What type of reader are you?

Loading...

Hello ladies and gentlemen!

How was this time? Today, I´m going to show you my new project. Taking into advance of the last World Book Day (23^th of April) our TIC teacher María Jesús told us to make a video about our favourite book. I claim that this is a very interesting task, since through seeing our classmates ‘projects, we can know new books which could be interesting for us. I always agree with sharing experiences and recommend things, since maybe we don´t like the same things that our classmates like to, but perhaps we coincide and it helps us to discover an unknown world!

Well, the first thing I have made is to choose the book, my favourite book. I have chosen Matilda, written by Roald Dahl in 1988 and originally illustrated by Quentin Blake. I have read Matilda several times since I was 14 and I still love it! It is very fun and it has lots of adventures, which I consider indispensable in a book. Have you ever hear about it? Matilda is a girl of unusual precocity who loves reading, but their parents don´t want her to do it, so they mistreat her. Matilda discovers the public library and she spends all the evenings reading lots of different books there. She meets the teacher Miss Honey, who is ill-treated by her uncle, the headmaster Miss Trunchbul, and she is stunned by Matilda's intellectual abilities. As I said in the video, I am not going to tell you more about the story, you will have to read the book! I also have to say that there is a film about Matilda´s story and it is incredible too! I also have saw it several times and I also recommend you to see it. I believe that Matilda is the perfect book for that project because it can encourage people to read, since it is the favourite hobby of the young girl, and it also teach different values such as empathy and friendly.

Secondly, I created an infographic using Piktochart, regarding the book I have chosen. In this case, the best option was to make a poster. In that poster, I have included the front cover of the book, a phrase said by Matilda which I love the most, a title and the date of the World Book Day, and some slogans (in order to catch people´s attention). It is very easy to use Piktochart, since you only have to choose the background and add the icons, images and text you want. You can visit the post I wrote some days ago about Piktochart to obtain more information about it.

Here, you can see my infographic:

Loading...

Later, I had an idea! I wanted to use Matilda´s images to the main character of my video too, and I thought: How can I do that? Following my partner Ana´s recommendations, I used Blabberize to create a mouth in Matilda´s images and add my voice answering the following questions:

• 1What features define you as a reader?
• 2What type of books you read?
• 3What is your favourite book and why do you recommend it?

It was very, very easy! I only had to upload the image, move the courses to place them on Matilda´s mouth and upload then the audio. And it was all! However, I had some problems because I only could download it as a Power Point Presentation, so I asked my classmate Álvaro (which is a machine!) and he helped me to convert the mpg file into an mp4 file. He told me that he used Xilisoft to do it.

Later, I used the program Aurasma to join the poster and the video. First of all, I had to download it into my mobile phone and I created my personal account (follow me as c.risueno). Then, I use my computer to create the Aurasma; I uploaded the poster, then the video (mp4 file) and I saved the results. Later, I used my Aurasma app (mobile phone) to scan the image from my computer and… Wow! The video could be seen very real in my mobile phone´s screen!! I have never used a program like this! I shared the poster as a new pin in the board that the teacher has created in Pinterest, which my other classmates´ projects. We had made a specific board since it is easier to find them which is called A Wallof Books.

Remember that you can visit all my projects and the programs by clicking on them. See you very soon!

Piktochart slideshow

Hello again ladies and gentlemen!

Today, I would like to explain you the challenge my group and I faced from our ICT subject. 

I have worked with the same group as in the challenges before. In case you don´t remember, we are: María, Gonzalo, Estrella, Celia and I.

For this new task, we had to make a tutorial and we decided to explain how to use Piktochart in order to help our students to take advantage of it. I´m not going to extend more talking about Piktochart because you can see all its details in the tutorial (or you can also visit my previous post). However, I have to say that we have chosen Piktochart (you can also use others such as Easel.ly, Thinglink or Canva) since we claimed that our children might be able to create their own infographic successfully (as it was said before, some members of our group had already used it and they believed that it could fit our purpose perfectly). As you can read on my prior post, it is a kind of graphic that represents information, data or knowledge quickly and clearly.

Well, to make our infographic we firstly screencasted our computer screen while we were recording orally step by step the process to use Piktochart. María was controlling the mouse and I was narrating what she was doing in Piktochart. In that way, we think that our pupils will be familiarised with it better. To do that, we have used the free tool called aTubeCatcher. We found this program suitable for this task because it is very easy to use and it has all the features we were looking for.  At the end, we shared the video to Youtube in order to make it public. A disadvantage that we founded is that aTubeCatcher didn´t allow us to edit videos. For this reason, we used other program: Movie Maker. With it, we could perfect the video adding some background music, the initial tittle and a final image including our Twitter handles in order to give the viewers the possibility to contact us with their doubts, suggestions and questions.

You can see the tutorial here:

 

I hope you´ll enjoy it and you´ll find it usefull! Do not hesitate to contact us. Remember you can get access to our Twitter profiles by clicking on our names. See you soon!!

Videochallenge: TIC and the Magic Planet

Hello!

I´m here again to show you our last project... We have work also in the same last group, composed by María, Gonzalo, Estrella, Celia and I. First I would like to say is that I´m very proud of my team! I consider that we had made a very good job :)

Well, regarding the current challenge, we become both writers and film directors! Yes! It sound amazing, and it was! We were requested to create a clip about the common e-project we are doing and the first thing we had to do was to plan what it would be about. Due to the fact that all our individual e-Projects were about the Earth and its features [Planets in the Solar System (mine), TheHydrosphere (by Gonzalo), Environmental care (by Estrella), The Mysteries of the Earth (by María) and Landcaping (by Celia)], we decided to create a character based on the Universe. And... 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 was called TIC? 

To plan our clip, we created a storyboard using the webtool storyboardthat which was recommended by our teacher María Jesús. At the beginning, we started to describe all the story, but later, we discovered that the free account we made only allows us to create six scenes, so we had to shorten it. However, it wasn´t a problem since the final clip will include the whole story (we thought that it also will make it scheming). Later on, we were surprised how amazing the pictures looked: the program has lots of backgrounds, characters and shapes, which allow you to create exactly what you want! Nevertheless, what we liked the most was the possibility to modify the position of the main character; TIC could put its arms up or down, it could move its head and cross its legs... and all these made the story more real! 

Here you can see our storyboard! Are you ready to meet TIC? 

From the storyboard, we brought TIC to live! We got down to work with the clip.

First of all, if you want to film a movie you need to write a script so we became writers! We wrote the dialogue using Word and we printed it in order to make Gonzalo ´s work (TIC) easier and show him what did he have to say. Our clip was divided into eleven scenes in which our alien would travel through the Solar System for discovering the Magic Planet. TIC was dying to find it out! but… What about TIC? We needed an actor! So... Gonzalo  became TIC thanks to our make-up team (María and I)! Look at that awesome result! I think we made a good group!!

  

Then, we were ready to record the video challenge... For this purpose we decided to use the chroma key technique and the webtool Camtasia, with which we could substitute the green background for a picture from our choice. Regarding Camtasia, we downloaded the free version with a free trial for 30 days. It seems quite difficult to use at the very beginning but after practicing with it for a while, we discovered all its possibilities. Thanks to Camtasia, we have learned how to use chroma key and how to organized the video clips, the pictures and the audios in order to get the final video. The only problem we have found is 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 to 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.
 
I hope you enjoy it! Don´t forget to visit our Twitter profiles and the programs bedore mentioned by clicking on them. See you very soon!

 

Sweet Chocotalk about CLIL

Hi my bilingual friends!

Nice to be here again! I would like to tell you that the last 7th of April, my classmates and I made a Chocotalk. 
What? Chocotalk? Yes, it is... A Chocotalk is an online chat or natter, in our case, about CLIL and how it can contribute to improving learners' Emotional Intelligence and making them happier people. 
On the one hand, if you followed me on Twitter, you could see my tweets and my classmates´tweets posting not only during this life event, but also before and after it. On the other hand, did you miss our it? Don´t worry! I am here for making you happy, so you can see it now!

 In the Chocotalk, all the members of the class had a role:

• CONTENT CURATORS: Estrella and Gonzalo were in charge of collecting all the information and everything that could happen during the development of the Chocotalk. As you will see after, they created a Storify to sumarize all the proccess.
•  
• SPEAKERS: in this case Celia was the one who had to talk during the live event, representing the rest of the group according to the ideas that we put together previously. From my point of view, we chose the correct persone since she is a fluent English speaker and she has always the perfect words to defend what she thinks (or what the group think, in this case).
•  
• DISSEMINATES: My classmate María and I were in charge of spreading and commenting what was happening in youtube, through different social networks such as facebook or twitter. We all used the hashtag #chococharlas and #ictclil_urjc

Once all of us were ready, the whole group started to search information about the influence of ICT in CLIL. What we finally concluded was how games can help in a bilingual classroom for motivating students and promoting a meaningful learning. We wanted to link civer games with Emotional Intelligence, the bilingual learning and ICT: they can motivate children and make them able to be self-confidence and self-sufficient; most of that games are originally in English, so they can help them to improve their English level; and obviously, playing a ciber game recquieres a computer, a mobile phone or something like that.

Before going on with the live Chocotalk María and me, as disseminates, created an ad using the tool Piktochart in order to catch people’s attention and engage them in the event. We made the following posters and we share them on Facebook and Twitter.

Before starting with the  Chocotalk, our speaker Celia was on Hangouts with the rest of other groups’ speakers Rubén, Patricia, Neus, Lola Álvaro,Inma, @GLHmaster, and  María Jesús, our ICT teacher in the bilingual classroom. They spent more than two hours arranging everything. And tha´s only before the event! They are superteachers!!

Then... The Chocotalk STARTED and we all were so excited for the event! It was the first time that we did an online talk, with possible viewers from all over the world. The Chocotalk followed a clear structure:

1. The first topic we were dealing with were the advantages and disadvantages of CLIL. Many people think that bilingualism affects negatively to the mother tongue acquisition so they feel afraid of this type of education that is offered currently in most schools. The conlusion we made were that the most appropriated way to work on bilingualism would be through cross curricular links, for instance working with projects.
2. The second topic refers to social and emotional benefits of CLIL. This Chocotalk was called “how CLIL can contribute to having happier bilingual learners” so, nothing else to say… My peers agreed with the importance of motivating students and making them feel confortable in order to foster language acquisition. This quote, which I really love, was from my classmate Rubén and it made me wonder about my teaching: “We’re teaching humans, don’t forget”.
3. The third one, was related with the use of ICT in the CLIL classroom. The conclusion we all agreed was that the more important aspect of teaching in any educational context is the purpose of the tools we are using for and the students’ learning process rather than the tools itself.
4. Finally, the speakers had to make a summary of each group’s e-project.  Celia presented our common project called “The Earth Adventures” and our peers explained also their projects related with ICT and CLIL:

• Patricia told us about their project “Learning about body and senses with ICT”.
• Rubén introduced their collaborative project about "History".
• Inma and her mates have created a project about “European Geography”.
• Lola presented their project called “Travelling around Europe”.
• Álvaro  and Neus have created a project with their colleagues about “Neighborhood”.
• Guillermo  told us about their “Animals eproject”.

Our content curators Estrella and Gonzalo have created this amazing Storyfy which allows you to see how the Chocotalk event was.

I hope you enjoyed it!
 If you want to add any comment, you can write us on Twitter. Remember that you can visit our Twitter profiles and the programs´ websites (when it´s possible) by clicking on them.