The final project... is not and end.

Every good story has a great finish. Teachppy and I started this subject and this blog in February, and we have tried to make this learning journal as well as possible. We have put all our effort and love in each task. We have invested much time to get educational tools which can assist and encourage our students. We are very proud with everything we have learned about Information and Communication Technology.

Some of the tools that we have learned to develop this year, now I am using in my classes. For example, the daily routine activity created using Genially; Pinterest to organize my digital resources and Easelly to create infography. Moreover, I am considering developing other projects such as eTwinning, training through AprendeIntef and to acquire and improve the Portfolio of teacher´s digital competence. Also I discover other digital resources with my classmates, as ClassDojo or Edmodo. I am considering all the tools for my future as a teacher. 

During this subject, my favorite activity was the video project, it was really hard and we have to spend a lot of time, but it was fun and very productive. Thanks to this task I could work as a team, discover the Future classroom lab of the Ministry of Education, using a chroma and create a video project. 

Now, I want to introduce you the final artifact. I tried to summarize all the digital projects that I made during five months. My first idea was to use iMovie, but then I thank that it was a chance to discover another app, and I used Powtoon. It was a great discovery, because the offer you a lot of options: backgrounds, shapes, scenes, texts, characters, props and media. It is a very intuitive webpage, but you have to spend lot of time to do a good job! Finally, I put the video in my Youtube channel, because is better to watching. This is my final video, I hope you enjoy it!

I really enjoyed doing this final project, because I´ve remembered all the tasks and I have seen that the time and effort invested gives good rewards: educative resources, be part of teacher´s network and meet enjoyable classmates. I am very grateful to my ICT teacher and all the chances and challenges to learn about how to use ICT at school. 

Now, fortunately, I feel that I am closer to being a good 21st Century teacher. 

This is not an end, this is a to be continue…. 

Don´t worry... teach happy.

Being part of a teacher teamwork!

Hello friends!

Teachppy and I always talk about new tools, ideas or resources to apply in teaching… and frequently we speak about teamwork and the importance to create links between teachers, schools and all the educative community. We really believe that this is an important point in which education has to improve. Open class is the present and the future way of teach. We don´t have to considerer than teaching is an individual task. All the educative community working together is the best!

Nowadays, luckily, there are a lot of ways to establish connections. And we want to introduce you one of them, called Flipgrid, “where social learning happens; every student has a voice”. Flipgrid is a world collaborative project where we can gather teachers around the world, and they can extend it to their students.

The aim fo the project is to join people from all over the world who have something to share. Flipgrid is where people go to share ideas and learn together, where students amplify and feel amplified. The way to do it is by means of videos. The videos should be short, authentic and fun. It is pretty easy to use it. You can update your videos or recor new ones, it is allowed some options to personalize your creation and add some personal information. Also you can include a topic or take part in a conversation.

I join in the project: Twima8, the world is my audience. It is the 8th edition of Twima project, that started with a question in Twitter asking how to develop a collaborative poetry project. It was launched by a teacher, Jon Smith, known as the ipod teacher, who is currently an Apple Distinguished Educator and Technology Integration Specialist for Alliance City Schools where his class iBook projects have attracted attention for their global reach and practical approaches to integrating transliteracy practices into the classroom. It is a place where we can show our videos telling a personal story. Here, you can see all the people who are taking part of the project.

And now I want to share my personal video, where I am telling my first year and experience as a teacher. It was difficult but… you have to watch the video to know more!

Participating in this project is very excited to me. As I told you at the beginning of this post, I understand the teaching as a collaborative work and thanks to this project I am feeling that I am part of a great educative community, more than my school classmates. 

The benefits, in my opinion, are that you can share experiences with other teachers and they can enrich it; also you can discover educative situations that coworkers from schools around the world are sharing.  Moreover, showing videos make the experience more personal and you can feel that they are real people, not someone disguised behind a nickname or avatar. It is a real educative community!

Finally… something better than a social media to share experiences? We are talking about this project through Twitter, with the hashtag  #twima8.

Don´t worry… be part of a educative net!

Don´t worry… teach happy.

Channel 4: we got it!

Hello friends!

Today it is great day for Teachppy and I. Do you remember our post about the collaborative work project called Channel 4? In that moment it was only a project, but we were working hard and… we were able to finish the project! It is a pleasure for me to show it!

My first reflection is about the collaborative work. I feel very fortunate to be part of this great team together Soraya, Lorena, Jenny and Silvana. Frequently, people remember great characters, for example Michael Jordan (I admire him) but we can´t forget that he has a great team around him: Tony Kukoc, Scotie Pippen, Dennis Rodman and Ron Harper. Probably, we had not a great star, but each of us are a star tip. We have formed a great team and we have worked very well. I hope that our project will inspire you!

To record this project, we had the privilege to go to the Ministry of Education and worked in the Future Classroom Lab. Before recorded, Francisco Prendes Veiga inspired us with a conference about eTwinning. Then, we started the recording with a chroma.

The recording was fun! All of us had prepared our speech, but we had to record the scenes several times to get the best. Then, at home, our editor had a hard work to create a singular the video with the best of around twenty videos. This edition was formed in different steps:

Video: First, she has to cut the video because some of them has gestures or sounds that we don’t want to appear. The app is QuickTime. It is an easy app to use. Apart to create the video, you can add your voice, record your screen and record yourself.

Edition: she has to select the best videos, put together them, fit it and delete some mistakes. She used the video editor program called iMovie. At the beginning, this is not an easy program, so we had to look for some tutorials with instructions to include music, headlines and the background photos.

Backgrounds: we had selected images from Pixabay, when we created the draft. iMovie allows to add our pictures together our videos.

Sounds: GarageBand has got sounds to incorporate into iMovie, both apps are synchronized. Moreover, we looked for free sounds in FreeSoundsEffects.

It was a great process and a hard work but… we love the result! We created a video as a TV new, we called Channel 4. Through this news program our kids have to work in different areas as Natural Science, Literacy, Physical Education, Social Science and Arts and Crafts. It is a pleasure for me to introduce you the video:

Our idea is to show the video to our students in the classroom. They will watch it and we are sure that they will enjoy it a lot. Then, we will work about the news: speaking about them, reinforcing the listening comprehension, making groups and preparing the teams to develop the questions that the journalist made up.

My experience in this project it was incredible. It was a hard work, we spent a lot of hours, we did well the teamwork although sometimes it was not easy, and all provide many different points of views. But all the effort invested is good if the result is productive to support the learning process and to help the students.  

Don´t worry... create you own video!
Don´t worry... teach happy!

Teacher training: INTEF

Hello friends!

I want to introduce you an incredible tool for teachers. Well, really it can be used by all the people that love teaching… but mainly it is a professional training. 

I will speak you about INTEF, Instituto Nacional de Tecnologías Educativas y de Formación del Profesorado, from the Spanish Ministry of Education. It is the responsible of Information and Communication Technology for non-university educational stages. 

INTEF: http://educalab.es/intef

I started to know INTEF and all their teacher training programs in AULA 2018. Then, on Tuesday 24th of April, I have heard more information in a webinar called Mobile learning and digital competence of education. . 

Webinar (web-based seminar) is a presentation or workshop that is transmitted over the web using video conferencinf software. A key feature of a Webinar is it is interactive, because it has a chat to discuss and make questions to the lecturer. Using webinar software participants can share audio, documents and applications with the webinar attendees. This is useful when the webinar host is conducting a lecture or information session. While the presenter is speaking they can share desktop applications and documents. Today, many webinar services offer live streaming options or the ability to record your webinar and publish it later. 

In this case, it was the University of Barcelona who offers the webinar. It was an activity into a Digital competence and lerning experience Postgrade, but it was open for all the people . María Jesús García San Martín, my Master degree ICT teacher, who carried out.

María Jesús García. S. M. (blog): http://stopandlearnenglish.blogspot.com.es/p/about.html  

INTEF offers us a lot of tools and information about ICT, as articles, blog, information and teacher training. In this point, they have a lot of possibilities. 

AprendeINTEF is the section where you can discover all the online teacher training options. The main goal is to improve the digital competence of the teachers. They say that our digital competence is a puzzle and it is necessary to fit the pieces. To get that, you can find different ways of training and diversity of topics.

There are a lot of options to train so it is a great factor because each teacher can choose which want to according to their possibilities of schedules, interest, etc. The mains ways to do training are:

EduPills: self-learning. You have to spend around three to seven minutes to improve your digital competence in one point. You can do in each place while you are waiting something. This is the only way of training that you need de app.

NoocIntef: Nano massive open online courses. Over three hours of duration. You can improve you teaching digital competence with courses as digital tools; share online; or classroom blog as collaborative tool.

MoocIntef: Massive open online courses. There are extensive courses where, to share your learning, you have to create a learning journal. There are courses as gamification; learning based projects; or visual thinking. 

They have other options as SpoocIntef, self-paced open online course, that it is an experimental way of learning base in the autonomous content managements, or EnAbierto, where you can read or consult a lot of courses in the moment that you need it.

This type of courses, in general, are:

• Open.
• Massive.
• Learning between pairs.
• With a person to support.
• You can use the content always that you need it.
• If you pass the course, you can get the digital badge.

AprendeINTEF not only offer us the formation. Moreover, they have the Portfolio for the Digital Competence of Teachers. This portfolio has the main goal to promote acquisition, development and improvement of the teacher´s digital competence through self-evaluation and the updatable record of teaching, learning and training experiences. There are six levels of Digital competence, from A1 to C2. The learning is working, mainly, to develop five areas into the into the common framework of digital compentece teaching:

1. Information and data literacy.
2. Communication and collaboration.
3. Digital content creation.
4. Safety
5. Problem solving.

The portfolio fixs as a backpack where you can put inside your digital badges, as evidences. To do the portfolio you have to login in the webpage, add you data and you evidences to get an accreditation level of your teaching digital competence.

Finally, I want to show you my personal reflection about this topic. I feel that the teacher´s training it is very important. The society is changing every day, and we need to give the students the answers that they need in each moment. Not only the answers about the content, the answers about their life, the values to built their personality, and help them in the process of maturity. Thanks to the webinar and the kind of courses that INTEF offer us, teachers and people with interest on Education can improve their knowledge in a different ways.

Thanks to this webinar I have learned about the digital competence of teachers. I had created a lot of digital resources to support my lessons for a long time, but after than use it, I forget them or I kept them for other courses. But I never was consciously that, each new digital tool that I used and each digital activity that I created, it was learning for me. And now, I can accredit this learning and my digital achievements to get recognition about my teaching digital competence. It can be very important for my future.  

Nowadays, I think so, teachers have to adapt to their students. And also, fortunately, this type of online training adapts to us. 

Don´t worry… improve your teaching!

Don´t worry… create your portfolio!

Don´t worry… teach happy! 

Channel 4: collaborative work

Hello friends!

Today I want to explain you a great chance. Teachppy told me that, nowadays, the teacher job can´t be an individual work. It is very important the open doors at school and the development of projects and activities together than other coworkers, even with the involvement of all the educative community.

Thanks to my current Master degree at University, I have known great teachers and better people. We have created a group of five to create an innovational educational project. We are from different school and I believe that each of us can contribute with a lot of ideas from different points of view.  

I want to introduce you my team. I will add their professional blogs:

Lorena: http://misslorenaag.blogspot.com.es/

Soraya: http://mytwoneuronsarebilingual.blogspot.com.es/

Jenny: http://teacherjenny17.blogspot.com.es/

Silvana: https://misssmurfette.blogspot.com.es/

We wanted a great challenge… we wanted something new… we wanted a different way to teach… and we found it! A video project as a TV news!

Team work is exciting, but not always easy. We had the main idea, TV news, but it is important to create a communicative situation with all the members of the group to share ideas, opinions and a way of action. When we got it, we wanted to create a lesson plan.

In this project, the lesson plan included a drafter about the TV program. We created a serious lesson plan to involve all the educative topics to considerer into a clil lesson. Moreover we included all of the speech of the recording and the role of each of one:

- Soraya: editor / TV presenter.
- Lorena: drafter / nature journalist speaking about a natural disaster.
- Jenny: drafter / journalist in London speaking about the brexit.
- Silvana: community manager / journalist from UK speaking about Saint George.
- Dani: recorder / sport journalist speaking about new sports.

In addition, we wanted to interact with the students and start an activity for them. For that, at the end of each journalist performance we will ask the students several questions on which they have to work. To answer them they will have to create an oral presentation with digital tool. We will work as a cross curricular project through Literacy, Natural Science, Social Science and PE

We have shared the document in a Google Drive to facilitate our collaborative work.

So, once we finished the document, we are prepared to record… we can do it? I will continue telling you in another post on this blog.

Don´t worry… teaching is collaborative work.

Don´t worry… teach happy.

Enjoying with the school radio!

Hello friends!

Teachppy and I were thinking about the first day at school, and how we can work in two ways; introduce ourselves and introduce the bilingual subjects. 

As you know, Teachppy is very enjoyable, and he recommended me to create an audio. Through the recording we can develop a lot of skills as digital competence, linguistic communication competence, teamwork competence, cultural and artistic compentence and the competence to learn to learn. 

I will want to tell you the steps that we follow to create a lesson plan, an audio channel, a playlist and, finally, our welcome recording. 

The firts step was to create an audio lesson plan. I created a document in Google Docs, it is one of the tools that Google Drive offers us. As I did it, you can create documents, presentations, questionnaires and spreadsheets. One of the most benefit is that you can work online and save the document in the cloud.

In the audio lesson plan I pick up the aims, learning outcomes, EU key competences, classroom managment, cross curricular link, resources and assessment. At the same time, I was making the draft about the things that I will say in my welcome recording. Moreover, I include the scaffolding to help the students to create their own draft and their own recording. 

To create the online postcasting we can advice you about SoundCloud. This website is very intuitive and easy to use thanks to the good presentation and indications that they look like. As usually, you have to sign in. You can use your personal email or social media account. 

Then, you will find a welcome message and a guide abot how to use. You have to spend only a few minutes to use it effectively. 

Using SoundCloud, the first thing that I did it was to create my own playlist. To do it, you have to look for your favorite songs. You have to select the fist one to create the new playlist. Then, with the next ones, you will find the option to add to the playlist. 

I enjoyed a lot, a lot! Creating my playlist about Bruce Springsteen. I discovered song with singers as Bon Jovi or performances and live shows that I never listen before! 

I want to share this playlist because I want that my students do their favourite music playlist after than their own recording. 

Music is very important in our lifes and our schools, so we want to promote it and stimulate our pupils. 

Finally... our welcome audio! To motivate the students, Teachppy and I imagine a local school radio. In our message we wanted to integrate the areas of Science, literacy and music. We want that the students have fun using English. We hope that they will enjoy listening the welcome audio and they will improve their self esteem speaking English, creating their own audio project.




Don´t worry... create an audio!
Don´t worry... teach happy!

Great challenge: planet Earth!

Hello friends!

Usually, I teach to first and second graders. After than this Spring break I will face a great challenge: to teach a project to fourth grade. Our school promotes this kind of teacher exchanges to increase the teaching and learning process.

Teachppy and I are very exited! It is a Social Science project about the planet Earth. To introduce the project, Teachppy recommended me to create an infographic.

Thanks to the infographic, I will be able to show our new students the content they will learn during our lessons. I will be able to do it in an original, attractive and motivating way. Also, it will be a script using in the sessions. I am sure that I am going to capture the attention of the students, and that is a great start!

You can see the infographic here!

An infographic is a visual way of representing and transmitting knowledge. To create an infographic is to prepare a image through the computer with pictures, texts, graphics or links. It serves to learn the most important content, to process the information better, to support the visual thinking and to make the teaching and learning process more visible.

In this case, I used the webpage Easelly. It is a very useful and easy webpage. First of all you have to create your own account, of course, it is free! Then, they offer you a lot of templates to use as an image background. On the top of you new creation, you will find a menu in wich you can select the different options such as shapes, lines, text and options to adapt the kind of letter, objects and media (where you can keep your own photos and videos). Of course, you have the basic menu including the save option. Also, it is very easy to share and embed.

From my point of view and my own experience, this is a very intuitive app to create infographics. It is very easy to use. But, in fact, you should spend a lot of time to design your perfect infographic! I recommended you to draw a draft in papper before use the computer to compose you ideas. 

Don´t worry... use infographics!

Don´t worry... teach happy!

Educational project about plants!

Hello friends!

Before Easter, Teachppy and I made an educational project to develop the Natural Science unit four about plants. Then, we shared it with our second grade coworkers and we coordinated to work at the same time, also in other subject into a cross curricular link teaching.

To show this porject to the students, to guide them, we created a mind map with all the information about the topic: objectives, learning outcomes, key competences, classroom managment, resources, activities, cross curricular link and assessment. 

We think that it is a good option to show the topic plan to the learners, because if they know the content that they will discover, the activities that we will do and the assessment way, they will be focused on the way that they have to follow. 

This is our educational project mindmap!

You can see the mindmap here!

A mindmap is a type of diagram to represent words, tasks or other concepts linked around a keyboard or a central idea. We use mindmaps at school in many different ways: to present a content at the beginning of the lesson or topic, to make a summary, to do an activity or evaluation test, to organize ideas or, as in this case, to share an educational project. It is very visual and the comprehension is very easy... if you do well! 

In this time, to make the mindmap, we use MindMaster. It is a very funcional webpage. First, you have to create an account with your email adress or social media profile. Then, they offer you a lot of templates, that you can select in relation to the topic and the motivational intention. You have to make your mindmap little by little, because you must be done carefully! We recommend you, before using the digital tool, to do a mindmap draft in a papersheet.

If you want to know other webpages similar to MindMaster, you can discover tools as: coogle, mind24, spiderscribe, bubbl or creately.

Don´t worry.... discover mindmaps!

Don´t worry... teach happy!

First day at school... how do the students feel?

Hello friends!

Teachppy and I were talking about the next course... well, really we started to speak about summer holidays 😊... but the next year we will be first grade teachers! It is a great challenge, but the beginning is always complicated.

How can we help those pupils? Maybe with something creative... curious... striking... motivating... Teachppy always has the answer: a digital comic!

Once we decided to create a digital comic, first we made a reflection about the topic. The first day at school is an excited day. Learners, families and teachers are nervious, thinking about the things that they will find the new schoolar year. So, what better than create a comic about the first day´s emotions?

Then, we created a draft with our pencil and rubber. We made the main characteristics of the characters, the dialogs and the scenes.

Finally, we were ready to create the digital comic. We can recommend you different websites: Pixton, Creaza and StoryboardThat.

In this case, we decided to use the last of them. StoryboardThat is a very useful web to be creative! You have to create your account, it is very easy because you can do it with your personal information or with your social network account.
To create your comic they provide you a lot of options, as scenes, characters, textables, shapes, etc. Inside each one of it, you can choose from different topics. Por example, indoor, outdoor, historical or transportations scenes , or sports, jobs or medieval characters.
Also, you are freedom to include a brief description about what is happening in the story and write the words that the characters say.
So, this tool gives you many facilities for its use, but you have to spend a lot of time ifyou want your comic to be well.

It is a pleasure for us to show you our comic. It could be a great tool for teacher and families, to help students prepare for the first day at school, especially when we start the firts grade of primary education. In this comic they can detect different emotions in other children (also in the teacher), and they can check that it is very normal to feel nervious or other emotions when something is going to star. Also it develops values of multiculturalism and integration. It is a funny comic, they will enjoy!

Press here to see the comic on the webpage

We hope that you enjoy with our comic, and also we hope it will be an effective and useful tool for families and teachers.

Don´t worry... sharing stories through comics

Don´t worry... teach happy!

Attractive and interactive daily routine!

Hello friends!

Teachppy and I start our lessons with a daily routine every morning. We like to do it because is a fun warm-up, students feel trustful to speak English and we create a positive communicative situation. 

Through the daily routine students learn and acquire every day expressions (as regards, the days of the week, colors, the weather or clothes), we are also adding the content that we are learning during the course (animals, foods, and feelings) and we show them different verb structures (present simple and continuous, past, future, and questions). 

Nowadays, we are teaching in first and second grade. For a couple years ago, we changed the way of do it in both courses. For the first graders, we ask the questions and, one by one, pupils answer us. For the second grade lessons we created the mini teacher.

Mini teacher is an activity to motivate the pupils and to encourage the English use. One of the students, that changes every day, is the mini teacher and he/she has to ask (and check) the questions to their classmates. They are speaking English and they love it! Mini teacher has an outline to remember the questions. The (real) teacher is a support in case they need help.

We were wondering... how can we go one step further with the mini teacher activity?

I was calm because Teachppy always helps me!

As you know, Teachppy loves to use the ICT in the classroom and recently he discovers Genially. It is an easy-to-use webpage/app to make presentations, infographics, reports posters or guides. You can sign up very quickly (with your email adress) and use this tool. You will discover a lot of ideas, templates, samples and effects to create atractive presentations. It is a free creator, and they allow you to share your creations. The only downside is that, if you want to download your works (to use without the Internet) you have to subscribe in a payment mode.

You can find similar tools on the Internet as Powtoon, Prezi, Biteslide or Google slides. 

In this chance, we decide to make a mini teacher presentation using Genially. We hope the students think it is genial! It is a pleasure to show you!

Finally, I attach a video from Youtube, where I explain this activity and I show the mini teacher slide.

Don´t worry... motivate with slides!

Don´t worry... teach happy!