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!

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.