321 Introductions. #ictclil_urjc - 2015 Edition

Check the brand new collection of 321 intros by the students at the Master's Degree Module for The use of ICT & Digital Resources in Primary Bilingual URJC - 2015 Edition:
 

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.

International Writing Exchange

2013/2014 school year is not even over yet, and however, we teachers are already getting ready for 2014/2015.

I guess we can't help it! As a well-known colleague of mine says, 'September will be here before we know it', and so, here I am, once again, jumping into a new collaborative project for English Language Teachers to try and help learners with writing and speaking skills, connect with other teachers worldwide and develop ideas and new activities.

These are some of the reason why I have joined The International Writing Exchange (IWE) 14-15 taking place at WiziQ and Moodle, willing to learn, collaborate and come up with connected digital artifacts, which I am sure we will be able to design together and thanks to the great support by Dr. Nellie Deutsch's Integrating Technology for Active Lifelong Learning.

Are you a teacher and would like to collaborate too? Watch the trailer below, read the course description and go for it!



All the members of the IWE are looking forward to welcoming you and your students. Don't forget: 'September will be here before we know it'. 

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!