Final task: my e-portfolio's reflection

It is time to say goodbye to our ICT module of the Master's degree in Bilingual Education but before doing it, it is important to analyse our learning through these last months and realise how much we have learnt in relation to CLIL and ICT. 

In order to summarize my learning in every challenge, which I have include in different posts in this blog, I have created a presentation using Genial.ly. This is an online tool which you can use to design dinamic presentations, adding pictures, gifs, different text types, backgrounds and so on. It is very engaging and attractive as it also includes great templates that you can use in an easy way. 

In this presentation I have included every module of our subject and the different challenges that we have carried out, expressing my reflectations in relation to each one. I have commented my favourite tool, which is Pinterest because of the many ideas that you can find to use in the classroom, and also my favourite challenge, which was the chocotalk as it was a fantastic experience that motivated us a lot. 

I have also included some reflections about why every task has been useful for our learning as I think that all the tasks have contributed positively to our ICT learning and have helped us to implement these tools in the classroom.

Although sometimes the process has been hard and a bit stressful, I am proud because I have been able to achieve almost all the challenges in time and I think that the final products are good, so in the end it has been an enriching experience in which there have been more positive than negative things.

To conclude, here you can watch my presentation about my final reflections:

Finally, I have to say thank you to María Jesús @mjgsm because she has demonstrated her incredible knowledge about ICT and she has shared with us a lot of interesting resources and thanks to my classmates because it has been great to share ideas, artifacts and participate in collaborative projects with you. All of us have worked a lot in this subject and I am very proud of it.

This is not a goodbye, as I am sure that we will be in touch though any social media that we have used in these months!

Creating a rubric to assess my e-project

As all teachers know, assessment is key to analyze our students' learning and help them improve with our feedback. However, this is not only necessary for learners but also for teachers, as we need to self-evaluate ourselves too if we want to be better teachers. 

In this case, I have created a rubric to evaluate my e-project, which I can use to evaluate my work and also see other classmates' assessment of my work using this rubric. Besides, I think it could be used for any e-project as also could be my peers' rubrics, which is great to have a bank of rubrics in case that we need them in the future.

I have used a great tool to create mine, Quick Rubric, which is really easy to use. You only need to register and use a template to fill in with the information that you want. For instance, you can write a title for your rubric, a brief description and instructions, the scale of ratings, maximum and minimun scores and the criteria. All this aspects are basic and very important to design an appropriate rubric so this tool is very useful because it offers everything in a simple way. 

In relation to the criteria, I would like to comment that I have chosen the main aspects that I think we should evaluate in every e-project. For me, the most important one is the effective use of the e-project, as the use that we have made of them during all this time is something that I consider very important. 

In conclusion, I think that rubrics are great tools to evaluate students and also our work. Without any doubt, online tools such as Quick Rubric can facilitate our work and lose our fear to rubrics. 

I hope that you like my rubric! You can find it in this link or here:

Celebrating World Book and Copyright Day

On 23rd April we are goint to celebrate World Book and Copyright Day, so I have added a pin to A Wall of Books board on Pinterest to contribute to the celebration of this day. In this board people can share their thoughts related to books, such as their favourite books, a current book that they are enjoying and so on.

I have designed an Aura using Aurasma, an incredible online tool to create augmented reality. I have used this tool before to create an infographic in our collaborative e-project and also my group and I made a tutorial to explain how this tool works, so if you need help with Aurasma you can use this link to start using it.

Aurasma es an easy tool that we can use to motivate students by helping them to create auras of the topic they are studying at school. There are many examples of this tool on the Internet so we can show them to students and surprise them with the amazing things that can happen!

To create my Aura, I have used a picture from Matilda's film as the trigger picture and I also tried to add an audio file but I had problems to make it work so I created a video with the same trigger image and then I added the audio in which I explain which book genre I usually enjoy reading and what is my favourite book from my childhood.   

Finally, this is the Aura that I have created. You need to download Aurasma in your mobile phone or tablet, follow my Aurasma account (maria92collado) and then point your mobile phone or tablet's camera at this picture in your computer screen, you will see what happens!
 

Besides, if you want to see our augmented contributions to A Wall of Books board on Pinterest, here you can visit it:

Follow Mª Jesús's board A Wall of Books on Pinterest.

Videochallenge: learning about vertebrates in Faunia!

Our next challenge has been creating a video for our e-project about animals. Before recording ourselves, we have been thinking in the organization of the video, our roles and what to say. To have a clear idea of what we wanted to do, we used StoryboardThat, an online tool in which you can create an storyboard, similar to a comic, to create a story or present and activity to children, for instance. 

In this case we have used this tool to describe our video, which consists of explaining an activity to children about visiting Faunia. This tool has been very easy to use and it is great for students as it is engaging and attractive for them. They could use it in class to explain an activity or develop their imagination by creating stories. 

The comic that we have created is divided into different frames:

1       -  Presentation of the activity

2       -  Explanation of what students have to do in Faunia

3       -  Tools that they are going to use in Faunia

4       -   Students in Faunia

5       -   Explanation of the activity after the trip

6       -   Final comments

Here you can see our comic:

Moreover, the aim of our video is to motivate learners to do an activity while and after their visit to Faunia. As our e-project is about animals, we decided that a school trip to Faunia could be a fun way to keep working on this topic while children learn more about it.  

In the video we briefly explained how to carry out a research on the animals’ topic in which children will investigate, take notes and look for specific information about the characteristics of vertebrate animals. Then they would prepare a presentation using Genially to share their experience and learning to the rest of the class. 

In order to do that, we have created a video using Chroma, which is an audio-visual technique used in TV, cinema and photography. It consists of removing a colour from an image, usually green, and replace it for another picture or video using a computer. To do this, we used a green sheet to cover a blackboard and we recorded ourselves with a mobile phone.

Besides, we have used Sony Vegas Pro to edit the video. This is a great programme which let you do anything you want to add or modify in your video. The only drawback is that there is not a free version. 

During the editing part we changed the background using animals’ videos and we added animals’ sounds to modify the audio.

We have learnt a lot from this activity, not only for the cooperative work but also about about editing videos and especially in my case, it has been the first time that I use chroma, so it has been very interesting to try new things in this challenge. 

Without any doubt, we laughed a lot when recording the video so the experience has been great!

Both the storyboard and the video challenges are part of a nationwide educational collaborative project, The ESL Times. This project consists of publishing students or teachers’ work in english and the aims are to foster the development of the four language skills, reading in english, using TICs to teach languages, encourage collaborative work and value the sociocultural aspects of the english language. 

Finally, you can watch our video here: