After a long School Year, we have arrive again to the summertime port. It has been a busy year also at our blog with near 25 post along the school year about really interesting class experiences.
The Editorial Board members are very grateful of all the effort all the teachers did to update this blog regularly. We hope you will take your time in summer to relax and enjoy.
Here we leave you a link with some special tasks you can do along this time. We hope you will find it useful:
Today we publish a great work project in class from IES Mediterraneo in Salobreña (Granada). Alberto Romero, the English teacher, tell us.
During the second term my students in 4º ESO had to read Braveheart (Penguin readers). Apart from reading it, we discussed about these topics: William Wallace and Scotland. Here are some of the projects done by the students (here's the link to my site, where it is: https://sites.google.com/site/albertomeditutor/graded-readers/4o-eso-projects ). I hope you'll like them.
The students worked in groups of two people. They follow this process:
First, they desing the settlement and the character, and they described both of them:
Then they wrote the stories and decorate them, they should have at least four paragraphs one per each page and the picture to decorate it. Here you can read and listen all of them:
The students at IES Vicente Medina in Archena (Murcia), share with us a new work. It's about the book "The diary of Anne Frank". I hope you like it , it's great!.
Inmaculada López, the English teacher show us.
After nearly two months without publishing any posts, we are back with this awesome work by students from 4º ESO B and 4º ESO C. As they say in English, all good things come to those who wait.
During the 2nd term students read “The Diary of a Young Girl. Anne Frank” and, like usual, decided they were going to surprise the teacher with fantastic ideas. They thought that good ways to work on it would be:
Making a film version of the book.
Writing a giant version of the Diary.
Interviewing Otto Frank.
Before handing in their final product, they all had to write the scripts of their work on a Google Document and share it with the teacher. The whole process took them all of the 2nd term and is part of our year project “Dark Sides 4º ESO“.
Their work is outstanding. Here is an example of each:
FILM VERSION
GIANT DIARY
INTERVIEW WITH OTTO FRANK
You can click on the photo below for further information on how the whole task was carried out and to view other videos.
Saint Patrick's Day is a cultural and religious celebration held on 17th March in Ireland.
In the last few years, this festivity is becoming very popular in many places and countries. Here, you can see, some important monuments illuminated green (people wear shamrocks and green clothes or accessories).
From CEIP San Isidro Labrador in El Chaparral (Granada), Alberto Molina and Marinela Alcázar González, tell us how they were working this festivity in this school:
Today we share an interesting work about Bulling from IES Vicente Medina in Archena (Murcia). Inmaculada López, the English teacher tells us.
Bullying is a social scourge which affects more people than we can imagine. Victims of bullying are often too scared to talk about what is happening to them to the point that sometimes they prefer to kill themselves rather than talk to teachers or parents.
During the 2nd term, 1º Bachillerato students have been working on this topic in different ways. First of all, they read and watched “About a boy”, a “funny” story which deals with serious topics such as the one under consideration in this post. After reading and watching, they all contributed to create a collaborative wall with Padlet in which they offered possible solutions to the problem of bullying at school. Click on the photo to view it:
1º Bachillerato A/C
Once the wall was finished, they organised themselves into groups of 4/5 students and wrote some leaflets using smore to start a campaign against bullying at school. These leaflets had to include videos in which they put themselves in the shoes of the bullies and the victims. As expected, they did an amazing job. Watch the videos and judge for yourselves:
If you want to find out more about how the whole process was carried out or have a look at the leaflets, click on the photo:
This year at Colegio San Gregorio we had a eTwinning project with the students of Year 5, the English teachers consider very important this kind of proyects with our students because we think it is when they really try to use real English.
Along the different task of the project the kids will need to use the vocabulary, the grammar, the common expression we taught them in the bilingual lessons. They need to communicate with other people using a foreing language, in this case the English. Also through eTwinning teachers and students can learn new cultural topics or teaching improvements.
There were different kind of task, but this year we have include all of them into our National Curriculum using the Standards to develop the different kind of task. We tried to have one task per each month, always using the grammar and vocabulary which was learnt along the units during the English lessons.
All of them were published into the website of the project, here there will show a summary with the final products of each task.
May: Writing Stories. (Let's click on the link to look for the final products of this task) This task was done during the exchange at Aguilar de Campoo, during this task we worked with international groups (some Spanish students and some English students).
We are Celia González, María Lainez, Cristina Risueño, Estrella García and Gonzalo Montón and we are students at the URJC university in the Master of Bilingual Education. We would like to share a couple of challenges for CLIL Primary students with you.
For this group task, we had to become both writers and film directors! We were requested to create a clip but, first of all, we had to plan what it would be about. Therefore we started to create a storyboard with our main ideas. As the topics we were working with for our CLIL e-project were about the Earth, we decided to create a character based on the universe. What could be better than an alien? Everybody wants to know about life from outer space! That’s how TIC was born, our main character. Can you guess why he is called TIC?
To create our storyboard we chose the web tool Storyboard That. Since the moment we started to use this tool, we were surprised at how amazing the pictures were: backgrounds, characters and different shapes, which allow you to create exactly what you want. What we liked best was the possibility of modifying the position of the main character, which makes the story more real.
However, while using the tool, we discovered that a standard account doesn’t allow you to create a board with more than six scenes. This is why we had to shorten the story. It was not a problem because the final clip will include the whole story. This storyboard is a guideline for the video challenge and it is meant to be a tale the teacher could tell their students at class.
Here you are our storyboard! Are you ready to meet TIC?
From the storyboard, we brought TIC to live! First, if you want to film a movie you need to write a script so we became writers! Our clip was divided into eleven scenes in which our alien would travel through the Solar System to discover the magic planet. TIC was dying to find it out!
Second, we started to film the scenes, but… We needed an actor! Gonzalo, @gonzaalo10, became TIC thanks to our make-up team!
Then, we were ready to record the video challenge. For this purpose we decided to use the chroma key technique. By using Camtasia and this technique, we could substitute the green background for a picture of our choice. Regarding Camtasia, it seems quite difficult to use at rhe very beginning. However, after practicing with it for a while we discovered all its possibilities. We downloaded the free version with a free trial for 30 days. Thanks to Camtasia, we have learned how to use chroma key and how to organize the video clips, the pictures and the audios in order to get the final video. The only problem we didn´t like about this tool was the fact that, because of the free version, a watermark appeared in our video and the quality of it decreased.
Despite this little problem, the result was fantastic! We created a video in which TIC travels through the Solar system and discovers the Earth and its layers. TIC also has doubts and makes questions during the video in order to encourage participation in our pupils. The teacher could stop the video whenever TIC makes one question to let the pupils answer him. This video can be used to introduce a topic, so the teacher can know about their prior knowledge, or to make a review at the end of the topic.
Today, a group of students from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos studying a Master’s Degree in Bilingual Education, have created a comic using Storyboard That and a video using Sony Vegas Pro to explain an activity that they have included in a collaborative e-project they are currently designing for their Master's Degree.
The authors are:
Guillermo Lagarejos @GLHmaster
Marina Goizueta @GoizuetaMarina
Teresa Martín @Teresa_md
Laura Pérez @LauritaPerz
María Collado @Maria_collado92
Sara Rodríguez @SaritaSar0
The aim of their video is to motivate learners to do an activity while and after their visit to Faunia. As their e-project is about animals, they decided that a school trip to Faunia could be a fun way to keep working on this topic while children learn more about it.
In the video they briefly explain how to carry out a research on the animals’ topic in which children will investigate, take notes and look for specific information about the characteristics of vertebrate animals. Then they would prepare a presentation using Genially to share their experience and learning to the rest of the class.
Before recording themselves, they have been thinking on the organization of the video, roles and what to say. To have a clear idea of what they wanted to do, they used StoryboardThat, an online tool in which you can create an storyboard, similar to a comic, to create a story or present an activity to children, for instance.
In this case they have used this tool to describe their video, which consists of explaining an activity to children about visiting Faunia. This tool has been very easy to use and it is great for students as it is engaging and attractive for them. It could be used in class to explain an activity or develop their imagination by creating stories. The comic that they have created is divided into different frames: - Presentation of the activity - Explanation of what students have to do in Faunia - Tools that they are going to use in Faunia - Students in Faunia - Explanation of the activity after the trip - Final comments
Name of the Reporters: Raquel Diez, Celia Lancharro, Patricia Madrueño and Natalia Martínez Name of school: Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
We would like to introduce our CLIL e-project, which is called Learning about Body and senses with ICT. It is a collaborative e-project carried out by our team in the Master’s Degree in Bilingual Education at URJC. It is aimed to be introduced to 3rd graders of Primary Education.
We were asked to make a video showing our e-project by firstly making a planning of it. In order to create our video planning, we decided to use the StoryboardThat webtool, since it is a very visual but simple resource to make comics and it would help us have a clear idea about what to do in our e-project video.
Our e-project proposal is that children create a poster using Canva. In this sense, the steps in the CLIL challenge which students will have to follow are:
Make groups of 3 people in order to work cooperatively.
Each group will have to search for information on the Internet about the body and senses. They will also have to select and collect this information in order to create the poster.
They will have to create a Canva account (one per group).
Using the information they’ve found on the Internet, they will make a poster including visual support as images or videos.
Finally, each group will share their creation on the social network (twitter, pinterest, facebook, the school blog…)
After creating our storyboard we could start recording our e-project video. The storyboard helped us to have a guideline to follow.
In this video we show our CLIL e-project about the body and the senses. We wanted to create an original and engaging clip. For this reason, we have recorded it as if we were students in a classroom carrying the e-project out. We have used a smartphone to record our videoclip, and then, we chose Windows Movie Maker to create and edit the final video.
Have a look at our e-project video:
Here you can meet us and learn more about our team on:
Today we are sharing a CLIL activity for Primary students, designed by a team of students at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid.
They are working right now in a collaborative e-project to teach History in a different way, and have created a video challenge.
As you know, when you want to record a video it is really essential to plan everything in advance. An easy way to do it is by storyboarding your video, which means planning every scene to have it ready for the recording moment. They have used StoryBoard That to create this amazing outline. As you can see, they have included the characters, the backgrounds (they will use a croma when recording to add them by video editing) and everything they were going to say. StoryBoard That is easy to use and you can create 6 scenes for free where you can add characters, bakgrounds and edit them with a great variety of designs.
Having made this outline, they were ready to record their video. As you can see they planned to dress up as different people in different times in History, So there they went!
In the video they present a new challenge to their children: they will have to crceate their own comic about History!
They think that this is an amazing way of teaching History in a different way. Children will be more motivated and focused on their task since they will have to use a online web tool called Pixton, which allows people to create online comics for free.
Today we are sharing the work of a group of Pre-Service Teachers at URJC who have let us know of their e-project based on video production.
They are Víctor, Inma, Ana, Lola, Natalia and Elena, students of the Master in Bilingual education in Primary School at Rey Juan Carlos University. This week they have been working in groups and they have done different activities in their ICT class.
This is the description of their own learning process, in first person, as Ana, their spokeswoman, has literally introduced it:
'First of all let me explain to you that all of us created a CLIL-e-project. Once we had it, we were allocated in different groups according to the topic. In this way, our group is about Geography.
Even though our topic was Geography we had really different themes within this topic so we thought about one common learning outcome and we all agreed that it could be “to learn about the physical and political features and some of the most distinguishing representations of the European countries”. The final activity of our project consists of presenting the candidature of one European country. We would divide our students in pairs and will assign them a European country to work on. Then, students would have to investigate about it (about the weather, animals, mountain ranges, rivers…) and finally create an Infographic, (you can see an example here: https://magic.piktochart.com/output/12668493-norway#.Vwd4fexYnM0.blogger)
So we created our story board using StoryboardThat to express the process that we will follow to explain this activity to our students.
We would like to recommend that you use this fantastic tool if you have the chance since it offers many possibilities. You can choose the length by choosing the number of vignettes. You can choose among a wide range of scenes (you can choose among the typical ones such as the school scenes but you can also choose castles, islands...), characters (you can even change their emotions and create angry and sad characters.) and text tables. Therefore, you can adapt your stories for any purpose. For instance, we could use it in our class to introduce one topic in a more visual and fun way.
However, we found out some things that from our humble opinion could be improved. For instance, we did not like the fact that the work you do is not automatically saved. Therefore, you have to be saving it all the time. Even though the page reminds you to save, it would be fantastic if it could be done automatically.
It would also be very nice if SoryboardThat could have an option to record voices, that would be awesome. Our students could practice their speaking skills, writing, computer skills and also their creativity when creating their comic!
Furthermore, students could create their own stories about any topic of the curriculum (for example we could ask them to create a story in which they had to include information about Egypt or any topic they are studying). In this way not only would they work one subjects but also they would put in practice and would improve their ICT skills!
Of course these kinds of tools are fantastic to communicate with children with special needs. Sometimes, they find it difficult to understand abstract languages and concepts, and this tool makes the process of communication easier. We can also use this comic for the routines: think about first grade of Primary School, at the beginning they find it difficult to get used to the routines of Primary, we could help them to remember them all by creating comics around the class (For example, before going to the playground take your snack, make a line and keep in silence).
Once we created our Story Board we started working in our video. Thanks to the Storyboard that we had created previously we did not have any problem with the video as we already knew what we were going to say. To make the video we used IMovie with the support of an Ipad. We would really like to recommend that you use this tool as well if you have the opportunity because it is really easy and intuitive. You can do many things with it, for example adding music to your videos, images, cropping your videos. Definitely this tool was fantastic to accomplish this challenge! As it is so easy to use you can even use it with your children in your class! Just imagine the results presenting their candidatures for the Olympic Games.... they would enjoy this activity as much as we did and they would be practising their speaking skills and learning new things without realising!'
