Live online conference at #moodlemooc10

Hi inno-teachers!

Today I want to share with you a great experience we had last 4th of May. My classmates and I were invited to be presenters at MM10, an online worldwide event for teachers. MM10 (or Moodle Mooc 10) is a series of online conferences about different topics regarding education that are taking place from 1st of May until 4th of June 2017. The purpose of the MOOC is to connect teachers around the world in order to exchange knowledge, experiences and practicies with or without technology in the classroom.

Our class took place on Thursday May 4th at 16h at WizIQ and its title was Open Educational Digital Projects for CLIL Primary Education.

Since our teacher in this Master's module told us that we were going to participate in an online worldwide event, we started to work very hard. These are the steps we followed so as to prepare the conference:

• To draft our speech.
• To design a support slide.
• 27th of April: day for the online rehearsal.
• 4th of May: Online conference in MM10.
• To reflect about the experience in our learning diary.

Designing a rubric for assessment

Hi inno-teachers!

And now is time to create a rubric for assessing our students! In this post I am going to present to you the rubric that I have designed in order to evaluate my students in my OEP: Namasté! Moreover, I will include some basic elements to take into account when designing a rubric such as the elements that it should contain or an interesting website to create it online.

Recovered from: www.xtlearn.net

Why is assessment important?

To assess means to ask students about their understanding of the subject matter. Assessment is an integral part of instruction because it determines if the goals of education have been met or not. There are different ways of assessing our students, but if we want to be good teachers, that critical moment in th teaching-learning process should contain some of the following characteristics:

• It provides diagnostic feedback.
• It helps educatiors set standards.
• It evaluates progress.
• It relates to a student's progress.
• It motivates performance.
• It allows teacher-self evaluation.

"Assessment is the engine which drives student learning". (John Cowan)

My second super learning mission!

Hi inno-teachers!

In this post I am going to present to you the second super learning mission that I have created to include in my OEP. I am going to follow the same structure that the one that I used on the previous entry. First of all, I am going to introduce to you the flat activity that has been modified; then, I will explain the whole process that I have followed and, finally I am going to show to you how the activity fits in my OEP (I will also include the sample of the digital artifact that is expected from the pupils).

Retrieved from: www.des.edu.ky

Before starting with the process, I would like to remind you the steps that are necessary to follow in order to turn a flat activitiy into a super learning mission. These steps are:

1. Decide a flat activity to change.
2. Think on how to motivate your students.
3. Join a collaborative movement (optional).
4. Set the new goals.
5. Explain the instructions to your students and how to create the digital artifact/s (if necessary).

You can see the poster that I created with these steps by clicking here. And now, we can start!

A super learning mission!

Hi inno-teachers!

Today I will present to you a super learning mission for my OEP (Open Educational Project). The vast majority of Open Educational Projects are characterizied by the development of missions that encourage students' motivation for learning.
The main differences that exist between a mission in a project and a traditional session in a classroom are the following ones:

• Most traditional sessions in traditional classrooms do not foster innovation and creativity.
• Missions promote problem solving and critical thinking.
• Traditional sessions aim to achieve closed objectives in the curriculum.
• Missions in OEPs are, in some cases, cross-curricular.
• Missions foster cooperation between students while traditional sessions usually don't.

Retrieved from: sbtexas.com

This post aims to transform a flat activity into a collaborative mission (the second mission will be published in another post in my blog). Hereafter, I am going to present to you the changes that I have made (in collaboration with two classmates) so as to enhance the activity and to ensure quality.

Let's find a partner!

Hi inno-teachers!

Let's continue enriching Namasté!, my open educational project! In my last entry, I presented a visual metaphor that summarizes how Namasté! project turns into a collaborative one. And now, I am delighted to introduce to you an elevator pitch to talk infoEDUgrafías (the collaborative movement that I have chosen) into accepting me as a new partner.

Firstly, I would like to explain to you what infoEDUgrafías is and why I have decided to join them. InfoEDUgrafías is a collaborative project for infant, primary, secondary and universitary students. The main aim of this project is that pupils create an infographic relating to any topic (for instance, the plot of a book, the parts of the plants or an important event in history). All infographics created by the students will be published on the webpage so as other pupils can benefit from the work. The way for participating and joining the project is very easy. Teachers who want to do it, just have to complete the form on the webpage. Once the works have been created, the teacher has to submit them to the following email adress: proyectoinfoedugrafias@gmail.com 

Retrieved from: http://infoedugrafias.blogspot.com.es

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

A CLIL educational project: "Namasté!"

Hi inno-teachers!

Today I want to share with you the prototype of my CLIL educational project. Hereafter, I would like to explain to you the whole process that I have followed for creating this project prototype, "Namasté!".

Before starting with the planification of the prototype, I decided to create a handwritten outline in order to organise my ideas. Once I knew that I wanted to focus my project on History for sixth graders, I started to imagine a motivating topic for the students. After thinking on it very carefully, I decided to center my CLIL educational project on the Indian culture. I strongly believe that the different cultures around the world are a very uplifting topic for the pupils since they can learn the main characteristics of any society that they have probably seen before, for instance, in films. 

I decided the title of my project, Namasté! (a respectful form of greeting in India), and I started to plan it: the number of sessions, the students' roles, the aims, the key competences, the evaluation tools... And, the most important decission, the final outcome. Once I had completed my outline, I copied the information in a template provided by my ICT teacher.

Here you can take a look of my outline, and, if you think that there is something that can be improved, just let me know! Although this is just a prototype that can be modified depending on several factors, I am very satisfied with it.

Let's analyse an educational project!

Hi inno-teachers!

In this post I am going to analyse an open educational project from EDIA-CLIL Projects, a set of CLIL projects for high schools created by the INTEF (Instituto Nacional de Tecnologías Educativas y de Fromación del Profesorado). The different units aim to foster language learning among young students while they deal with relevant topics such as their daily life, the digital world or important cities in the world. 

Recovered from: http://blog.educalab.es/intef/

I have decided to center my analysis in a particular project: Designing an advert. 

Designing an advert is an English project for 1st graders of Secondary Education in which the pupils will have to design a multimedia advertising campaign for an invented product. The project is organized in five lessons (or missions) and a final task; and, it is designed to be able to work in groups. According to the INTEF, the two main aims of the project are the following ones:

• To practice and learn the English language.
• To improve digital skills.

3, 2, 1 interview. Today... Cristina Hernández!

Hi inno-teachers!

This is my first post on this blog, Make innovation happen, and I am delighted to start with a flipped introduction activity. In this post I will introduce Cristina Hernández Palacios, an Infant Education teacher who is studying a Master's Degree in bilingualism at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid.

I have decided to interwiew Cristina following the 3, 2, 1 structure. For those who do not know the main features of this way of getting to know each other, I would say that it is based on answering 3, 2 and 1 questions related to different aspects in the interviewee life. In this case, I have asked Cristina the following ones:

• 3 things we should know about her
• 2 of her favourite activities
• 1 dream job

But, before embedding the interview podcast, I would like to explain to you the steps that I have followed so as to interview Cristina.