Beyond a simple project

Hi inno-teachers!

In this post I want to share with you how I have decided to enrich my educational project, Namasté! 

As all of you know, we all learn from and with others; we all take part in education. As an educational community, teachers, students, families and others educational agents interact among them, and this is a way of constructing knowledge. One of the best ways to get knowledge from others is collaborative learning. 

Collaborative learning is a method in which pupils team together to solve a problem or create a meaningful project. According to Gokhale (1995), individuals are able to achieve higher levels of learning and retain more information when they work in a group rather than individually, this applies to both the facilitators of knowledge, the instructors, and the receivers of knowledge, the students. There are three kinds of collaboration movements:

• Collaboration within the classroom through cooperative learning.  (García, M.J., 2017 [lecture notes]).
• Collaboration out of the classroom connecting with other classes, communities, with the real world, so as to make service-learning projects, entrepeneurship projects, investigation projects, and so forth.  (García, M.J., 2017 [lecture notes]).
• Collaboration back to the classroom, involving external agents in the learning process so as our classes become a real learning community.  (García, M.J., 2017 [lecture notes]).

I have decided to choose the second collaboration movement (out of the classroom) in order to imply its benefits to the educational project that I have already prototyped. Hereafter, I will explain the changes that I have made in order to enrich my project.

Retrieved from: trivantis.com

The final task that I expected from my students in my prototyped educational project was to record a video representing (through role-play) a situation related to the Indian culture, such as food, clothing, music, dances, traditional markets...

As we, as teachers, are trying to become 21st century teachers, I want my students to become 21st century learners, too. I mean, I believe that it is necessary to give them the tools for constructing their own knowledge; and, collaboration learning, is one of the ways to achieve this goal.

For this reason, I have decided to modify the final task of my educational project and to incorporate an activity that foster collaborative learning. Hereafter, I will explain the steps that I took so as to create a more complete project. Then, I will attach a flyer with all the information that can help other teachers in order to turn their units into collaborative ones.

1. Firstly, it is important to read the prototyped project that is already designed in order to know all its main characteristics. I reread mine and I annotated the possible improvements that could be done regarding collaboration learning.
2. Then, I checked some collaboration movements on the net. I have created a list with some important projects to join in and some tools for the students. It is available for you and you can access to it by clicking here. 
3. The next step was to decide which one will fit better with my project and the aims that I want to accomplish. After looking for lots and lots of collaborative tasks on the net, I decided to join InfoEDUgrafías. I believe that it is adequate to incorporate it on my work, Namasté! InfoEDUgrafías is an open and collaborative project for infant, primary, secondary or universitary students. It consists on uploading different infographics (regarding any topic) which will benefit other students around the world. 
4. Once I had decided the collaboration movement that I wanted to join, I started to modify the activity (in this case, the final task) in order to accomplish the collaboration aims. The new statement for the final task of my project, Namasté!, read as follows: "In groups of four students, create an infographic to illustrate one of the characteristics that we have already studied regarding the Indian culture: food, clothing, traditional markets, dances, music... You can include images, text, graphis, links... It's up to you! Then, share your infographic with other mates in the web InfoEDUgrafías".

Here I attach a flyer with all the steps that need to be followed for enriching any educational project and turn it into a collaborative one.

educational project by ana94marquez 

And this image illustrates my project enrichment:

party by ana94marquez 

But, before saying goodbye, I would like to reflect on the learning that I have acquired thanks to this activity. Firstly, I would like to highlight that I have learnt new things about collaborative learning. Before carrying out this activity, I had an idea of collaboration movements in education; but, due to the fact that I have had to decide one of them to join in, I have observed the wide range that exist on the net. I strongly belive on this kind of education: a teaching-learning process built by all of us. As I have stated above, we all learn by communicating with others and by sharing our ideas. We, as 21st century teachers, should teach our students how to take part of this "movement".

Moreover, this challenge have allowed myself to dig deeper into infoEDUgrafías. From my point of view, it is very rewarding for the students. Moreover, an other important aspect that makes infoEDUgrafías a brilliant collaborative activity, is the fact that it is an easy task for pupils because they just have to create an infographic taking into account all the knowledge that they have acquired.

Finally, I would like to talk about Canva. Canva is a brilliant tool for easy graphic design. It is not a new tool for me because I have use it a lot during my academic and personal life. I think it is very complete and very intuitive to use. Furthermore, it offers a wide range of free layouts which makes the task easier. As I have mentioned above, it is not the first time that I have chosen Canva for creating magnific images. I arrange a cultural project in my city, which is called Benidorm Desperta. The main aim of it is to run cultural activities in my city (open-mic sessions, concerts, talent contests...) and I use Canva so as to create the posters to promote the events. Here it is an example:

Author's own

And, after sharing this moment with all of you, I only have to add...

See you soon, inno-teachers!