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:

#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.

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!

From eBookEVO to CLIL eBooks

Inspired by the #ebookEVO session within #evosessions 2015, a bunch of pre-service teachers at University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid rise up to the challenge of designing their own open CLIL ebooks for Primary Bilingual students, from February to May 2015.

Their ongoing teaching journey starts with a positive tornado and is scattered with learning missions to be accomplished step by step until overcoming the final challenge: designing and publishing and open, engaging CLIL e-publication.

This blended adventure is what I would like to share with you all on 21 March 2015 at the Spring Blog Festival, when I will be presenting and co-moderating with Dr. Nellie Deutsch from 12 am to 24 pm GMT+1, along with other well-known educational leaders worldwide.



I look forward to welcoming you all at Spring Blog Festival 2015!

Evaluating eBook Designs

Inspired by #eBookEVO, a bunch of pre-service teachers at URJC in Madrid are evaluating some designs by participants in that rocking session within #evosessions 2015, with the aim of finding true inspiration when designing their own CLIL e-publications for Bilingual Primary Education. #ictclil_urjc 2015 Edition.

Check the Pinterest Board with all their outcomes and our warmest appreciation for all the teachers that took part in #ebookEVO 2015 and their enormous generosity at sharing their outcomes with the world.

Follow Mª Jesús's board Evaluating eBook Designs on Pinterest.

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.

8 Reasons Why Open Badges Are Awesome

Find more education infographics on e-Learning Infographics

Teachers, We've Had a Problem

Ready for a new challenge?

This school year, the students from URJC at the #ictclil_urjc 2015 Edition of the Master's Degree Module on The Use of ICT and Digital Resources in Primary Bilingual Education are facing a brand new mission: 'Teachers, We've Had a Problem'.


Click on the story below, find out what that problem is and feel free to contribute with tips and ideas to overcome this issue:

Where have our textbooks gone?

Useful tips to give elearning a human touch

eLearning is undoubtedly the way to bring learning close to individuals interested in being taught anywhere, any time, and about all kinds of fields one can imagine.

However, sometimes we might make the mistake of leaving elearners to their own devices and forget about the fact that they are real human individuals, real learners who need to feel that there is somebody behind the learning portal.

Courtesy of eLearning Infographics, here you are a list of tips to humanise your eLearning initiatives and, of course, your eTeaching.


Find more education infographics on e-Learning Infographics

First Steps on Smore

Smore is an online tool that allows you to design and publish flyers, for instance, when you want to announce an event, present an outcome in a visual way, create a web cv and so forth, that is, spread the word online, as the site of the tool itself claims.

In the videotutorial you are about to view below, the flyer on screen has been designed as a compilation album of comics in English, which have been created by teachers, about the subjects they teach.


Smore is a good choice to start a visual neat engaging activity and put it into practice in any class, for any subject, at any level, focused on any target audiece, aiming at improving students' skills such as language learning skills (reading and writing), digital skills or visual and critical thinking.

When considering Smore in lessons, you might like to have your students use it for:

• creating albums and compilations
• announcing class and school events
• designing flyers on contents, concepts, ideas, tutorials, activities, etc.
• publishing video and audio playlists
• drafting and summarising 
• presenting works

Check my Smore for further examples of various uses of this web tool.

Evaluating ebook designs

Week 2 for #ebookEVO is about to start, and I'll have the pleasure to be co-moderating it with an awesome team of committed educators: Shelly Terrell, Lucia Bartolotti, Walton Burns, Chuck Sandy and Sylvia Guinan.

As part of that week's mission 1, participants are asked to evaluate various ebooks designs, so as to be able to decide on how to design their own ebook.

I have thought that you might find it useful to have a rubric in front when evaluating those designs, so here you go my contribution to the week and the mission.

Evaluating ebook designs. eTextbook Teachers. EVO 2015 from M. Jesus Garcia

Good luck with Week 2, and above all, enjoy!

eTextbook Teachers EVO 2015

Register now for the eTextbook Teachers English Village Electronic Online 2015, EVO15.

This EVO15 session is taking place from 11 January to February 15 and registration is now open until 11 January.

The eTextbook Teachers EVO 2015 session is massive, open, and free for all of you to join. Aimed at all teachers who, in 5 collaborative weeks, want to begin drafting a chapter or more of a digital textbook that is relevant and updated to support their learners.

The session is facilitated by 18 moderators from all over the world, with experience in publishing and materials design, who are ready to support every participant at all times.

Meet the team of moderators below. From left to right: Shelly Sanchez Terrell, Janet Bianchini, Jennifer Verschoor, André J. Spang, Debbie Tebovich, Ian Hall, Moundir Al Amrani, myself, Sylvia Guinnan, Walton Burns, Natasa Bozic Grojic, Michelle Worgan, Chuck Sandy, Özge Karaoğlu Ergen, Jason Lavine, Tanya Trusler , Lucía Bartolotti, Terry Freedman.

    

   

 

 

The learning environments are set up as follows:

• Discussion group:  https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/108458862109297898812 
• Task and materials Wiki: http://ebookevo.pbworks.com 
• Collaborative Bookmarks (Listly): http://list.ly/ebook-evo
• Live Online Sessions (Google HangOuts): http://ebookevo.pbworks.com/hangouts
• Video Recordings of Sessions: Youtube playlist
• Session Twitter Hashtag: #ebookevo

To join the session, follow these steps:

1. Go to: https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/108458862109297898812                                      2. Click on "Join Community " 

3. Wait for your membership approval. 

4. Begin completing the pre-tasks on our Wiki http://ebookevo.pbworks.com   

The action starts on January 12, 2015!