Stories in the classroom. More than just a simple narration: a great teaching tool.

Good afternoon everyone!!

A long time ago without writting on this blog, but today I want to share with you the work that I have done. It is a work related to the master that I have studied and of which I have already spoken to you in previous posts of the blog.

The work aims to demonstrate the importance of stories as an educational resource. In addition, this work can be useful for teachers to see the amount of utilities that stories can have in the classroom.

The work has a theoretical part and two practical parts. The first practical part is a survey that I have done to know the current use of stories in class. The second practical part is a prototype of an online-library for the first grade of primary education. The library has a selection of useful stories to achieve curricular goals.

I don't want to go too deeply into the explanation of my work because I prefer that you read it fully, so that is why this entry is quite brief...

I hope that you find my work useful and I would appreciate that in the comments of the blog you write your opinion!!

Thank you very much and here I leave you the link to the work: Stories in the classroom. More than a simple narration: a great teaching tool.

The end of the road?

Four months ago I began my adventure in ICT’s through a subject of the Master I’m doing. All showed that it would be a hard and difficult subject for me, because new technologies were not one of my strengths; so at first I was not very motivated in this work.

The good fact that this subject had, was that our teacher had perfectly organized all the contents: each task came with its corresponding "instructions" and its possible "solutions" so that little by little I was completing all missions, as you have seen in each post of this blog.

To sum up all my work, I have created a video. You can see this video to enjoy my exciting journey through the subject:

I created the video with the application "go animate". I already used this app for my e-project and as I found a useful and good tool I've used again to complete this task.
This time I have recorded my own voice and I have created a character, "similar to me."

What do you think about my video?

About my subject I would like to say that:

My favorite task was to create my own Digital Identity. For me this blog and my twitter account are currently two essential things, while four months ago meant nothing to me.
As a teacher I like to transmit my knowledge to the whole world and now I think that through social networks many people can read my comments and use my tools and materials. This is fantastic! Isn’t it?

Therefore, I could say that my three favorite activities of the course were:

- Create a blog

- Create a twitter account

- Use my blog and my twitter account

And if I could change something so that the subject was better in the future, I would change the duration of the course. I think it would be better if it lasted the whole year and not just one semester. In this way we would have more time to do the activities and we would obtain better results. Sometimes I thought that having one or two extra-weeks I could have had a much better result.

Finally, to finish this post I want to thank all my classmates for their help in the difficult moments. Because when I did not know how to perform a task they have helped me. Thanks to all.

And also thanks to my teacher María Jesús, for her patience, for explaining the same thing five times so that we might be able to understand it and for lending us her help at all times.

Our subject ends today, but we still have a long road ahead.

Image from pixabay

Creating a Rubric

Hello again!

Today I want to share with you mi first rubric but first, what’s a rubric?
I’m sure that the vast majority of you already know what a rubric is, but for those who don’t know what rubrics are, I would like to explain that the commonly accepted definition of Heidi Andrade says that a rubric is a document that articulates expectations for a mission by listing criteria, or what counts, and levels that describe the quality from excellent to poor.

From my point of view, rubrics are a way to communicate to students how they will be evaluated, providing information focused on works in progress. Rubrics are a way to teach, but they are also a good way to learn, I mean, if the teacher provides rubrics to students before they complete the task, they can create their work following the points that the teacher will evaluate their work. For students is easier to perform a task knowing exactly what is expected of them and how they will be evaluated.

Then if rubrics are a good tool…LET’S USE RUBRICS!

However, before using any rubric I recommend you to do your own because in that way you will be sure that it meets its job properly.

So how can we create a rubric? Let’s see:

Actually there are a lot of online tools that allow us to create rubrics quickly and easily. In this list created by Maria Jesús you will find several tools: Rubrics for all 

After consulting the list and following the recommendations of my classmates, I chose the “quick rubric” tool. About this tool I would like to say it’s very easy to use and flexible, so you can create rubrics as you want, varying the number of rows and columns to your liking and writing on the table what you want. You do not have to register on the website to create rubrics, but if you want to save or edit your creation later, I recommend you create an account.

When you have finished your artifact you can save it to pdf format, print it, or share it online. The hardest part of this work was, for me, create a PDF with my rubric; fortunately my classmates explained me how could I do that. Therefore, to make it easier for you I leave a few screenshots explaining the process:

Go to your Rubric and clilk on "Print Rubric"

Then, clik on the "save" button and select "Save as PDF"

To conclude this post, I'd like to show my rubric. As I said before this is the first time I make a rubric so I'd love to know your opinion about it to improve it.

It’s a rubric to assess online blogs and e-projects and the criteria that I have taken into account are: grammar mistakes, innovation and originality, citations and attributions, personal opinion and detailed work, proper functioning of links and also use of online tools. The scale I have used is: Perfect! (3points), in the good way (2points) and improvement needed (1point); so the highest rating that can be obtained is 18 (6x3) and the minimum score is 6 (6x1).

And remember: we must not forget that the rubrics are for teachers but also for students, so we should do simple and well explained rubrics to facilitate the work of our students.

I hope you've learned interesting things about rubrics, see you!

Augment World Book Day!

Hello everyone!

As you know, last April 23 was the Book Day. To celebrate it, my classmates and I made a special task nameds: What type of reader are you?

To perform the task, we had to create our own “Aura”, as you know because I explained it to you here, Auras are the images we create with the Aurasma program that come to life when you scan it.

So to carry out the task I first had to ask myself what kind of reader am I? And the answer to this question is not easy... 

There are people who are clear about the kind of books they like to read but I'm not that kind of people. I am an eclectic person; I think I can learn something useful from anything and the same happens to me with books. 

Throughout my life I have read a lot, I like reading, I enjoy reading; for me reading is a way of disconnection, when I'm stressed I read and I feel relaxed, but I insist that I do not like a certain type of book I like that people recommend me their favorite books, I usually follow their advice and I read it.

I like teen-novels, I like adventure and mystery books and I also really like tales and children's books. As I actually work in an Infant School I have a big collection of tales, but as I said I do not just read stories...so, what kind of reader am I? I’M A SUPER READER!

And now that you know a little more about my literary likes, you can see my trigger-image in Aurasma: as you know first you have to follow my channel called t.martindobl and then scan my photo to see the video that appears.

If you cannot see the video through Aurasma, don’t worry! Here you have the video:

Finally with all the trigger-images created, our teacher has created a board on pinterest called "A wall of books" you can see the work of all my classmates across that board.
 
I hope you like and do not hesitate to leave me a comment!

Planning and creating a video!

In this post I will talk about how you can organize yourselves when creating creating a video.

Whenever we perform a task we have a goal to get with it. In the case of video is the same. Sometimes teachers shows videos to their students without reviewed it previously and that is not educative... this only serves to "entertain" students and to let them waste their time.

Use videos of others are a difficult task because these videos may have copyright (as I have mentioned above) or because these videos may not cover what we need.

As teachers, the best we can do is creating our own material and in this case create our own videos.
Create a video is complicated but through this post I will try to teach you how to do it and also I will show you how my team has created a great video for our project.

FIRST STEP: PLANNING THE VIDEO

It is important to plan what you want to appear in your video, because through this way when you go to make the video you already have the main ideas and it will be easier for you to create it.

To make our Video Planning we have used Storyboard That, which is a very useful and simple tool to make comics. It offers a big amount of free resources for you to develop your ideas and create stories related to any topic you wish.  

Creating and decorating the scenes and the characters has been really easy to do, as well as sequencing the images, writing the bubbles and organizing the story. We just had to drag with the mouse what we wanted to use and release it wherever we liked.  

Each frame of the comic represents an scene of the video. And here you can see our artifact which represent our video planning:

Once you have planned the video, you have to create it and record it so…

SECOND STEP: RECORD THE VIDEO

To create the video of our project we use a Chroma. A Chroma is an audiovisual technique that consists in changing an image of a fixed and uniform color (usually green or blue) for another different image selected from a computer. This technique is widely used in television.

Here you can see our making off:

 THIRD STEP: EDIT THE VIDEO

After recording the scenes with the Chroma, we have to edit and insert images we want to appear instead of green fabric. To do it we have used the Sony Vegas Pro program in order to chage the Chroma for animals' images. This program is complicated and difficult to use, but the results are very good so worth learning to use it.

After much work I have to say that we are very satisfied with the result. Do you want to see our video? 

LAST STEP: ENJOY!

These tasks were also part of a collaborative work, in this case with The ESL Times the official news magazine for collaborative ESL learners, and here you can see the award we received for taking part of the project:

As a final thought I have to say that at the beginning I was a little scary because of the idea of creating a video and post it on the internet, but my team has helped me to see this work in another way and now I think that create this video has been a very good idea. I'm sure I'll create more videos and also I'll share it with you.