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!

Music is fun!

Music is fun! is the CLIL e-publication for Primary bilingual learners by @koralinda27.

Coral Mg is a pre-service teacher who has just designed her first open educational digital publication as part of her Master's Degree Module on The Use of ICT and Web Resources for Primary Bilingual Education at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid.

She has been working hard for 3 months in order to be able to come up with this digital resource, which I am sure will be inspirational for any CLIL Primary teacher and learner interested in Music and English.

If you surf around her e-publication you are bound to find engaging missions aimed at 3rd graders to be collaboratively challenged into learning by doing while having fun. Just check this awesome video challenge where learners meet the notes with Mozart that @koralinda27 has designed in cooperation with her peer pre-service teacher @utopicmarta and have a glimpse at what Music is fun! has to offer:

And if you are more into audio challenges, the e-publication also includes a podcasting channel where CLIL learners are introduced into speaking and listening skills in an easy straight forward way that will lead them to grab awards and have their findings gamified:

But Coral has gone a long way in order to be able to publish this digital CLIL OER. From a drafted mindmap, crossing evaluation of visual principles, diving into licences, citing, attributing and connecting with other educators worldwide, up to attending online sessions and co-presenting, while designing CLIL artifacts and rising up to collaboration, and so forth.

But why reading this post when you can actually listen to Coral herself narrating her own learning through ICT? There you go her reflections on this three-month cruise around CLIL and ICT:

Congratulations, Coral, for such a nice e-publication!

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!

How to be effective when studying

How to be Effective when Studying – Best Study Apps, Tools, Tips & Techniques by Open Colleges

Practise your English pronunciation while you watch TV shows

PlayPhrase.me offers you the possibility to improve English pronunciation and patterns of intonation with your favourite phrases out of famous scenes of TV shows and movies.

Just key in the phrase or chunk of text you would like to practise and the tool will come back to you with the bits where the phrase was uttered by various actors and actresses at various films or TV shows. You will then be ready to drill the phrase as if it were a karaoke machine, as the phrase rolls down, highlighted below the sliding scenes out of which it has been singled out.

Quite a dynamic enjoyable way to keep your English intonation and pronunciation up. Enjoy it!

Halloween Festive Webmix

The Symbaloo Edu team has designed this fun webmix with with everything from costumes to DIY projects, to celebrate the creepy date with your students.

Enjoy it!

Announcing Mentor Relationship - The 13th Student Blogging Challenge

Have you been 'FaceQed' yet?

Not yet? 

Well, well, well, I have been a lucky one and my eleven-year-old technologically creative son has avatared me with the brand new free app FaceQ, available for both iOs and Android.

While having an iced drink at a cosy sun umbrella-protected café in the middle of one of those historical trendy colourful suburbs that only a few can enjoy in the summer if they work in a city closed for vacation in August, such as it is warm Madrid, my son would not stop fiddling around with his mobile, taking snapshots, uploading them to his Instagram and talking about avatars and funny faces.

So, my obvious question as a mother, was: 'What are you doing with your gadget'?

Fast and happy, he answered with another question: 'Would you like to have a new avatar?'

And there he came up with this snap design, while I had not really been able to find a sec to say yes, in a couple of minutes, created with his iPhone, using the free FaceQ app, while enjoying the shade without losing imagination.

And this is how I found out two things: what I looked like for my son and how he felt about my working away from home from Monday to Friday.

Besides, I was inspired for a few back to school icebreakers (Thank you, son!) with the aim of fostering ICT use in the ESL classroon once again. I think this app can be a nice free tool to carry out some quick quests over the first days back in our lessons.

Ten ideas coming to my mind right now:

• Pair the kids up and get them to avatar each other. Then, ask them to describe their designs to the rest of their peers and have a 'Guess Who' game.
• Have the kids avatar themselves using the app and compare their faces with the same avatars other peers have designed of them; compare the differences, make them aware of the fact that the image one might have of oneself can be different to the image others have.
• Share the avatars as pictures in their virtual classroom profiles.
• Turn them into posters and decorate the classroom with a big group picture of the class avatars.
• Make badges out of the students' avatars, so they can wear them, both virtually and as real pins.
• Hold a vote for the best avatar and give out prizes or awards.
• Keep them until the end of the school year, then have another round of FaceQ design and get them to explain the changes in their design. How has the image changed, to yourself and to others?
• And of course, take advantage of the designed faces and get them to practise parts of the face, colours, revise shapes, types of hair, eyes, clothes, accessories, and so forth.
• Get them to design the faces of their whole family tree, and then have a nice round of 'introducing my family' presentations among peers.
• Or get to know them better by asking them to avatar their favourite cartoons, characters, sportspeople, heroes, singers, idols ... Here you go another couple of my son's outcomes, which show two of his most-loved heroes in the world right now. 

'Who is each gentleman? Would you like to take a wild guess and leave a comment with it?'

It is a simple easy to use app; outcomes are quite attractive and ready in minutes, as you see. On top of it all, there is no need to register the under-age users and you can go social with your designs too, as they are shareable through social networks such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, but you may also mail your creations, so why not give it a try? 

Many of our students might come back to school having already heard of FaceQ or even having used it, so it is a nice chance to go fashionably mobile in class from the very first day.

Bringing Colegio San Gregorio and Book ME-Library together!

This is the beauty of e-connections and how taking advantage of ICT resources and social networks can bring peer teachers with alike interests together around a common rewarding mini-project that turns out to be an e-connected means to foster reading, writing and digital skills among Primary Bilingual students.

The story of this e-connection starts in a University classroom (URJC), with a group of future teachers taking the Master's Degree on The Use of ICT and Web Resources in Primary Bilingual Education, and approaching Challenge Based Learning through the development of various projects, which will enable them to embrace this methodology with their own students when having the chance to teach real, but at the same time, seeking for project testers, that is, current teachers looking forward to putting the projects into practice in their own ongoing lessons.

One of those students is Billy Ramos, working on the Book ME-Library project to encourage reading and writing skills with mobile devices.
As soon as he is ready for his creations to be tested, I start my Twitter engine and post several calls there as well as in Facebook, where the overall experience is now part of the 30 Goals Challenge and we have become inspire leaders for other teachers around the world to accomplish the eStudents Connecting and Creating goal.

Among many other collaborative colleagues, to whom I am sincerely thankful, Julián Sanz, from Colegio San Gregorio, in Palencia - Spain, responds willing to integrate Billy's assignments into his We Are StoryTellers eTwinning Project for sixth graders, together with Carmen Pérez, a colleague of Julián's.

I quickly e-gather them so we collaboratively plan, schedule, organise, exchange ideas together with proposals, and, as Billy often says: 'We are on it like white on rice' very very soon.

Billy starts with a sweet video introduction for the kids to get to know him better and have a glimpse of the upcoming episodes from Book ME-Library.



Julián, from his end, starts presenting the mini-project to the educational community:



And ... Off we go! The kids from Y6 San Gregorio are looking forward to learning how to become digital storytellers, and there is Billy, in Madrid, to show them the essentials of any story: introduction, nub, ending.





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Meanwhile, in Palencia, Julián, Carmen and their teams of sixths graders, with the help of Billy's tips, are writing scripts and storyboarding trips, tsunamis, monsters, fantastic creatures and loads of other digital storytelling adventures that they share and edit in Google Drive until ready for the final design.

And, there is a new decision to be taken, which tool to use for the digital creation. The winning tool is ... collaborative Storybird, so Billy comes into action again and with his superpowers, efficiently screencasts a how-to tutorial about the artful tool.



On top of that, Billy heartedly creates a sample story with Storybird: Who is bigger than me?, especially dedicated to the Y6 kids from Julián's classrooms, which hides an augmented personalised gift; to open the gift you need the Aurasma app in your mobile device, follow the Book ME-Library channel and scan the book cover with the app.

You wouldn't expect me to spoil it for you, would you?




Now, the sixth graders have all the ingredients to cook and serve wonderful digital stories, feel they are storytellers and have the spirit of e-connected students at the same time. Here you are some of their outcomes, and don't miss the authors' pen-names!!!

And this is the ending of our own e-connected story or perhaps it is the beginning, who knows? But one thing is sure: "We taught and learned happily ever after".

Density Experiment - Breaking Science!

The Science Breaking team of future CLIL Primary teachers at URJC have a new experiment they'd like to share with you all!

Ready for the new challenge? Watch their video clip, listen and practise!

If you are a teacher and ever carry it out in your lessons, or at home if you are a student, @ScienceBreaking will love to hear your feedback!

Cross-posted from Breaking Science

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

Is Celebrity Obsession Bad for Us?

You are invited to take part in our final Do Now: Art And Popular Culture before summer break, twittering about the article entitled Is Celebrity Obsession Bad for Us?

Read the post carefully, watch the video clip and draw your own conclusions. When you are ready to post your impressions, opinions, comments and so forth on Twitter, please start twittering on a regular basis, about this topic.

Start all your tweets with @KQEDedspace and end them with our hashtag #DoNow_urjc. Respond to your peers, and retweet all those posts that you regard worthwhile.

Be creative, illustrate your tweets, include multimedia content, use your imagination!

Lots of other students from all over the world are also twittering about this Do Now and they will be using 

#DoNowCelebrity, so it would be nice if you focused on that hashtag too, apart from our own. In order to manage that, you may use a tool for real time tracking and organizing your Twitter, such as Tweetdeck.

Photo at the top, by Brendon Thorne/Getty Images

Ready to dance Samba?

A nice energetic way to start any Physical Education lesson, get ready for the rest of the day, practise English and link to the world traditions.

This is the proposal by @Coonchaaa from the Arts & Music Around The World team at URJC, aimed at getting CLIL Primary students on the dance floor! Just watch the video clip below and learn to dance samba in one minute.

The Arts & Music Around The World team will love to see you all showing your dancing talent!

Cross-posted from Arts & Music Around The World

Egyptian hieroglyphs

Are you ready for the challenge?

@Cristina_RubioC from the Arts & Music Around the World team at the URJC is challenging CLIL students with an Egyptian adventure: writing like in Ancient Egypt, using hieroglyphs.

Watch the video clip below, and learn how:

If you are a CLIL teacher or student and ever rise to the challenge, the Arts and Music Around The World team will love to hear from you. Comments welcome!

Italian Style Art

Just with a mirror and some materials, @pablomaster89, from the Arts & Music Around The World team at URJC, is going to show you how to come up with a fine piece of art, Italian style.

Just watch his video clip and follow the steps:

Now, if you are a CLIL teacher or a CLIL student and decide to use this clip in your Arts & Crafts lessons, the team from Arts & Music Around The World will love to hear from you.

Learn more at Arts & Music Around The World.

The Hare and The Tortoise, Revisited

As part of their URJC Master's Degree for Primary Bilingual Education, a team of future CLIL teachers have been designing various CLIL activities to foster digital listening, reading and writing skills among CLIL Primary students within a so called  Heal The World With Stories project.

Their latest outcome is a two-stage assignment based on the traditional children's story 'The Hare and The Tortoise'.
Along the first stage, they explain the three different sections all stories have, and propose kids to mindmap their own story. As an example they have designed a mindmap of 'The Hare and The Tortoise'.

Once done, here comes the next stage: podcasting a new story following the mindmap the kids have designed. And again, they are providing the learners with a recording example. 

What story do you think you are going to hear? Of course, 'The Hare and The Tortoise'

The Heal The World with Stories members are @laugar91, @Maria91bm and @alcalop14. They will all love to hear from you if you ever use their activities in your lessons

Cross-posted from Heal The World With Stories.

Where Do You Find Everyday Art?

Jodie Mack

From 7 to 20 May 2014, you are invited to take part in Do Now: Art And Popular Culture twittering about the article entitled 'Where Do you Find Everyday Art?'

Read the post carefully, watch the video clip and draw your own conclusions. When you are ready to post your impressions, opinions, comments and so forth on Twitter, please start twittering all along this coming week, on a regular basis, about this topic.

Start all your tweets with @KQEDedspace and end them with our hashtag #DoNow_urjc. Respond to your peers, and retweet all those posts that you regard worthwhile.

Be creative, illustrate your tweets, include multimedia content, use your imagination!

Lots of other students from all over the world are also twittering about this Do Now and they will be using #DoNowAbstract, so it would be nice if you focused on that hashtag too, apart from our own. In order to manage that, you may use a tool for real time tracking and organizing your Twitter, such as Tweetdeck.

Where Are All the Green Spaces?

Sidewalk flower in Oakland, CA
photo by Joel Wanek

You are invited to take part in Do Now: Art And Popular Culture from Thu 24 until Wed 30 April, twittering about the article entitled 'Where are all the green spaces?' for a late celebration of Earth Day.

Read the post carefully, watch the video clip and draw your own conclusions. When you are ready to post your impressions, opinions, comments and so forth on Twitter, please start twittering all along this coming week, on a regular basis, about this topic.

Start all your tweets with @KQEDedspace and end them with our hashtag #DoNow_urjc. Respond to your peers, and retweet all those posts that you regard worthwhile.

Be creative, illustrate your tweets, include multimedia content, use your imagination!

Lots of other students from all over the world are also twittering about this Do Now and they will be using #DoNowGreen, so it would be nice if you focused on that hashtag too, apart from our own. In order to manage that, you may use a tool for real time tracking and organizing your Twitter, such as Tweetdeck.