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!

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!

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!

Student Blogging Challenge 2015 - Week 4 Mission

  Connecting 2015 #ictclil_urjc and 2015 Student Blogging Challenge is landing on week 4.

This week we are joining globally and making an evironmentally friendly stop on 28 March 2015, Earth Hour. Take the chance to use your power to make a change regarding climate change by encouraging your mentees to be part of it all too.

Activities for this week are all to do with the globe or the world we live in, so visit your mentees' blogs and support earth with them.

Do not forget to visit the Student Blogging 2015 Challenge main page and read the suggested missions there. We are now into week 4 of the challenge so students should have an About Me page or post, created an avatar, perhaps written something about commenting, written a post using images and giving correct attribution - maybe a poem or story to finish, too.

Please get in touch with me if:

• you have been allocated blogs where you can't leave a comment,
• your mentees are not replying to any of your comments  especially when you have asked a question,
• your mentees have written no posts at all relating to the challenge,
• your mentees still have the basic Hello World post.

Happy Week 4 and Happy Earth Hour 2015. Let's make the change!