Online storytelling

Hello!

Are you ok? Still impressed by my Chroma project? 😏 Me too, but don't worry! I bring new surprises for you today! From the beginning of this blog, I have shared with you several activities, all of them educational; but on this post I want to make an exception.

All of us have stories that make us happy 😛, embarrassed 😳, sad 😞, curious 🧐...Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools, not only for teachers, but humans in general, to get whatever we want; remember that communication is very important in our days. Today's post is about stories, but not about a story that is written and that's all. NO NO NO. Our post is about telling stories online. Yes, my right neuron is happy again, my left isn't.

Flipgrid is a social video for student engagement and formative assessment. We joined to this social platform with the project Twima: The World Is My Audience. This project is about telling stories; so far there are stories from my classmates and from students and teachers from Alverno.

As I said before, we joined to Flipgrid and when I say WE I mean we; our creator Soraya has joined us too and she has told a nice and fun story about her first time teaching as a private tutor in the United Kingdom. Let's listen to her! 

If you want to hear more stories, here you can find the whole #twima8 grid. I recognize some faces 😆 Hello! 😂

Participating in one activity like this encourages you to share your own stories. Our is about teaching, but there are others about Why am I a teacher? or Happy Exchange Experience. For me this project has got several advantages: sometimes you've got stories that you want to share but you don't know if they are relevant for you colleagues, classmates,...Twima has given us the opportunity to tell how shocked was to have got parents into the classroom. The alternative story than Soraya wanted to tell was: she is working in a public school in Madrid and it's her first time. Sometimes she wants to share stories about her first impressions (everything is new for her), but she knows that those stories maybe are bored for her colleagues. Sometimes, opening the mouth liberates yourself. The project is quite cool and innovative! Why not to create a similar activity with primary students to share their own stories 🤔 (left neuron idea). 

What about you? Have you got a story that you want to share? Don't be shy and remember that sharing is caring! Spread the voice and you story, of course! 

TwoTwo

Three, two, one...ACTION!

Hello people and neurons!

Have you enrolled in any course? Come on! Don’t be lazy and be curious! As teachers we need to teach and learn everyday; it doesn’t matter if the course is about Chinese cookery and culture or projects based learning. The important thing is that your brain works, in this way you will encourage your children to be active people, to have curiosity and not to be a couch potato 🙅

Today is the day! Chroma is here! My group and I went to the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports last Thursday. Specifically, we went to Future Classroom Lab. It’s a classroom with amazing chairs (yes, my right neuron fell in love with them) and a big green wall. You remember that I explained what Chroma is two posts ago, don’t you? So, we recorded ourselves with an improvised prompter and a mobile phone; the professional recorder decided not to work thad day. It was a good experience and I got some ideas to apply into my classroom.

The recording was in different steps; in total we recorded more or less 20 videos, there were 5 or 6 bloomers very fun. Our creator, Soraya, was the editor, so she brought the videos at home and we start playing with them. How did she make it?:

• Video: you have to cut the video because sometimes there are gestures or sounds that you don't want them to appear. The app that can make that is QuickTime. It's quite easy to use; apart from cutting the video, you can record your voice, record your screen and record yourself. 
• Edition: as you know, I used iMovie. It was easy? Well, Google and YouTube helped me a little bit to figure out how to mix music, headlines, the background photos and our videos without making any mess! Is it intuitive? I love trying new things and touching and clicking here and there, but it arrived one moment that I had to look for tutorials. Is it a waste if time? No way! I can't be happier with the result. It took time, but tell me that you don’t love it! 💞
• Backgrounds: Pixabay was my friend but iMovie also helped me. It's got picture and video backgrounds where you can add words. You cannot change the templates, but for this project I didn't need to change them; they were quite useful.
• Sounds: GarageBand has got sounds that you can incorporate into iMovie (I love when the apps sincronice themselves). Besides I looked for more sounds and audio effects online. On this website you can find a lot of free sounds, you can pay too for more. 
• Patience: a lot of patience to create this and don't make the laptop fly across the window!

Our project was called Channel 4, we wanted to create a news programme where our kids have to work in different areas. The storyboard is here and now, now I am so proud of introducing the amazing, the fantastic, the unbeatable video. Enjoy it!

I started to play with Chroma in my lessons, only to check if green paper could be an alternative to green paper and it worked! I recorded some of my students with the app TouchCast; highly recommended it. In this app the templates are done, then you avoid all the time with the edition step (this is very important because the time that you spend in an activity is very crucial for your organization; I liked iMovie but I know that I couldn't use each week for the following reasons: the time and the surprise element; maybe TouchCast can solve the problem about the time and for the surprise element I can create different programmes, not only news).

I hope this post encourages you to do different things in your lessons and start to use Chroma or videos in general. Have fun!

TwoTwo

P.S. In some parts of the video, on the right side, you can see ghosts. They are not ghosts, these are us that didn't control quite well the light on the wall 😬

Training weekend

Hello again! 

How are you? I have been quite busy this weekend. My two neurons get mad with training; they love it (one more than the other one) and sometimes this “love” makes me feel very tired because I enrol in many activities...but I am quite satisfied with myself 😌

On Friday I started an immersion course/workshop called Exploring your own classroom practice. It was for teachers who wanted to share their own innovative practices (good practices) or activities that make them feel proud of being teachers. The course lasted since Friday afternoon until Sunday afternoon. It has been amazing! I learnt a lot of new techniques, met a lot of people and swam in a heated pool. If you have got any chance, enrol in a course about innovation or sharing between teachers. It’s worthy 100%. If you are asking which good practice I brought, yes, you guessed it! I talked about the radio project 📻 My colleagues shared with me different ideas that I am going to apply for sure in my lessons: a real radio programme in Madrid (so excited about this 🤸🏽‍♀️), an app to record and host podcasts, the activity Teacher for a day, how to create films with stop motion technique and more and more and more.

But this is not the only training that I took 😏 I have to say that few months ago I didn’t like online training, I thought that online courses/webinars/workshops and so on were of a bad quality and a waste of time...until I discovered educalab. It’s a website from Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, which has got quality courses and a huge directory with different courses: 

• MOOC: Massive Online Open Courses
• NOOC: Nano Online Open Courses
• SPOOC: Self-Paced Online Open Courses

Besides you can find a lot of useful resources like this one for being journalists.  And this weekend they organised the 4th Webathon on Digital Educational Experiences. What is that? Wait! I’m coming! You only need a good connection on your device and time. You are going to be the public of a digital educational monologue or conversation between specialists. 

Left neuron: Ok, that’s fantastic 😒, but how much does it cost? 😏

Right neuron: Nothing! You are going to learn for free from specialists in different areas ✌🏼They want to share for free!

Left neuron: Really? 😳 Well, that’s not bad 😒 but I didn’t enrol and now it’s late 😁

Right neuron: Don’t worry! The marathon is on YouTube and you can watch it whenever you want and whoever you want with 😍

Left neuron: It’s ok 😩 You won!

And this is how I watched this webinar (I saw the programme and there was one webinar about school radio, I think that the radio project follows me 😂 and I cannot be happier! Yes! I chose it!):

📻ON AIR INNOVATION (since 1:58:27 to 2:30:48)📻

Who? Esteban Santana and Gloria R. Ruiz Rodríguez. 

What? Scholar radio.

How? They divide the project in different windows: 

• Products: the products are the podcasts.
• Tasks: the students can choose different tasks to create the final product: interviews, investigation, marketing.
• Activities: evidences that they are learning. 
• Key competences: linguistic competence; competence in information treatment and digital technology; competence in learning to learn; social and civic competence; initiative and entrepreneurial spirit and cultural conscience and expression.
• Methodology: the methodology involves 11 steps; the start with the election of the topic and plan a question, then they form the teams, they defining the product or final challenge until they arrive to the metacognition.
• Spatial and temporal distribution: the scholar radio goes outside and inside the classrooms. They implemented this project in three phases: training and investigation, collaborative training and project and experiences in the classroom.
• Indicators.
• Instruments and tools for evaluation: they evaluate through rubrics. 
• Didactic resources.

The podcasts have got different topics: technology, elections (with a final debate). The evaluation is not only for the final product; the podcast. The evaluation is around all the different steps and activities that the students have been done. It's a cross-curricular project, for this reason they are going to  be evaluated in different areas.

Who for? Early years, primary, high school, university students and even children in educational prison centre classrooms.

Is this for me? Of course that this is for me and for you. The radio is a very attractive product and you have seen that almost all the key competences are connected, so you have fun and you cover all the curriculum; not all, but you know what I mean 🙌 The radio improves the coexistence; this is a personal opinion but I think that the vast majority of the problems are caused by a lack of communication; then I complete agree that radio improves the coexistence, our students learn how to communicate and between you, me and the gatepost, that's an essential skill for their adult life. 

And this is all for today folks! I am quite exhausted because I have got a lot of information and new activities and resources that I want to apply tomorrow and my students are going to think that I am crazy (more than usual)!

Enjoy the rest of the weekend!

TwoTwo

Chroma is coming!

Hello TwoTwonians!

How are you? I am quite excited, as usual. Do you remember my last post about podcasts? I told you that I will increase my playlists; I created a new Soundcloud account for my school and a blog! So proud of my two neurons and my twenty-four students 😍 The idea is to create a radio school with podcasts. This is our first programme! If you have got any suggestion, tell us! We want to improve it and overall having fun! 😄

Today we want to take a step forward. Podcasts are an amazing resource, but we want more. What about to create a video/short movie? 😱 Yes! It's insane with a lot of work to do, but we are all mad here! 

Image by: tookapic CC0 Creative Commons 

The first thing that we need to do is to split the work. Working in groups is not easy, but if each member knows what is his/her job, it will be better. In my work team we are 5 people and the main roles are: drafter, recorder, community manager and editor (in the draft that you can find at the end of this post, there is all the information). 

Our group decided to create a news programme. Its name is Channel 4. The objectives that we want to achieve are several; to work cooperatively, to improve students' listening and reading comprehension skills, to learn subject contents through a visual format and so on. This activity is a good one with future purposes; a lot of schools have got newspapers, but having a TV programme is playing in a different league 😏

Channel 4 will have different sections:

• TV presenter (yeah! It's our creator; Soraya 👏👏)
• Natural Science news: earthquake
• Social Science news: Brexit
• Cultural news, linked with Arts and Crafts: Saint George
• Physical Education news: new sports.

The students will split in groups; the idea is that each group takes a news and develop an investigation activity. They will present their works with the tools that they will decided: Genialy, lap books, videos. I, sorry we, believe in creativity and originality and for this reason we want that our students explore different ways to create a final project. 

At the end of each news, the groups will have to answer the questions that each reporter has asked. 

And now, we talk about the video 🙈 The video will be available in our next post (maybe yes, maybe no). But, don't be impatient. I can tell you which apps we are going to use:

• iMovie: I will explain how to use this app in the next post. We will use Chroma; a technique to change your background. Chroma for dummies: you record yourself with a green background and later you add your own background.
• GarageBand: I told you about this app in my previous post. It has got lots of sounds that you can use in your videos. 
• My own brain and my two neurons: the most important part (my two neurons agree). Digital technologies can be amazing, but you need to know how to use them 😉

The background photos that we used are from Pixabay. They are all under Creative Commons license. The sounds that we introduced are available in GarageBand. The draft of the plot was created in GoogleDrive with a GoogleDoc as in my previous post (here you can see it):

I hope you like my new idea! I can't wait to show you it!

TwoTwo

To be or not to be

Hello my friends!

How are you? I have to say that I am quite excited with this post, as usual! Today I want to share with you what a Podcast is and how to create it to teach in your lessons (I am going to do it next week with my 6th graders! I'm so excited 💪 Wish me luck 🍀). 

A Podcast is an audio file with a lot of possibilities, it can improve the confidence of your students, their pronunciation, their fluency and accuracy. I will answer you the following questions and you will understand it better.

How can I create a podcast? I use GarageBand, it's an app for Apple devices but let me say that it's wonderful. You can add loops, change your voice, add more loops and even add music. Do you want to play the guitar with this app? You can! If you haven't got an Apple device, Audacity is other alternative, different neurons have told me that it's easy, but my right neuron doesn't' agree!

Where can I storage my podcast? Once you've created your podcast, you need a room to keep it. My option is SoundCloud; it's free and very easy to use. From GarageBand you can share your podcasts and creations directly with SoundCloud. It's a piece of cake.

Why do you have to create a podcast and you can't continue with my boring and useless lessons? Are you sure that you need an answer? Think it twice 😏

I created a podcast as a welcome in my audio project called To be or not to be. We are in April, April celebrates Saint George (in some regions in Spain the 23rd of April people gift books and roses) and Shakespeare death and birth. For this reason, I though that it will be a good idea to start a new project with Shakespeare. Ready? Steady? Go?

The first that I did it was to create a lesson plan. The draft is in Google Drive and I created a Google doc. You can create documents, presentations, questionnaire and spreadsheet. The best thing is that you are working online and the document is saved in the cloud.

Then, I created the podcast with GarageBand, I added to my channel in SoundCloud and I wrote some hashtags. Here you can listen to the voices of  Romeo, Juliet and my creator. She mixed some voices and music. I really love it!

You should be familiar with different concepts when you create an audio channel. The audio channel is the main page, your profile and, the playlists are the different folders with different music. This is my audio channel (yes, I've only created a podcast, but wait a couple of weeks):



Do you study with music? And what about your students? This is my favourite playlist; it's called Study and I play it when I am doing projects, planning lessons or thinking about my final thesis 😅 

Explore the many posibilites that these apps have got and share your projects!

TwoTwo

Be mad with an infographic

Hello my dear friends!

I don't know if I've told you, but I love being creative and sometimes my imaginations hasn't got limits. My right neuron feels quite sad when a student colours an elephant with the grey crayon or a whale with the blue crayon. I think that students must be creative and use their imagination as much as they can. This will give them originality, a must tool in this society. For this reason, today I bring a nice infographic. Wait! Didn't I explain what an infographic is? Sorry! My fault.

An infographic is a very visual way of representing and transmitting knowledge. I use the app Canva. I told you about this app in this post. I think that is the best free app that I've ever used to create nice and visual content. Canva gives you a lot of free templates for infographics, CV, recipes, diaries...You can choose several illustrations, pictures, fonts. Try it! 

The topic that I want to show you through an infographic is a topic that I really love. I like telling stories, but sometimes the students find very difficult to express themselves with creativity and they tell the same stories that we know: Little Red Riding Hood, the Beauty and the Beast... In this infographic I summarize the best tools that I consider essential to make up a story. In this way the students reinforce their writing and speaking skills. 

How to make up stories de Soraya Borja Almarcha

I hope you like it and you can make up wonderful stories with your students. 

Take care and have a wonderful Easter break! See you soon!

TwoTwo

Mindmaps or how to create chaos in harmony

Hello again!

How are you? Have you already created a comic? Don't be shy and share your creations! Education is sharing 😛 I've come back to talk about chaos (my right neuron) in harmony (my left neuron).  I love when both of them combine in a perfect way! 

I've got visual memory, I mean, I remember better when I see a display for example, that when I listen to a song. For this reason today I bring you a mind map. A mind map is a visual map that allows you to see a lot of information at a glance. It's amazing, isn't it? Let me explain better.

I am going to use MindMeister; it's an app with a lot of possibilities: you can create a map with links, documents, you can present the slideshow, share it with you colleagues and convert it into Word, PowerPoint and so on. Impress? Not yet? Wait for my mind map, please 😏. (It would be better if the free options were wider, but for the first time, it's ok. I will discover other apps in the future.)

I would like to introduce my students in a very special project: Scotland.  I know that it's a country full of surprises and it worths to discover it (I lived there 10 months, so, I know what I'm talking about). This project lasts whatever your want. This means that when you start with projects, the best thing is start with a short project, in this way you can realize if the project works for your students and for you (the self evaluation is an important step in education, don't forget it!). 

I will include this project in the English subject; there are cross-curricular links with PE, maths, but the main focus is on the English language. Each  teacher can adapt the main topic to his/her own aims. My general objectives for this project are:

• To discover the United Kingdom and more specifically, Scotland.
• To raise students motivation in the Scottish culture.
• To practise the past tenses.
• To be able to summarize a story in a video.
• To be able to express themselves in different languages.
• To pronounce specific words in the proper way.

I divided the project in 7 different steps; the main idea is that each student "tastes" all the different stages. This is a brief summary about what you are going to discover in each step:

• Geography: the students will learn where Scotland is, which countries form the United Kingdom and what the Ben Nevis is. The assessment will consist in the comparison of Scotland and the students' country in an infographic.
• History: from the Vikings in Scotland we jump to Mary Queen of Scots: the most important queen in Scotland and the one who fought for the independence. The students will be assessed through different games. 
• Language: in Scotland, there are two languages: English and Scottish. The students will practice the pronunciation of the English language. They will need it for the final surprise 😁
• Culture: have you tried haggis? And shortbread? The students will discover the different traditional meals that Scots have got. The assessment will be to record a video cooking in the school's kitchen. Besides Saint Andrews is the patron of Scotland, a video will show them who Saint Andrews was. 
• Curiosities: the legend of Loch Ness Monster and how the Scottish men dressed years ago, there are two topics that students will enjoy. This can be linked to arts. 
• Films: the film Brave will explain the different clans that existed in Scotland. There is a legend called The Story of the Giant's Causeway that will show the students why the coast of Scotland and Ireland have wonderful stones like these

 

• Final surprise: I think, and this is my personal opinion, that every project has to have got a final surprise; and this project has got a wonderful one. Do you know anything about Erasmus+? Me neither until one year ago, but I am a very proactive body with two neurons that want to innovate more and more. On the mind map you have a short video about the project Erasmus+ KA2. Could you imagine how it would be to travel with your students to Scotland (or anyplace in the UK) as the end of the project? It would be absolutely A M A Z I N G.

I really like teaching through culture, there are a lot of interesting things and curiosities that can attract our students, for this reason I chose Scotland. Each step has got its own assessment, but the best assessment for this project would be the trip to Scotland. If the students know that they are going to put in practice everything that they've learned, they are going to be brilliant in the lessons and their personal motivation is going to be on Ben Nevis pick.      

I hope you enjoy and like this project!

TwoTwo

PS, the two photos that appeared in this post were taken by me one year ago 😉