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:

Maths lessons could be fun! by martuki_pdm on GoAnimate

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!

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:

Create a Copy | View Larger

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.

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:

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!

#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:

Your Dreams Start Here from Mª Jesús García San Martín

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.

View on iBooks

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!

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!

The connection between #moodlemooc6 and #ictclil_urjc

Last 7 May 2015 edition of the Master's Degree on ICT and Web Resources for Bilingual Primary Education came to an end, and it could not have ended in a more adequate way than connecting with Moodle MOOC 6, the massive open online course hosted by Dr. Nellie Deutsch at WizIQ and running until 31 May.

Why am I regarding this mooc as the best e-connection with #ictclil_urjc 2015 edition? Very simple, because for 3 months the pre-service teachers attending this Master's Degree at University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid have been crafting missions at their Moodle Virtual Campus and their outcomes are open e-publications which show evidence regarding how open blended learning that combines Moodle, social networking and blogging, all approached from a project based learning orientation, can help improving teachers' digital competencies.

The theme of #moodlemooc6 is collaborative learning, reflective practice, connecting online for instruction and learning, and peace through online learning.

A chance like Moodle MOOC 6 is the perfect scenario for these future teachers to have the chance, not only of disseminating their digital outcomes, but also of making e-connections, as they are presenting live in front of an audience of international educational leaders, experts and connected teachers.

Being the perfect match then, 7 May was D-Day and there they were, the group of 26 pre-service teachers, willing to explain about their e-publications for Primary bilingual learners, having collaboratively prepared their slideshow in advance, and looking forward to generously sharing The Challenge of Digital Crafting at Moodle for a 60 minute live online session, which was extended well into over 80 minutes in the end.

Apart from the common place last minute audio or video issues that we are bound to get some time throughout our presenting life, I must confess I am really proud of all their effort and how calm they rose up to the challenge of presenting in public, apart from being extremely satisfied with all those digital artifacts they have come up with after those three months of hard work and several puzzling moments.

Well done indeed, my dear #ictclil_urjc Moodle crafters!

Here you are the recording of the session:



After this first experience spreading the word online, all of them wanted to thank the organiser of Moodle MOOC 6 for the opportunity, so I do encourage you to read their memories at their e-publications to pay tribute to Dr. Nellie Deutsch and show her our acknowledgement and gratitude.

Thanks ever so much, Dr. Nellie, for being so welcoming generous with all of us!

And, of course, last but not least, I must recommend you to surf around the collection of digital publications by this group of pre-service CLIL Primary teachers; they are ready for anybody interested in Primary CLIL education to dive into and find tips, ideas, lots of resources for lessons, and above all, fun.

The Challenge of Digital Crafting on Moodle

This is the title of the live session the group of pre-service teachers about to finish the Master's Degree Module on The Use of ICT and Web Resources for Primary Bilingual Education, #ictclil_urjc 2015 Edition, and myself are co-presenting on Thursday 7 May 2015 at Moodle MOOC 6 free course on WizIQ.




Have a glimpse at our slideshow and feel free to join us 7 May 2015, 5pm Spanish time, for our free online session, when we will be sharing the ICT and CLIL 3-month-experience along which this digitally skillful group of CLIL-ICT future teachers have been using Moodle as their Learning Management System together with social networks, blogs, sites, online video and audio challenges, storyboards, collaborative missions and much more, with the aim of designing online open educational e-publications for Primary Bilingual Education that you will be able to visit right at our free session.




We would like to thank Dr. Nellie Deutsch for hosting both the MOOC and our session,as well as for giving the #ictclil_urjc bunch this great chance to show their outcomes and interact with speakers worldwide.

Looking forward to welcoming you all at "The Challenge of Digital Crafting on Moodle". Thanks for stopping by.

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!

Moodle MOOC 6 is now in progress

As every fall and spring, a new free edition of Moodle MOOC, and we are running the sixth one already, is available thanks to Integrating Technology 4 Active Lifelong Learning, hosted by Dr. Nellie Deutsch.

Last 1 May the sixth edition of this well known MOOC went live at WizIQ and it will remain open and accepting your enrollment up to the next 31 May.


As part of this sixth edition, I have the honour to co-present on 7 May at 17:00 Spanish time with my #ictclil_urjc pre-service teachers from the Master's Degree I teach at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, about The Use of ICT and Web Resources for Primary Bilingual Education.

The 2015 edition of this Master's Degree is getting to an end too, and we have been so lucky as to be invited to finish it online, spreading the word about or work, disseminating our brand new e-publications, and having another great chance to learn and collaborate with educators from around the globe. By the way, at Moodle MOOC 5 there are 26 presentations with 19 presenters from 15 different countries.

Our live session is entitled 'The Challenge of Digital Crafting with Moodle', and you are free to join whenever you like, exactly as with the rest of live sessions scheduled for these upcoming 4 weeks in May, the discussions and reflections and so forth.

Check the interesting syllabus and welcome aboard! At the end of the free MOOC, you are also entitled to your certificate but without any doubt, the beauty of this MOOC is, as it has always been, sharing, contributing and collaborating.

Looking forward to meeting you all at #moodlemooc6.

GRETA - ELT, Spring of Ideas - 25 April 2015 Jaén

On 25 April 2015, I had the pleasure to share GRETA Teacher's Day with almost 100 teachers and pre-service teachers interested in CLIL learning.

It was a light-hearted event at University of Jaén, to which I was warmly welcome by the GRETA team, who quickly managed to make me feel at home, and so I would like to thank them all for that.

After some days to reflect and think about all the innovation, positive attitudes and splendid materials I had the pleasure to view and feel in Jaén, I'd like to provide you with the presentation and handouts I used in the workshop that opened the day, hoping that you might find it enjoyable and maybe inspiring for your own spring teaching/learning practice.

Challenging Future e-Teachers to Blog e-Projects (Handouts) from Mª Jesús García San Martín

It was a real joy to be able to take part in the event and hope all those there enjoyed as much as I did. Looking forward to our next meeting now!

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 Festival, Moodle 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!

Webinar #CDigital_INTEF

This evening I'll be moderating, sharing viewpoints and impressions about Digital Competence with some well known teachers and educational leaders in Spain at a live event which you can stream view below.

The event is broadcasted in Spanish and belongs to one of the challenges at MOOC #CDigital_INTEF, a free Massive Open Online Course hosted by @educaINTEF which has just started on Monday 27 April, but whose enrolment is still open.

If you are interested in learning more about digital skills, competencies and how to teach them and evaluate them at school, in class and with your students, you are welcome to join us live this evening and at mooc.educalab.es for the next 5 weeks.





What is Digital Competence?
Why should schools train learners to be digitally competent?
Teaching and assessing digital competence in class
How are teachers and learners approaching this competence?
How should digital competence be evaluated?

These are the speakers who will be ready to answer the questions above, as well as any others that you'd like to ask. Check their Twitter handles below and learn more about what they do in Education before meeting them live this evening at 20:00 GMT+1. Check your timezone.

Manuel Area Moreira 
Mercedes Ruiz 
Elisa Piñero
Francisco León

Planning video challenges for CLIL Primary Education in 6 Steps

When planning any kind of e-challenge for learners to rise up to, one must carefully mindmap it and put it forward to them so that they actually know what they are being asked to accomplish, what learning goals are being achieved and what assessment criteria are being taken into account.

This is how the challenge of coming up with educational engaging video clips for CLIL Primary learners has been evisaged at URJC in Madrid, by a bunch of 27 pre-service teachers who are designing digital outcomes of the kind to be incorporated into their own e-publications for their own future CLIL Primary students.

 Step 1. Overview (challenge scenario)

'Imagine that you are selling a movie idea to a director with the hope that he will buy it and take it to the big screen.' 

This is the starting point, the context to trigger off the crafters' imagination (the learners) into setting up a video learning challenge.

 Step 2. Idea (challenge tip)

'Storyboards are the blueprints of any digital video challenge/project/mission/trailer/activity'.

This is the idea to start drafting the challenge.

 Step 3. The challenging question

'Let's create a storyboard and present it to the director'

This is what sets the challenge in motion and makes crafters go for it.

 Step 4. Guiding steps

Now that the crafters have risen to the challenge, it is time to guide them through how to accomplish it:

- Identify what you know about the challenge you are up to, that is, if you know what a storyboard is, and what you don't know about storyboarding, so as to investigate and find out.
- Analyse the challenge scenario, that is in our case, the CLIL e-publications we are designing and are in progress.
- Define the challenge your are facing, that is, how a video challenge can allign and match learning goals and needs within your overall e-publication.
- Design the work plan, that is, team up and discuss about what kind of video challenge you'd like to come up with: characters, background, aims, target audience and so forth.
- Gather and organise information, that is, surf and choose online means for designing the storyboard for your video challenge, investigate about the topic, about the info your are offering in that video challenge, and so forth.
- Develop activity, that is, use the means chosen and go for the design of that storyboard!
- Evaluate, spread the word, share and keep it up!

Step 5. Guiding missions

This is the time for hands-on work, that is, 
- write the storyboard, 
- craft it, 
- evaluate it, 
- improve it, 
- publish it and share it.

 Step 6. Guiding resources

Providing the crafters with curated useful resources for tackling how to plan a video challenge for CLIL Primary Education learners. In this particular challenge, we are mostly working with the Storyboard That free online tool.

And, finally, here you are the digital storyboards the bunch of pre-service teachers have come up with, which are obviously the preface to their actual video challenges, for whose results you should stay tuned and wait!


Meanwhile, all the participants in the #ictclil_urjc Master's Degree 2015 Edition and myself as their middle-lady are looking forward to your feedback about the final storyboards and what you think the evolution into actual video challenges will look like.

6 online tools for designing digital posters

Digital posters and infographics are great means to create and communicate knowledge and information through the web. They are visual products that allow both educators and students to organise concepts, order topics, create schemes, present results, share products, clarify difficult key ideas or help with complex themes, among other purposes.





Nowadays there is a wide range of online tools that make our lives easier and offer us easy ways to design visually engaging posters which we can then use in class, insert in our digital sites, webs, portfolios, blogs, and so forth, or share at social networks.

Here you are a taste of six easy-to-use friendly online options for you to choose those that best match your teaching and learning needs:

Easelly has the ingredients for any teacher or student to be able to design a nice poster or infographic which fulfills visual principles and besides, it allows teaming up so the poster can be created in collaboration. The digital outcome can be downloaded in different formats, including printable .pdf format and the designer is provided with the link and the embed code so as their product can be cross-posted to their own digital blog, site, web, and so forth. Here you are a tutorial with first stpes to start using this tool:

Piktochart might be considered the best known and most popular online tool for designing posters and infographics nowadays. It is easy to use and offers various icons, shapes and templates ready to be included in our design. However, it does not allow real time collaboration and printable oucomes cannot be grabbed. If you decide to go for it, here you are how to start tackling your digital poster with this tool:

Canva is an awesome online tool for designing all kinds of posters, banners, infographics, cards and so on. It includes over a million illustrations, icons and templates to choose from, although our own pics are also welcome.
As with the afore mentioned tools, you must sign up and then log in to start using it, and then decide what type of digital outcome you are designing with the tool, as from that decision, the tool will provide you with the right sizes, layouts, templates and so on, so as to adapt your creations to your specific goals and needs. For further help with this tool, view the clip below:

Smore  is a visual friendly online tool for creating posters and flyers to which you can add text, videos, images and whose outcomes can be linked and embedded at any web site or blog. However, the basic free version is currently restricted to 5 free designs,so once you are done with those five, you will have to upgrade to the Premium version if you would like to keep on designing more creations.

Tackk is similar to Smore as regards aims, as it is a friendly tool for designing digital posters in an easy quick way. Besides, at the moment it allows unlimited designs without having to upgrade and the templates, layouts, wallpapers, backgrounds and other creative options are quite an asset.

Mural.ly is a drag and drop online tool that allows you to easily include links and images onto the poster you are designing. The interface is neat and friendly as regards including multimedia content; on top of that, collaborative edition of ongoing posters is available, so it is undoubtedly added value for this tool when applied in education, since it fosters team work. If you are thinking of starting with it, do not miss the clip below:

Student Blogging Challenge 2015 - Week 7

Connecting 2015 #ictclil_urjc and 2015 Student Blogging Challenge is landing on week 7, which is Game Week, a real fun mission all about visiting other blogs

Please check the Student Blogging Challenge 2015 main page and surf the activities your mentees should be accomplishing.

Help them with comment starters, encourage them to connect and comment and play the Count Out Three Game, you won't regret it!

And I do recommend you to read this range of clues to take into account when commenting about fellow bloggers' posts and entries. I think they are bound to be useful both for your mentorship and your own blogging activity.

Illustration from Clue: a space

Student Blogging 2015 Challenge - Week 6

Connecting 2015 #ictclil_urjc and 2015 Student Blogging Challenge is landing on week 6. The activities for this mission are about working and then playing.

Please check the Student Blogging Challenge 2015 main page and surf the activities your mentees should be accomplishing.

Read the flipboard magazine to visit bloggers who are writing great posts and are then leaving comments on Miss W’s challenge posts. Students with Edublogs free blogs can’t have posts flipped into the magazine, so they are being mentioned on each week’s posts instead.

View my Flipboard Magazine.

A potential cover 4 #twima2

As you are bound to have guessed by now, the ictclil_urjc bunch of pre-service teachers attending the Master's Degree Module for The use of ICT & Digital Resources in Primary Bilingual Ed. URJC. 2015 Edition, are connecting with collaborative projects worldwide, and one of them is our much appreciated #twima2.

Stage 1 is finished and we are now diving deeply into Stage 2 to build multimedia artifacts while interpreting other collaborators' dreams.

On top of that, the collaborative iBook we are all helping to produce and publish is so far, 25 chapters and 630 pages of brilliant dreams written/illustrated by over 90 classes worldwide, and it needs a cover, doesn't it?

Well, our talented @MartaLFabero28 has come up with a sweet potential cover for #twima2 which we are proudly presenting right now:

Everybody in class and myself are keeping our fingers crossed for Marta's cover to be singled out as the final one.

Good luck, Marta!

CLIL e-Publications for Bilingual Primary Education

After facing challenges, going on learning missions, sorting out new teaching scenarios brought up by a tornado blowing textbooks away, and 3 months of amazing hands-on work at the Master's Degree Module for The use of ICT & Digital Resources in Primary Bilingual URJC - 2015 Edition, now it is time to proudly introduce the CLIL showcases this bunch of 26 pre-service e-teachers have just designed and opened up to the world, their e-publications for Primary Bilingual kids:

This is just the visual tip of a full schedule of missions that they have had to craft in order to reach this turning point, which will soon be hopefully extended into an open challenging engaging digital publication for Primary Education learners and teachers.

To land on this creative stage after the tornado, the pre-service teachers, now turned into e-authors, have climbed up quite a wide variety of stepping stones. They have:

• brainstormed together about how to rise to the challenge of teaching with no paper textbooks; 

• surfed other ebooks, designed by other teachers worldwide who have already made the decision of designing their own digital teaching materials,  and evaluated them;

• learned about the importance of licencing, citing and attributing;

• improved their digital literacy by attending the Spring Blog Festival 2015 live sessions, where over a dozen educational leaders inspired them to go ahead in their ordeal;

• started curating their own resources, ideas and tips so as to gather information, ready to include if necessary when publishing their digital outcomes;

• gone collaborative and taken part in worldwide educational projects: #twima2 has given them the chance to dream internationally. #stubc15 has opened the door towards blogging and becoming international blogging mentors. @infoEDUgrafias has taught them how to draft visual outlines of their e-publications, which later evolved into mindmaps.

Of course, their outcomes are in progress, but I wanted to share their work with you all, as I think their effort is worth it and they all deserve your staying tuned for upcoming episodes, as there are more challenges knocking on their doors which will sooner than later be real, and that make, from my viewpoint, nice evidence that innovating is a must when educating.

Meanwhile, suscribe to #ictclil_urjc and don't miss it!