Once upon a time, a tiny story about CLIL

It is time to spend a while sharing what future CLIL teachers have ahead for us and our Primary kids.

Fortunately for me I teach potential Primary Bilingual educators twice a week, and I guess that allows me to envisage if CLIL methodology in the classrooms is going to be just a name again in coming years, and if we are actually taking the right steps to have real innovative Content and Language Integrated Learning Teachers in the classrooms, and how we are going to actually accomplish that in the adequate way, that is, how we are training CLIL teachers, and if that training is turning them into innovative enthusiastic educators, who will be absolutely convinced that integrating Content, Language, ICT, PBL and lots of Pills of Enthusiasm are the igredients to cook a classroom of bilingual students who will be ready to manage their lives in the real world, in two languages.

From my viewpoint, that type of training is the only successful one as well as the kind of training which will plant a seed of change in CLIL lessons, and so, that is part of what I try to transmit my groups of future Primary Bilingual educators every year. 

It is a challenging but very rewarding job, especially when, after four lessons, you come up with awesome outcomes, such as the video clip @MartaLFabero28, one of my students at the #ictclil_urjc 2015 edition, has just recorded.

This was the mission for Marta, as for the rest of her peers, in order to jump into digital literacy and social networking: their first tweet for #ictclil_urjc with one aim: learning by twittering.

How to achieve the goal? Writing a tiny story about what CLIL means for teaching and learning that allows the reader's imagination to run with it. They should start their tweet using #ictclil_urjc, that was the only condition.

And what did Marta do? She took a step ahead and summarised her own aspirations and opinions on CLIL teaching in an awesome clip she recorded with VideoScribe and that she later tweeted.

But before actually going live, Marta carried out wonderful preliminary work, which I observed dumbfoundedly in class.

In a nutshell, this was her step-by-step procedure:

1. She gave her tweet a thought or two,
2. reflected on the tiny story,
3. came up with an idea,
4. scribbled the clip in a piece of paper,
5. drafted her ideas,

6. recorded the clip including her drawing with Inkscape,

7. uploaded it to YouTube and spread the news on Twitter.

On top of that, she kept on with her own impressions and reflections when describing her upload at her YouTube Channel. 

Wouldn't you say it is a round solid job? Well, I would.

Isn't she just on the right track to become a good innovative teacher, digitally proficient, ready to teach CLIL in a modern way? I do think Marta is a promising young girl, full of enthusiasm, good ideas and excellent skills to craft loads of wonderful challenges like the digital artifact she has just produced, and who will do an awfully good job with future twenty first century citizens.

I just hope she can find her teaching place in Spain, and we do not lose all that talent for other countries or schools abroad where this kind of competencies are better valued than here.

Thanks a bunch, Marta, for your incredible effort, and also for making my day.

Keep rocking it!