On Tuesday, 2nd April 2019 we held a video conference with three experienced CLIL teachers. We connected simultaneously with Guadalupe Ruiz, David Pérez and Javier Ramos from our classroom at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. It was great to have a chat with them and learn about their experiences. We had planned a few questions in advance on a collaborative document on Google Drive. The tool we used for the video conference was Google Hangouts.
Guadalupe Ruiz is a Music teacher in CEIP Maximiliano Macías school in Mérida (Extremadura). She is currently teaching Music through English from 1st to 6th graders. In her lessons she uses lots of ICT tools to support her teaching.
David Pérez is a Physical Education teacher in the same school. He applies the CLIL method in his lessons too. David uses ClassDojo to gamify his lessons and encourage his students.
Javier Ramos teaches at Colegio San Gregorio in Aguilar de Campoo (Castilla-León). He is the 5th grade class teacher. You can have a look at his blog or follow him (@javiramossancha) and his school (@colsangregorio) on Twitter.
We would all like to thank Guadalupe, David and Javier for sharing their knowledge and expertise with us, especially when they had a very busy schedule at the end of second term.
Comics can be used in our CLIL lessons as they engage learners. They are a composition of art, dialogue, character expressions and frames. Basically, comics allow us to tell a story by mixing images and text, bubbles that are supported with visuals. This will help our brain to process the information in an easier way than reading a large amount of text on a page.
As digital storytelling tools, many of the comic creation tools are easy to use allowing the learners to fill in their frames by clicking on a choice of characters, props, scenes, and so forth. Our learners will be able to quickly create a story, view it, and share it.
Our children can use real or made up characters. When students create cartoons or graphic images of themselves, they are creating avatars. Avatars are a safe way for students to navigate the web. They often encourage students to express themselves because they feel safe in the comic world.
Creating comics engages students and encourages them to explore vocabulary, summarize information, and contextualize what they learn in a creative way.
The tools we have used have mainly been Pixton and StoryboardThat.
Some great comics designed by Máster Universitario en Enseñanza Bilingüe en Centros Educativos de Educación Primaria e Inmersión en Lengua Inglesa's students follow. Comics by Sonia, Daniel, Uxía, Catalina and Nadia are just examples of the creativity shown by them.
Slideshows help us teach a subject or a topic through visual elements in an attractive way and will contribute to making learning a more encouraging and motivating experience for our Primary students.
On our course most of our Master's Degree student teachers have chosen from a variety of tools to create presentations. Their favourite ones are:
After the design process they have presented their support slideshows to the rest of their classmates in order to receive some feedback on aspects they have found positive and those which need some improvement to be made.
Here you are some of these support slideshows:
'My emotionary' by Daniel Rodríguez:
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'Earth ecosystems' by Sonia Martín:
Uxxia's Genially about 'Blas de Lezo's life':
'The water cycle' by Catalina Rey:
These are just a few of the many support slideshows they have created. Feel free to visit their learning journals(via the Pinterest widget on the right of this blog) and make the most of it since most of these presentations are ready-to-use resources for our CLIL lessons in Primary schools.
Storybirdis a website which allows us to foster our storytelling creativiy in a fun way. It will help us boost our writing skills by creating beautiful colourful stories within minutes.
There are a ton of already published books by professional writers to be used in our lessons straight away. Or, and this is the best option in my opinion, you can invent and make up a new story yourself. Once it is finished, we have the chance to print or share high-resolution PDFs of our picture book or poetry
in various formats.
Here you are an example of a picture book we have created at Máster Universitario en Enseñanza Bilingüe en Centros Educativos de Educación Primaria e Inmersión en Lengua Inglesa at URJC by gathering all of our tiny stories published on Twitter: Telling our Tiny Stories.
Developing the 4C's of CLIL through storytelling was the title of the workshop we attended on Thursday at the Ilustre Colegio de Doctores y Licenciados in Madrid. Organised by Asociación Enseñanza Bilingüe we really enjoyed D. Mercedes Pérez Agustín's talk.
She offered us a practical CLIL lesson on storytelling. To do so she used "Press here" children book by Herve Tullet.
Then she taught us about Vladimir Propp's narratemes and morphology of fairy tales. So interesting!
Finally we got down to work and made up an original story in groups by taking into account Propp's character types just to finish the event by performing our made-up tale in front of our audience.
La Asociación Enseñanza Bilingüe apuesta por la formación del profesorado.
“Developing the 4C’s of CLIL through storytelling”
Taller de Mercedes Pérez Agustín organizado por @Ens_bilingue en el @CDL_Madridpic.twitter.com/S3x4lMuPgJ
Only two weeks of course have passed and everyone has her/his own blog or learning journal.
All of them have been collected on this Pinterest board.
Pinterest is a very useful curation tool that will be studied in depth on the next few days. As for today, this is 'Our blogs at ICTCLIL_URJC' board embedded for a quicker access to any learning journal of ours. The same HTML code has been applied for the right sidebar gadget, only height and witdh have been adapted. Do you like it?
Last Tuesday we talked about licenses and authorship. We learned to cite and attribute those images and resources that we usually take from the internet in order to use them in our CLIL projects.
Creative Commons (CC) licenses are the most widespread. The first activity was to license our learning journals. Some of us set up a new widget on the sidebar of our blog while others stated the license at the bottom of the page.
Creative Commons logo
The most popular license for our work was CC-BY-SA license: Attribution + Share alike. This means that anyone using any content on our learning journal must specify the source (our name & blog) and share his/her work under the same license.
We found the next presentation about Creative Commons license by Anna Araky to be extremeley helpful, by the way.
Our classmate Sonia licensed her learning journal via a sidebar widget and here is the result; she prefers applying a CC-BY-NC-ND license.
Time passes by so quickly. Now we are entering our second week of course. But, what happened last week?
On Tuesday, our first day, we started by introducing ourselves: our names and our previous teaching experience.
We continued by watching a presentation while we discussed about why ICT is necesary in Primary Education. Motivation, communication, content curation, cooperative work... self-training.
We talked about the jobs in the future to come and realized that some of them may sound a bit odd at the time such as earthquake forecaster, commercial space pilot or memory surgeon. We did agree on the skills our children will need to develop: problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, people skills and STEM. [Top 10 Jobs in 2030: Skills You Need Now to Land the Jobs of the Future]
A question was due to be made: Do we know our kids? What are they into these days? Digital divices since they are little (digital natives?), online videogames, social media at an early age... Are we ready as teachers?
It was a nice talk but after watching the presentation it was time to check what we had learned that day in a fun way. What better option than playing a Kahoot! And even better, there were some prizes to be won, something is better than nothing! We had a really good time.
The last few minutes were spent by getting acquainted with the virtual campus on Aula Virtual.
On Thursday we worked on our computers. Unit 1: First things first. Our first activity was to open our learning journal, the blog we are going to update every time we finish an activity in order to post our reflections, share our digital artefacts and so forth.
Blogger, Wordpress or Tumbler were the options chosen by the students.
The second and last activity for the day was to cartoonize ourselves. We had to turn ourselves into our avatar. To do so we were offered apps such as Tellagami, Doppel or Bitmoji, the last one being the most appealing to us.
Here you are some of our avatars:
We all agreed that it had been a great week. And so be our week starting tomorrow too!
This blog is about Education and Technology to a great extent.
We will be posting and showcasing our learning at 'The use of ICT and other resources for Bilingual Education in Primary Education: preparation and adaptation of materials' subject at URJC university, but also any other reflections, advices, analysis and so forth regarding the application of Technology in the field of Primary Education.
