Turning flat activities into learning missions

Hello everybody!!!!

My last post was about searching partners to join in a collaborative project from the internet. As I am getting involved in a collaborative community and I wanted to enrich my open educational project, my new challenge is turning flat activities into super learning missions.

How can we turn a flat activity into a super learning mission?

First of all, we have to bear in mind that we are teachers from the 21st century and there are many ways of teaching, most of them very motivating for our students. Let´s try to forget textbooks for a while and let´s try to be more creative! Creating super learning missions is a way of transforming boring tasks into motivating challenges for students to learn, and for teachers, it is a way of enriching our way of teaching and our educational projects.

In order to carry this objective out, we have to select a flat activity, for example a task from the book. Then, we have to set the goals we want to achieve and after that, we have to think how to make it more motivating and meaningful for our students, analysing the tools we are going to use. Finally we have to explain clearly to our students the artifact we want them to create.

I have created a poster with the steps you can follow to create learning missions.

Created with Easel.ly by Laura G.

Which activities have I chosen?

In the protoype of my Open Educational Project (OEP), you could see some activities that I proposed considering digital skills and ICT because I thought it would be nice and children would love it. However, after thinking about them, I saw that some activities were flat and I wanted to turn them into super learning missions. The activities I have chosen are looking for information and creating a presentation.

In this post I am going to explain everything from the first activity and I will publish another post with the explanation of the second activity for you to have it clear!

How have I turned the first activity into a super learning mission?

The first activity "looking for information" consisted in, as its name shows, looking for information in the textbook, about the topic that the group of students have in order to fulfill an activity from the textbook. Now this boring activity is a super learning mission called "blogging my knowledge!", in which students will have to do a research of the topic by groups, and then, they have to post the explanation in their learning diaries. With this super mission, students will collaborate within the classroom, in small groups.

Here you can see how I have developed, in a draft using Google docs, the super learning mission "blogging my knowledge!". You can find the goals I want to achieve, the contents that are going to be worked, the competences involved, the timing and tools that are going to be used and the final artifact, as well as the full description of the development of the learning mission.

Besides, I leave a magazine that I have created with the tool canva, with the whole explanation of the super learning misison in order to make it clear.

Mission 1 Journal created with canva by Laura G.

How have I linked this super learning mission to The 30 Goals Challenge?

As you could see in my last post about the partner search, I wanted to focus on the blogging goal from this community and I thought a good way to do it was including this goal in my flat activity in order to turn it into a super learning mission. By this way, I am also linking this activity to the community to which I want to belong to.

Furthermore, teachers will also achieve their objectives from the 21st century teaching by including this amazing resource.

I have created an example of what I want my students to do in the classroom blog with the tool: Blogger.

Self- reflection

As always, I want to reflect about this new challenge, which has been a little bit difficult. First of all, I had to look for information about what a learning mission is and after having a look at many websites, I started to think about how to do a more interesting activity from the one that I thought in the prototype. I decided to do a poster to explain it better, with a digital tool: canva; in order to make my post more visual and attractive.

This challenge has been very interesting for me since I have learnt how to work in a different and meaningful way on a topic that can be seen as boring for students.

As far as digital tools are concerned, I decided to include Blogger since students will develop their writing skills through an unconscius way. By learning many things about our environment and about digital tools, they will also improve English and writing skills. Moreover, it is linked to the challenge from The 30 Goals I wanted to focus on, inside this community. For these reasons I decided to link all the missions to this challenge. Students will have to overcome different artifacts and then publish them into their learning diaries in order to share it with the world.

From my point of view this is a very interesting and motivating perspective through which students will learn a lot of things constructing their own knowledge, helping each other.

As Ever Garrisson said: "a teacher is a compass that activates the magnets of curiosity, knowledge and wisdom in the pupils".

I hope you like this new idea and I will be waiting for you to see my second super learning mission in the next post. See you soon!!