Enriching my prototype

Hello everyone!!!!

Last week, I shared with you my prototype of the educational project I created. Today, I want to show you more about it. I have been thinking about enriching my educational project by making it more social, introducing different cooperative work.

First of all, I want to explain to you what collaborative work is. Learning and cooperative work is an approach that seeks to organize activities within and outside the classroom to become a social and academic learning experience. Students work in groups to perform tasks collectively.
Learning in this approach depends on the exchange of information among students, who are motivated both to achieve their own learning and to enhance the achievements of others.

Through collaborative work, students can share strengths and weaknesses with their groups and help each other, Besides, they will also develop many interpersonal skills to interact and communicate with others.

If you want to investigate more about this approach you can have a look at these links I leave you embedded:

1.Concept of collaborative work

2.Collaborative work in depth

3.Steps for collaborative work 

For these reasons, I decided to turn my educational project into a collaborative one.

How have I done it?

I was researching about collaborative work and I found three collaborative movements:

- Collaboration within the classroom through cooperative learning.

- Collaboration out of the classroom connecting with other classes or communities and share opinions, to make service- learning projects, etc.

- Collaboration back to the classroom, taking into account external agents in order to provide a meaningful and real learning.

I have made some changes in the prototype I shared with you last day. If you remember, in my prototype I included collaborative work inside the classroom but as I want to make it richer, I have taken into account collaborative work outside the classroom and then, bringing back the external ideas to the classroom for the final outcome. The protoype process was the following:

1. Collaboration inside the classroom: looking for information in groups, about a certain topic, in which each student will have a different role.

2. Final outcome: creating a presentation with the information they have looked for.

I will keep collaboration within the classroom the same way I explained in my prototype, keeping roles within the students´ groups, but with a different purpose. The final outcome will be a genial.ly presentation too, but I will include another challenge before the final outcome in order to involve collaboration out of the classroom.

In this new challenge, social networks will be part of the project. Students will be able to spread their ideas through the classroom blog. The process I want to carry out now is:

1. Collaboration inside the classroom: looking for information about a certain topic, in groups, in which each student will have a different role.

2. Collaboration outside the classroom: students will have to write their conclusions of what they have learnt through the previous process, in a learning diary in the classroom blog. The teacher will help students to share their learning diaries with other schools or classrooms in order to receive feedback from other students.

3. Collaboration back to the classroom: once students have shared their ideas, they will have to reflect about the feedback given in order to include some of the aspects they have learnt from the other students. Each group will have to create a genial.ly presentation in which they include the information they have concluded, and some aspects they have learnt with this educational project.

It is a great idea, that students can share their knowledge among others. By this way, students learn from a meaningful context and thier interests arise.

Here I leave you a flyer explaining briefly how I have enriched my educational project.

Created with Smore

Here I share with you a mindmap for you to take into account when creating your own collaborative project from your lesson plan!

Created with Easel.ly

As in every post, I want to share with you a final reflection to conclude, in order to reflect what I have learnt.

Self- reflection

For carrying out this post, I had to research about what collaborative work is, and to know some of the main collaborative movements in order to see which one fits better in my educational project. Finally, I decided to include the three movements I have already shown you, because by this way, with this educational project, students will learn a lot and they will realize that learning is not an own task, but we can learn from and with others.
The tools I have used are:
- Smore for creating the flyer through which I have presented the changes made in my educational project in order to turn it into a collaborative work. For doing that, you can also use other easy applications, that I used for other posts, such as: Canva to create images and flyers, Pixton in order to create comics for your students, or even your students can create them for the rest of the class!, another tool for creating comics is Storyboard That.

- Easel.ly for creating the mindmap highlighting the three main aspects we must take into account for making a collaborative project.
All of them are very easy to use and very interesting for enriching your works, you just have to log in and start working!

Besides learning about new tools and applications I had never heard about, I have learnt many things about cooperative learning. I realized how much I like this type of learning since I think it is very interesting for our students, moreover, it has many advantages that maybe we had never thought. It makes students to be motivated with the topic they are going to study and a positive attitude is going to be developed. Cooperative learning also helps students to develop interpersonal skills, to respect each other, to develop problem solving skills and to be resposible with their own work.
In addition, for me, carrying out this challenge of turning my prototype into a collaborative project has been very useful because I see that there are many fun ways of learning, not only for the students but for us, as teachers, for example taking part of other collaborative projects, that many other teachers share with the world.
Having said that, the next step I will take is to fit in another collaborative project from other people. I would like to be part of a learning circle on the net with people from all around the planet. I invite you to do the same because it will open your mind and see the world through another perspective.

See you soon with the next post!!!

Educational project: "My Town"

Hello everyone!!

Today I want to show and share with you an open educational project that probably you, teachers, can carry out in your classroom. Furthermore, I have analysed it in order to see the main characteristics, proposals and tasks that we can find in this educational project, which is called "My town".

This project has been published by CEDEC (Centro Nacional de Desarrollo Curricular en Sistemas Propietarios) and INTEF (Institución Nacional de Tecnologías Educativas y de Formación del Profesorado).

"My town" is a project designed for 1st graders in Secondary Education, whose main objectives are to acquire English skills such as: reading, writing, listening and speaking as well as to improve in their digital skills, by using a blog and a twitter account. It also aims to reach an autonomous learning through interaction and creating students´own knowledge. This type of learning is based on learning by projects.

This project is divided into six parts and in each one, students have to pass some challenges and post them in their blog:

1. Breaking the ice. The first challenge is to think and reflect about a New York video in which students will have to answer some open questions such as:

- What can you see?

- What do you think about what you see?

- What are you wondering about these images?

2. Working with maps. In this section students will have an activity in order to practice speaking by giving directions with a map.

3. What can you find in a city?. In this step students will have to talk with a partner about the most important places in a town.

4. Liverpool on a flyer. The next activity will be about promoting and showing a city in which students will practice reading skills. They will have to gather information and take pictures. Finally, they will create a presentation that must be original and creative.

5. My town is the best one. In this activity students will improve in writing skills. They will have to create a document in google in order to share it with the teacher and they will have to write good aspects about their city.

6. Promoting my town. Tha last activity is to create a reflection of what they have learnt during the project introducing all the elements they have used, grammar structures, vocabulary, pictures, etc. The final outcome will be a video promoting their city.

Before analysing...

I decided to have a look at EDIA CLIL Projects http://cedec.ite.educacion.es/es/rea-ingles where you can find other projects such as: "A sport journalist", "A cookbook", "The history of my family" and "Designing an advert".

I chose "My town" since I love Geography and I believe in learning in a different way, not only reading a book, which talks about a city, and learning by heart the main places in it, and so forth. I think this project is very well structured in order to carry it out in a real classroom. Besides the advantages that it has in the academic level, it also encourages an active participation and construction of the knowledge by discovering in an autonomous way. This interesting aspect will make students to be more organized in their own lives.

Before analysing this educational project, I read it and highlighted the main features. After that, I followed a check list including the following points.

KEY KNOWLEDGE, UNDERSTANDING AND SUCCESS SKILLS

The project of "My town" aims to reach five linguistic skills: interaction, reading, writing, listening and speaking.

Students will also learn key vocabulary and grammar related to the city and the places where they live.

It also includes success skills for students such as: thinking skills through LOTS (Low Order Thinking Skills) like giving opinions, relating monuments in the city and HOTS (High Order Thinking Skills) like evaluating others´ projects and their own project, researching on cities and monuments; cooperative work through the evaluation of the projects and self- management by carrying out a personal learning diary about their process in order to improve some aspects; they will also have to provide feedback in order to improve the classroom.

Another HOTS that can be worked with, in some activities, is creativity. Students must be creative when presenting their tasks.

CHALLENGING PROBLEM OR QUESTION

Students will have to challenge questions in order to generate and share the knowledge and learning and they will also have to challenge "problems", they will have to face each final task in order to learn by an autonomous manner. Students must create a portfolio in a blog in which they will have to post everything learnt and to face the final reflection in their learning diary.

SUSTAINED INQUIRY

This project involves active learning in which students are the main instructors of their knowledge and the learning is based on projects. This encourages autonomous learning and thus, students will generate questions that probably by researching and finding some resources on the internet they will answer themselves.

AUTHENTICITY

 This project has a real- world context due to the topic: the city. They will use real-world processes such as giving directions and working with maps.

 As students like to share their opinions, they will be involved in sharing their towns and it will be an interesting topic for them. They will also practice the language and grammar structures such as comparison and adjectives and other vocabulary in a natural way by describing and comparing cities.

 STUDENTS VOICE AND CHOICE

Students will organize their tasks by themselves, how they work and the time they spent in each task. The teacher will only explain the tasks and he/ she will participate in the assessment.

The teacher can give advises and opinions in order to improve some aspects, but students will have to construct their own knowledge.

REFLECTION

The project provides opportunities for students to reflect on their blogs what they are learning and how they are learning, as they will have to post all their processes and progress.

They will have to post the most difficult aspects to work on, the most important aspects they have learnt or what they did not understand.

CRITIQUE AND REVISION

The project includes processes for students to give and receive feedback on their work as they will cooperate and carry out collaborative work. With this feedback, students can improve and revise their ideas for further inquiries.

PUBLIC PRODUCT

The project requires students to demonstrate what they have learnt by creating a product that is presented or offered to people beyond the classroom by twitter and their own blog in which they will post everything.

Here, I leave a brief summary with some screenshots and the most important aspects of each section, which has been created with www.genial.ly/es

FINAL SELF- REFELCTION 

To finish with this post, I will say that this project is very complete and a fun way of learning. In this project we have seen, individual work, collaborative pair work and group work. Many things can be worked, such as: grammar, prepositions, comparisons, adjectives, vocabulary about cities, digital skills, English skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking) and two important points: autonomy and cooperation.

With this learning by projects I think students will also be more motivated and they will learn a lot.

For me, analyzing this educational project, has also opened my mind and has given me some ideas in order to create a lesson plan based on projects, working in many aspects and with a cross- curricular lesson, such as in this case: learning English skills through a content of Social Science (maps).

Regarding www.genial.ly/es, I think it is a very useful tool for creating fun and innovative presentations. As it is not too difficult, students also can practice with this tool and they will have a great time, for sure!

As I have said at the beginning, I think that the learning process can be carried out in many different ways, not always the traditional and boring learning with books. So let´s let our students to do different things!

I hope you like it, and see you soon with another interesting post!!!