This is a mess! Let's tidy up!

Hello TwoTwonians!

Today I was a little bit overwhelmed, let me explain myself. My left neuron is very organized and my right neuron isn't, let's say that it's more creative. And sometimes it's very difficult to make them both happy. 

On the web, there are thousands of resources, you can spend hours clicking and clicking again (remember that in my first post I recommended Focus to you, an essential app to manage your own time). For this reason my left neuron wanted a place where everything is organized, but my right neuron wanted more mess and loads of creativity..and I found the solution! The solution is called content curation. Do you know what is it?

Content curation means that my both neurons are happy and satisfied. On one hand, the resources are organized and on the other hand, they are linked with other resources that are very useful. It's great!

There are different tools to start curating content (Symbaloo, Pearltrees, List.ly), but Pinterest is cutting-edge . Why? It's intuitive, easy to use and you can find thousands of resources about everything! Do you want to make a nice activity for Saint Patrick's Day? Pinterest is your solution. What about nice cards for Saint Valentine's Day? Go for Pinterest. For Easter? I think that you know the answer. 

Let me explain a little bit about Pinterest:

• What is a Pin? A Pin is a picture that you upload to Pinterest. Each picture is a link, then when people click on your picture, they are going to land in your blog.
• What is a board? The boards are categories or sections that you can create in Pinterest to organize your content. For example, I have a board for classroom management, another for storytelling time, for CLIL and so on. There are group boards where people can collaborate in the same board; remember that sharing is caring!

This is my favourite board: routines. I think that our students need routines to feel comfortable in the school environment. You can find wonderful displays about the days of the week, the months, the routine of washing their hands and more.

Don't be shy and create some boards, you'll feel better when you see all the great ideas that you can use in your lessons in an organized and creative way.

See you soon!

TwoTwo

Left neuron talking: image attribution

Hello guys!

TwoTwo on the line again!

Today I want to explain one important thing about images on the net. Sometimes you see very nice pictures and you want them, that's perfect! But let's make it clear; not everything is for free use (this is the bad news), and the good news is that there are a lot of sites with images, pictures, vectors and so on for non commercial use. Let's take a look!

Pixabay is one of these sites when you can download photos for free use, even you can choose the quality. Most of them are under the license CCO Creative Commons and that means that we can use them. For example: I chose this picture (my right neuron will be explain why I chose it). In the footnote you can see the author (if you click, you will be directed to the author's page in another window) and the license. This photo hasn't got a title; if there would be a title, the title would be before the author's name.

Image by: Grafikacesky CC0 Creative Commons

Right neuron talking right now! I chose this picture because I want to use it in a Early years classroom (5 years old would be ideal). The main topic of the CLIL lesson is the prehistory. I will use this photo in the classroom to introduce the differences between that period and nowadays: 

• Animals in the prehistory: there were mammoths, huge elephants with a lot of hair;
• Clothes in the prehistory: the clothes were made with natural things: leather, leaves;
• Weather in the prehistory: the weather was very cold, there was ice surrounding people, animals, mountains;
• Houses in the prehistory: there weren't  houses or buildings, people lived in caves.

This would be the introduction for my CLIL lesson using this photo.

I hope you like this brief post about picking pictures on the net and a few ideas about a prehistory introductory lesson in an early years classroom.

Take care 😆

TwoTwo

Hello, is anybody out there?

Hello! My name is TwoTwo, because I've got two neurons and both are bilingual. Let me introduce myself. 

My voice is cool too

The right neuron is the neuron which pushes me to move to Madrid from Scotland in August 2017, to start a new adventure in the public school education system and to enroll in a Master in Bilingual Education (and as you can imagine, this blog is the result of one of the subjects of this Master: ICT & CLIL).

The left neuron is the neuron which decides to think before talking, but sometimes it fails in this mission. It is the neuron which says "education can be hard, but don't worry, you are making a difference", too. It says that ICT can be time consuming but the results are amazing, you only have to look at me 😏.

I was created by Voki; it's a very intuitive app where you can create your own avatar, insert your voice and change different physical features; you can be even a cat! Very useful when you want to hide your identity in a nice way. As teachers, we need to take into account always that our online privacy is very important.  

The effects of the picture are made by Canva. Canva is a very useful app when you want to create displays, computer graphics and I found it very useful when I was preparing my exams for being a civil servant (here my two neurons were working together). You can upload photos, write with hundreds of different fonts, find templates for CV, presentations, displays, banners, school newspapers, magazines and a long etcetera. Try it! It's very intuitive! 

This is the school newspaper that I created last December

Now that you know me better, let me tell you a little secret. I really like to spend time surfing the web, but sometimes I realize that I spend too much time without resting. The solution for me was the "pomodoro method"; pomodoro is an Italian word which means tomato. The method is very simple; you need a kitchen timer (tomato shape will be more motivating) or a wonderful app like Focus. The app has different intervals. I do my best during 25 minutes, later I have a rest of 5 minutes (walking a little bit, eating something, talking with somebody, checking your social media) and 25 minutes more focus. You can change the settings and adapt them to your pace. For me it works perfectly. If you don't know how to organize your time, I strongly recommend it.

And that's all folks!

TwoTwo