, for example: create avatars to make descriptions of animals and guess which animal is the avatar talking about, make an infographic about vertebrates and invertebrates, create a comic, use Pinteres, Twitter and the school's blog to share pictures of animals that the students are going to create, design a rubric for self and peer-assessment and create a tree diagram to summarize the contents they have learned. 

If you want to know more things about my eproject, I have used this template to explain the main parts of it and I have shared it using Google Docs:



Besides, to show the prototype of my CLIL e-project to my classmates I have created a videoclip using Videoscribe, a webtool to design fantastic videos using pictures, gifs, backgrounds, music and any text type that you want. It is a great artifact to present something in a creative and attractive way, so I totally recommend it. In my case, it has been a bit difficult to use at the beginning but when you know how it works and you have a clear idea of what you want to do, it is very easy and useful to achive your goal. I believe that this tool would be great for students to create videos presenting their work or maybe to design a videoclip with the lyrics of a song that they can create by themselves.

This is the videoclip of my CLIL eproject with Videoscribe:


My edesign evaluation of a CLIL eproject

Before creating our own CLIL eprojects is essential to know some examples created by other teachers and evaluate their work to see the best points and the things that need to improve.

That is why I have chosen this eproject, Little geniuses of the Renaissance, created by @silviapl_21, one of the students of the last year course of the Master's degree in Bilingual Education. This eproject is intended for sixth grade and it is focused on Arts and Crafts subject. The main objective is to show learners the work of famous Renaissance artists, like Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo, and foster their creativity and skills to make their own artistic creations.  

To achive this, the author has planned and designed different activities:

-Make an infographic using Piktochart
-Create a mindmap using Lino
-Create a story with Storyboard
-Design a video with GoAnimate
-Make a video using Wideo
-Create audio files using Soundcloud

As you can see, the author has used a lot of ICT tools in her eproject so this is one of the things that I like the most about this work, apart from the topic as it is a creative way to plan an interesting and useful Arts and Crafts lesson for students. 

However, there are some points that need to improve. For instance, there is not a description of how to adapt the activities to children with special needs, so the attention to diversity has not been considered while designing this eproject. I think that this is an important aspect to take into account so we have to include it in our eprojects. 
Moreover, the author has not explained how the activities can develop coginitive skills, adding questions and activities taking into account Bloom's Taxonomy, for example. Although the activities and tasks can develop these skills, it is not clearly explained in the eproject so it is difficult to know if the author has consider this aspect or not.

Finally, I have created my edesign evaluation of this CLIL eproject with Buncee, a webtool in which you can create presentations using different resources such as sounds, videos, pictures, animations, stickers and so on. The tools are very colourful and visually attractive so I think it is a great tool to engage students. It is also very easy to use so I consider that children could use it in class with our help, for example to present their group work or project, but I am sure that as soon as they know how it works they can use it independently, even at home to design presentations for class or to study a topic in a fun way. 

You can see my edesign presentation with Buncee here:
                                                                                                                         

Tuesday 1 March 2016

My first board on Pinterest about CLIL resources

As I commented in my previous post, Pinterest is a great tool for teachers to find useful ideas for CLIL lessons and you can put them into practise and share your students' creations to everybody.

That's why I have create a new board in which I have shared some useful links about CLIL and I have also shared some of my favourite links that my classmates have added to our Open CLIL board on Pinterest.

I will continue adding more pins to my board and I hope that more people follow my board and add more pins too! We need to increase our knowledge about resources and put the most interesting ones into practice to see the results. Children would absolute benefit from our new ideas!

You can see my new board in this link

Our bank of common knowledge on Pinterest


My classmates and I have a board on Pinterest in which we are publishing useful materials and resources for CLIL lessons that you can see in this link. 

I have shared with them some websites that I think that can be useful for them, for example:
  • Peekaboo is a Youtube channel with interesting and creative videos for students. It's fun and motivating, check it out!
  • In this website you can find ideas to design musical instruments with your students! They will have fun using them and they will learn to reuse some products in a creative way. 
  • Great website to find educational videos in which you can choose the grade and the topic that you need
  • In this blog you can find many resources to teach science in English: videos, games, projects... 
  • E-learning for kids is a great website with resources for maths, science and other interesting topics to use in class! 
  • The school in which I'm doing my Practicum has this blog, which they use specially for English and Science subjects. They share interesting materials that you can use in class! 
I have discovered that Pinterest is a great resource to find materials for our CLIL lessons and it is a tool that we should use everyday to find new ideas and resources. I think that it would be great to show students this website as they sometimes do projects in class about a specific topic that they are studying and they could visit this web to find ideas to improve their projects and make them more interesting.
We will continue adding resources to this board so follow us on Pinterest!

My blog's license


As you can see, now my blog has a Creative Commons license. That means that all the materials and resources that I publish in my blog can be shared and adapted by other people although I don’t allow commercial uses of them as I don’t want others to publish my materials and earn money with it.

I have added this license to my blog because I think that sharing our work with others can contribute to the learning of other teachers and we can create a great environment in which we can work collaboratively. 

Creating a Creative Commons license has been very easy to use as the steps are easy to follow, so you can add a license to your blog by using this link and choosing what you allow others to do with your resources. 

In relation to work Creative Commons with students I think that the main goal is to make them understand the importance of using online materials respecting copyright. It would be a good idea that they create their own materials for a project in class and then they can share it in the English class blog to show it to everybody. First, they need to create a Creative Commons license to understand why it is important to create it and why they have to take into account this type of license in other blogs and websites to obtain materials for their projects. Besides, they would need to learn how to attribute and cite where they have found the information and the author of it. Finally, we could talk to them about how they feel about sharing their work to others and how they would feel if others use their resources in other schools without their permission.