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!