Thursday, May 28, 2015

Chef of volume

 Check this awesome CLIL e-publication for eight year old learners by Marta Plaza, a Primary Bilingual teacher who has just finished her Master's Degree Module on The Use of ICT and Web Resources for Primary Bilingual Education at University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid.

Marta is providing full objectives, learning outcomes and what visitors to her Chef of Volume might expect, in a simple but visually engaging infographic which she has designed for the @infoEdugrafias collaborative blogging project.



Besides, if you are not into deep reading but would rather have a quick glimpse at what Chef of Volume has to offer you, the author has also mindmapped her whole e-publication for a quick overview:



My advice is that you land on the e-publication augmented cover and meet cute Holly and Phoebe, who are willing to unveil the surprises Chef of Volume is hiding behind the wide range of learning missions CLIL young learners will love completing.

This open educational resource is inspired by a task where students have to make sandwiches of different geometric shapes. The goal is that CLIL young kids learn about some mathematic content throughout a cross curricular approach. Its main objective is to make students make a difference between the concepts of area and volume while doing web searches in small groups and using online tools for presentations and a video creation.

And, if you are a CLIL teacher yourself, you might also find it useful for your own lessons. Check the e-publication skeleton and decide for yourself. Morevover, if you are into open e-publications, you may find Marta's evaluation of digital ebooks interesting, as it was her prior step to designing her own showcase, inspired by what participants in the ebookEVO 2015 session did in that field. But, if your issue is that you cannot see the PBL approach when teaching Maths to young learners, the storyboard and its video challenge can change your viewpoint regarding learning Maths forever:





Next recommended stop is at the 3 missions Marta is challenging learners with: Creating a presentation, Writing creative recipes and Producing short animated videos.

And, after surfing all around the epublication, you must not miss the collaborative connected challenges and projects Marta has engaged herself in, so as to be aware of the importance of e-connections but also to be able to put that teamwork approach into the e-publication itself and into online learning. First of all, teamwork started with her closest peers and so she developed and audio-challenge together with her colleague Elena Benito aimed at combining Maths, Multiplying and Fun.


Then, she went nationwide and collaborated with a wider range of peers and students in Spain, through contributing to InfoEdugrafias. Finally, she took a step ahead and turned internationally e-connected, thanks to mentoring at the Student Blogging Challenge 2015, dreaming and interpreting others' dreams at #twima2, and taking part in Moodle MOOC 6 with her first live co-presented session ever.

If you would like to know more about Marta's own feelings about her achievements while designing her e-publication, view the clip below, or even better, join her on 10 June 2015 for her free live YLTSIG Webinar, when she will be explaining the whole adventure herself. Do not miss it; it is bound to be worth it!

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Bringing arts closer to children

 @teacher_marga is a Primary Bilingual teacher who has just successfully completed her Master's Degree Module on The Use of ICT and Web Resources for Primary Bilingual Education at University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid.

The result of the digital learning missions and challenges she has overcome along this three-month adventure is an e-publication aimed at CLIL Primary learners to interpret Prehistoric Art, entitled Bringing arts closer to children.

After evaluating other ebooks, reflecting on visual design principles, learning about licencing, citing and attributing; crafting audio and video challenges, designing flyers, attending live international events for inspiration and contributing to several international collaborative projects, @teacher_marga is showcasing all her findings in a blog where she offers tips and ideas for other CLIL Primary teachers to apply in lessons.

Check her proposals, tools and dreams, and listen to her own reflection after having cruised around CLIL digital teaching and learning for a while:


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Tuesday, May 26, 2015

YLTSIG Webinars: Where have our textbooks gone?

Join three of my #ictclil_urjc 2015 Edition teachers on 10 June for the free live session 'Where have our textbooks gone? on WizIQ, when they will explain how they faced up the challenge of teaching without textbooks after a tornado blew all the paper textbooks away and had to think of open connected interactive digital ways to engage CLIL Primary Bilingual students into learning.

This free webinar is part of the  IATEFL YLT SIG Bi-Monthly Webinars 2014-2015 series on teaching young learners, hosted by the Network for IATEFL YLT SIG.



For 60 minutes of live broadcast, Elena Benito, Coral Muñoz and Marta Plaza are sharing with you all their Open CLIL e-publications aimed at Bilingual Primary students, where they have envisaged a wide range of learning missions focusing on learners to rise up to challenges and investigate, through a project-based-learning methodology, so as to become autonomous learners while acquiring skills and accomplishing various goals.

Along their three-month Master's Degree Module about The Use of ICT and Web Resources for Primary Bilingual Education, at University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, these three pre-service CLIL teachers, together with the rest of their peers, whose outcomes are gathered at our public social list, have been progressing towards the e-publications they are presenting on 10 June, by means of crafting different learning missions themselves, getting inspired by other teachers who have already dived into e-publishing their own materials; connecting with international educational experts worldwide at live and face-to-face events, collaborating with other students and peer teachers in several projects and becoming aware of the importance of student-centred orientations when teaching and starting active methodologies in the classrooms.

Their digital reference locations have been the University Moodle Campus and this blog, and they have taken it from there so as to open up their own imagination, invent and design their own ICT activities, combine them with their CLIL teaching objectives and wrap it all up into attractively visual digital showcases, such as the three that we are singling out in this upcoming live session: Multiply your fun, Music is fun and Chef of Volume.

 

Do not miss the chance to listen to these three young talented CLIL teachers and surf their findings and achievements as well as their own viewpoints on teaching young learners.

We are looking forward to meeting you all live on Wednesday, June 10 2015 | 5:00 PM (Romance Standard Time)!

Please enroll the session and spread the word.





Thursday, May 21, 2015

Animals, animals, Animals!

 Check the brand new e-publication for CLIL Primary learners by @asersantos.

Aser is a Primary Bilingual teacher who has just successfully completed his Master's Degree Module on The Use of ICT and Web Resources for Primary Bilingual Education at University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid.



Along this three-month Master's Degree Module Aser has risen to various challenges and accomplished a wide range of learning missions until producing his final digital artifact: an e-publication ready to surf by anybody interested in CLIL teaching and learning.

Inspired by The ePerfect Textbook EVO session held back in October 2014, and challenged to brainstorm about facing lessons without textbooks, the first stage Aser has climbed up has been evaluating other e-publications, assessing their visual principles and drafting his own e-publication skeleton and mindmap.


Meanwhile, he has been curating resources and gatheting material so as to have everything ready when diving into designing the epublication itself, for whose showcase he has gone for Google Sites, and at the same time he has found about the importance of licencing, attributing and citing.



Of course, being an innovative young teacher, Aser could not miss the chance to be a connected educator, and he soon started twittering around and sharing with other peer teachers at virtual events such as the Spring Blog Festival and Moodle MOOC 6, both hosted by Dr. Nellie Deutsch, the collaborative #twima2 writing project, the InfoEdugrafias blogging project, or the Student Blogging Challenge mentorship. All these initiatives gave Aser the chance to be aware of the latest educational trends and put them into practice in his e-publication.



Inspired by all the above and encouraged by the proposal of missions available at the University Virtual Campus, Aser dived into e-publishing and crafting his own challenges for young CLIL learners and so now he is offering all kinds of learning adventures: from augmented digital mysteries to unveil when scanning images with Aurasma, online storyboards that lead to video productions, to audio challenges; all aimed at helping 8-year-old CLIL kids to learn about animals while having fun and improving their digital, language and science skills.

And, if you would like to meet Aser, there you are his own personal introduction and how to contact him too, although I would recommend you to go for the augmented version of this promising young CLIL teacher, which you will find on the left hand side of the 'Animals, animals, Animals' landing page.

However, if what you are wondering about is how Aser has lived this learning experience, do not hesitate to view and listen to his own reflections about this cruise:




Wednesday, May 20, 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!


Friday, May 15, 2015

#twima2 is live!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The World Is My Audience 2: Dreams Around The World


#twima, The World Is My Audience, was a first attempt at gathering the world's classrooms for a collaborative poetry project. It was a huge success, not in numbers of downloads (yet), but in the impact it had on teachers and students making connections with classrooms worldwide.


#twima2 is the follow-up project. Again, the goal, from March to May 2015, has been to collaborate with the world's classrooms on a writing project. And we, at our Master's Degree Module on The Use of ICT and Web Resources for Primary Bilingual Education from URJC in Madrid, have been in charge of dreaming stories and making the interactive media for those stories, together with 28 classrooms from around the world.

The outcome is now live: a 700-page interactive iBook live and ready for your downloads!

But behind this digital artifact, there have been 3 months of intensive, enjoyable, international collaborative work, magnificiently led by @theipodteacher, to whom we are greatly thankful.

Our contribution to #twima2 has been sequenced along the two main stages of the 3-phase-project:

Stage 1. 3 to 23 March 2015

Step 1. Discussing dreams among peers. The dreams we wrote about could be personal dreams, actual night dreams, dreams for the world, dreams of our culture or dreams that related to academic areas we were currently part of.

Step 2. Placing these written dreams in a shared Google document, without forgetting the title of each dream and the full name of the dreamer at the end of each written dream, for authorship. These written dreams may include artwork or photos we created, always making sure we used our own artwork and photos, so that we avoided any copyright issues. If we chose photos from the Internet, it was absolutely necessary to be sure they were acceptable and copyright free.

And this was the actual outcome for Stage 1:



Stage 2. 2 April to 2 May 2015 

Step 3. Once the dreams by the world’s classrooms were submitted, we were passed the written work and we became part of the worldwide team who took those written dreams and turned them into multimedia for the iBook. These media could be videos, photos, widgets and much, much more. The sky was truly the limit. The only condition was to choose a dream from a chapter/page by a dreamer from a classroom in the world we had not met; read it, interpret it, and turn it interactive.

And here are our actual products for Stage 2:




Stage 3. 2 to 14 May 2015

Step 4. Host teacher, JonSmith, was using iBooks Author to increase the interactivity and ease of transferring work to the iBook, uploaded the whole collaborative iBook to iTunes and, after Apple approval, here we are the full iBook live! The #twima2 iBook is now live and ready for your free downloads.

Click the link below to download on your iPad or Mac.




Thank you everyone for being part of the project, and my special congratulations to @MartaLFabero28 (one of my #ictclil_urjc students) for her extra contribution to #twima2 with her cover, which has been singled out to be the official cover of The World is My Audience 2.
We all hope everyone likes it and enjoys interactively reading it as much as we did while collaboratively designing it.

And, stay tuned for #twima3, as it will start up in the fall. So if you missed out this time, we will be back!

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

3,2,1 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.



Stay tuned for its final launch! Just 20 more days to go and it will be available 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!