#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!

Are you an Educational Blogger?

Then, you've come to the right competition! 

The IX Espiral Edublogs Award is accepting runners until 3 April 2015.

If you write an educational blog, do not miss the chance to take part in this blogging initiative that the Espiral Association has been organising over the last nine years. 

Just check the award community for detailed information, requirements, categories in which to register your blog, as well as to grab your participant badge.

The information is in Spanish but blogs written in any language are welcome. Join the educational blogging award that acknowledges the creative writing value of students, parents and teachers that bet on a better education where blogging plays a key and still innovative role.



And, for further impressions of those peers who have already won the spinning top, stay tuned at #yotambiéntengolapeonza.

Enjoy and be happy!

For a wonderful 2015, full of happy sincere authentic collaborative learning and teaching!

Thank you to all who, whatever the way, have been supporting me throughout 2014, which undoubtedly will always be a year to remember!

The World is my audience

As you all know by now, the Twima Project has been going on  for a few months, along the last term.
In previous entries here, we have been following it step by step, from scratch to its web launch, until now, when it comes to its end with a wonderful collaborative iBook compiled with the contribution of more than 170 writers from all around the world, being smoothly coordinated by @theipodtecher, who was the one coming up with this wonderful globally connected idea.

Our contribution to #twima from Spain comes hand in hand with the online teacher training course 'Digital Storytelling For Teachers', run by INTEF, and hosted by an awesome team of instructors, who encouraged and fostered their trainees to play a part in a collaborative chain story, which has now gone global. I sincerely thank them for that!

A chain story is an easy way to have students learn vocabulary and work with their friends to create a collaborative story. In a chain story, the teacher begins the story, student A continues the story, student B continues where A stopped, and so on.  The students have to listen to each other and understand each other so that the story makes sense and flows.

For this activity, trainnees contributed to a collaborative web chain story, using an online tool, Padlet. This tool allows you to click on the web wall and add text, images, videos, and more. Trainees did not have to register, but they were kindly asked to include their name. Of course, they can contribute on any mobile device with internet access or on the web.

We had over a hundreed online course participants, divided into five groups, to whom we provided the same beginning of a chain poem, and whose chained outcome can be read at the different group poems below:

Group A - http://padlet.com/majegsm/chainpoem_A 

Group B - http://padlet.com/majegsm/chainpoem_B  

Group C - http://padlet.com/majegsm/chainpoem_C 

Group D - http://padlet.com/majegsm/chainpoem_D 

Group E - http://padlet.com/majegsm/chainpoem_E 

To contribute to the poem, our trainees had to read the entire story up to the last post, contribute with a chunk that made sense and continued the flow of the poem as well as being related to the previous post, and adding multimedia elements to accompany their part of the poem, but involving an added snag: their contribution should be at least 100 words long.

The collaborative poems that they have come up with are now part of the #twima iBook The World Is My Audience, live at iTunes, free to download on all iOS devices and Macs.

Blend, Flip and Boost Your Teaching Up!

Join The EduPower Couple! for a free live session at Wiziq on November 3 2014, at 18:00, GMT+1.

We are looking forward to sharing with you all at the kick off of our first ever micro teaching in pairs experience at WizIQ: The EduPower of Blended Learning.

This first live session in the micro teaching in pairs experience will be inntroducing blended learning through flipped classrooms, teamwork and project based learning methodology, all linked together via ICT.

We will be co-presenting about our practice with flipped and PBL methodology at University in Madrid, where Billy and I met as student and teacher, and how blended learning has allowed us to extend our relationship until becoming peer presenters and course designers.

Blend, Flip & Boost Your Teaching Up

Uploaded by María Jesús on WizIQ Tutorials

This is the first tip about how blended learning might be the means for peer to peer teaching and learning. Or, would you rather think face-to-face sessions alone have the same power to keep students and teachers in touch in such a way as to start professional e-projects together after the classroom door closes?

If you'd like to share the answer with us, we will be more than happy to chat with you and all the attendees interested in having an interactive relaxed paired-up webinar.

QR Storytelling

Billy Joel Ramos, CLIL Primary Teacher and member of the Book ME-Library URJC project, is presenting a collection of English e-stories for young learners.

He has designed them along his Master's Degree at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, putting into practice what he has learned in his own lessons, with his students at Colegio VillaEuropa, where he has taught them how to enrich storytelling with their own voices.

Here you are their QR code format outcomes, so get ready, scan them and enjoy storytelling!

Fat Cat on a Mat

Big Pig on a Dig

Ted in a Red Bed

Hen's Pens

Shark in The Park

Crossposted from Book ME-Library

Adventure Picture e-books for Primary Bilingual Readers

Jacob Welcker, from the URJC Book ME-Library team, is the author of these two adventure picture e-books aimed at fostering digital reading skills among 8-12-year-old young learners.

If you are a CLIL Primary teacher, or if you teach ESL to young readers, like his stories and ever use them in your lessons or recommend them to your own students, the whole Book ME-Library team will love to hear from you.

Run your mouse over the cover and click to flip pages. Comments and feedback are most welcome!

Crossposted from Book ME-Library.

A collection of e-books for young learners

@jdtearse and his peers from the Book ME-Library team from the URJC group of future CLIL Primary teachers, have created a really wonderful collection of colourful ebooks that young learners are bound to enjoy!

I am sure teachers are also going to regard them as a good source of ESL material for young readers to be encouraged to e-read. If you like them and ever use them in your lessons, the Book ME-Library team will love to hear from you.

Just click on the images below, and start reading!

Crossposted from Book ME-Library.

Two New Storybird Books

Book ME-Library's two newest books for kids. Still Learning and A Typical Tuesday are two fun and easy to read books designed for younger kids (ages 6-9). With wonderful pictures provided using the Storybird tool and illustrations by HedgehogsandCo and nidhiart (respectively), these books are meant to educate young readers using repetition, key phrases, and both past and present tenses. As always, comments are appreciated. Hope you enjoy!

Still Learning

(Click on either of the book covers to head straight to the E-book!)

Typical Tuesday

Fat Cat on a mat

International Book Day is coming up! So, to celebrate it and continue to create books for our Book ME-Library, we got some 1st graders from a bilingual school in Móstoles to read a few stories. We uploaded the recordings up to our SoundCloud channel, captioned it and created individual QR codes for each book. Here Ivan B. read Fat Cat on a mat. Please share it and comment. Thanks and enjoy!

The Great Hunt

Check out Book ME-Library's new story, The Great Hunt.

It is about a thrifty hunter who wants to capture the most magnificent beasts for the menangerie of the king.

Click on the picture or click here to read The Great Hunt.  Enjoy!

Lucy and the Library from Book ME-Library

Check out the new story from Book ME-Library, Lucy and the Library.  The story is about a girl named Lucy who is bored on a rainy day.  Lucy doesn't know what to do.  Her grandfather tells her to go to the library.  He says that the library is a magical place and that books can take you anywhere.  So, Lucy goes to the library to check it out.

To create this story, we chose a website called Storybird.com  Storybird has pre-made photos from a lot of artists.  We really liked the options available to us on Storybird.  We are not necessarily fantastic artists, so we were thrilled to find an option where we can use the beautiful pictures available along with our own unique creativity to create a story we thought would catch the attention of the children.

So, without further ado, here is the story.  You could also just click on the picture above.

Miss Cloud, The Prettiest One

Writing and reading are a key to mastering a language. We wanted to keep fostering the reading part with the story "Miss Cloud, The Prettiest One". With the help with from José Luis, Jacob and John, we put this wonderful story together. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Original story (Doña Nube 1989) and artwork provided thanks to: María Dolores Pérez-Lucas and Irene Arial

Full information about this eproject: Book ME-Library.

Kuentalibros: 2,000 posts recommending books

Interview for AulaPlaneta to summarise this two-year collaborative project after its ending in summer 2013.

The interview is in Spanish.

Thanks a lot!

Goodbye, Kuentalibros!

All the best to the huge amount of Storytellers that have been collaborating with Kuentalibros for the last two years!

After having said goodbye to the collaborative project that has meant so much to me and my ESL students, I'm absolutely lost for words, but please, Do Keep on Reading!

What kind of reader is Ana?

I do not really know what kind of reader I am. As in other aspects of life I do not like labels so the best thing to do is to tell you some reflections about reading and about me.

I think I started reading when listening to my grandparents´ stories. I always enjoyed being told tales, stories or whatever as far as I am more a listener than a teller.

Eventually tales came to me at school and I specially remember the times I spent reading and leafing through a huge Little Red Riding Hood tale in the library corner. I can still feel the paper sliding from my fingers and those lovely pictures...she was almost as big as me at that time.

As I grew up I began reading Enyd Blyton, the “Famous Five” and naughty Guillermo in search of adventures. I also read comic books: Mortadelo and Filemón; Rúa del Percebe.

Nowadays sometimes I read for fun, sometimes because I need it for my job; sometimes because I need information about a place, a gardening technique or to extend knowledge about something new I learned and became really interested in.

It is important where I read; I cannot do it everywhere or even travelling (I get dizzy) …imagine if I lived in a big city with the enormous amount of time they waste on transport My favourite moment for reading is my room in a winter morning with the sun filtering through the window panes and after having had breakfast….delightful! In a rainy day it is not so good but it is worth it too.

I read very different kind of books: illustrated tales (I love them); novels (I suppose being a different one from myself and learning about human behaviour, feelings…I find it quite an interesting work of empathy); essays about the human condition; books about nature, gardening….a little bit of this and little bit of that. 

I have to say that right now I prefer paper books rather than e-books but in some years time…who knows?

Sometimes I read a lot and sometimes right the opposite. I guess depending on my mood.

By @gonzanafer

A reader's self-portrait

I’m not a very good reader although I should be. I mean, I’m a Philosophy teacher and I’d have to read more than I do. But I have to confess that I don't have enough time to read. I remember reading lots of comics when I was a kid. I began reading the famous Spanish cartoons of the 70s: Mortadelo y Filemón, El capitán Trueno, Zipi y Zape. It was the Ibañez World. Afterwards, I began reading “The Famous Five”. I spent a very good time reading the nice adventures of these cousins. They were all the time fighting the bad guys, looking for treasures, and always eating marvellous pic-nics. Then, I began reading about eastern philosophy, I mean, about budhism. There were several books by Lobsang Rampa: "The third Eye". I tried to make the astral travel but I couldn't. Afterwards I realized the author wasn't a real budhist. I found literature can stay very far of real life. 

When I was sixteen I began visiting the public library and I spent good moments there, searching old books. I could smell the odour of the books, I could touch them, I could walk between thousand of books trying to know the purpose of their authors, guessing about the adventures that were between their pages. To read is a real adventure, one of the best you can be engaged in. You can travel far away, you can move throughout the whole story or you can be in fictional worlds. That's why to read is worthy. 

I have never read a digital book so far. Just a few pages. Of course, I realize it's another way to read but to turn the pages of a book, to smell it, to measure it...its an experience mankind must not forget. Anyway, if we have to change, the point is not to close the door to new adventures.

By @juanatt

CelebRAting World Book Day

Scan the images below using Aurasma and celebRAte World Book Day with us! 

To be able to discover the superpowers of these posters, just follow this channel using your smartphone or tablet; then open your Aurasma app and scan the posters. 

We hope you enjoy augmenting the reality of reading!

What kind of reader am I?

A self - portrait by ...

The C1 ESL Bunch

Stay tuned for our World Book Day Celebration!!!!!!!