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!
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