The power of music and songs in the classroom!

Hi everyone!
Today I just wanted to speak about music but why is it important?
The role of music and the arts in child development have  many benefits in children, some of them are:

• General cognitive development.
• Language development, reading-readiness and reading: listening to music can faicilitate learning to read, probably by increasing children's awareness of speech sounds.
• Improve pronunciation, phonic awareness, intonation, rhythm, etc.
• Facility for recall and retention.
• Verbal abilities: Learn new words and ideas.
• Abstract conceptual thinking and reasoning: creativity and originality, play improvisation.
• Motor development and coordination.
• Positive attitudes toward school.
• Improve personal and social adjustment.
• Stress reduction.
• Release energy and channel it in creative, productive directions.
• Gain confidence in themselves as they realize they can use mind and body together. Children learn that, with practice, their bodies will do almost anything they want to do-even leap across a room or tun cartwheels in time to music. 

Music and CLIL

One step further would be to consider the importance of music and CLIL. It's important to seek integration with other subjects when possible; in our reality, this means, Knowledge and Understanding of the world, Literacy, Art and some other subjects like PE or Geography and History.

Vocabulary helpful to singing songs:

- Dynamics, e.g. loud, quiet, guetting louder, getting quieter.

- Tempo, e.g. fast, slow, getting faster, getting slower.

- Pitch, e.g. high, low, getting higher, getting lower.

- Timbre, e.g. descriptive words such as: light, heavy, bright, dull, cold, warm.

- Structure, e.g. beginning, middle, end.

Music and Science
Songs in Science is a very helpful tool which must never be understimated. Concepts in Science when put into a song teach the children to memorise and approach what may be a difficult concept in a non-threatening way. Look at one example:

Water cycle song

 

Water travels in a cycle, yes it does!
             (make circles with your arm, then a
      thumb's up)
Water travels in a cycle, yes it does!
It goes up for evaporation  (raise hands above         your head)

Forms clouds for condensation (make a circle with your arms above your           head)

Then comes down in precipitation, yes it does!(use fingers to imitate rainfall)

Water travels in a cycle, yes it does!
Water travels in a cycle, yes it does!
Water goes for collection (make a circle in front of you)

To rivers, lakes, seas and oceans (ask children what gesture they would use        for each)

From plants and trees are transpiration (make like a tree and then make            fingers gesture rainfall towards the sky)

Yes it does!

Very important before teaching a song:

- Set your objectives.

- Look for cross-curricular links.

- Analyse vocabulary.

- Master the melody.

- Be clear with the TPR.

- Be enthusiastic! Your energy level is contagious!

- Think of variations to singing it (changing volume, tempo, pitch, feeling, word substitution, guessing the word by actions...)

- Have fun!

In short, if you want to engage your students in a CLIL classroom, music is an amazing way of getting it!
I hope you like it and find it useful. Feel free to use it if you believe it is going to be helpful for you and don't forget to leave me a comment! I'll be pleased to hear your opinions.

My learning journey throughout the ICT course! In five words: Stay connected to stay inspired!!

Hello everyone!!

 Today, I just wanted to tell you that this is the final post related to the ICT CLIL subject that my peers and I have been enjoying during the Masters degree at Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid. This brief but intensive period has been very valuable for us for many reasons, for example we've discovered amazing ways of enhacing learning! All of them have been by trial and error -a very positive aspect that doesn't happen every day-.

This fantastic and worthy experience wouldn't have been possible without my peers and my mentor @mjsm. I've learnt much more than I expected at the beginning and in a very engaging way so thank you very much!! Although the process has been hard in specific moments and a bit stressful, I am proud of it because I have been able to achieve almost all the challenges in time and I think that my final products have improved along the course at the same time that my learning skills, so in the end it has been an enriching experience in which there have been more positive things than negative ones.

Here you can see a presentation about my learning progress using the ICT: Click here!

To create that presentation I have used Capzles. It is a nice free online tool which allows you to create very visual presentations using a timeline template. As it is an online tool, we need to “log in” (as we have been doing in previous challenges with other tools). After that, we are more than ready to create presentations!

With Capzles it is possible to include our own materials: pictures, videos, music, podcasts and so on. Thanks to that, you can personalise your presentations according to your needs.

Thanks for reading me and see you soon!!

Augment world book day

After completing some group challenges, we came back to work individually. The new challenge @mjgsm had prepared for us was related to the Book Day, which is the 23th of April. Because of this event, we were requested to created an aura. I want to say that this is the first time I try Aurasma and I think it's fantastic! With this challenge I have realised that we can celebrate the book day at school in a very fun way thanks to this app. The students are going to be more motivated with the aumentaty reality as it differs from traditional ways of celebrating this day such as making bookmarks or other boring things.

First, I will explain what Aurasma is. Aurasma is a HP Autonomy's augmented reality platform that can deliver any content (videos, audio, pictures, animations...) in real time. The final artifact is called ''aura''. If you want to learn how to use Aurasma step by step, you can read this interesting and detailed post of one of my classmates with an explanatory slideshow: 

Check here

Once I had everything prepared I entered in Aurasma Studio to create my aura. It is increadibly easy to use since all the steps are clearly explained in the website and it is very intuitive. However, if you have any problem, you can see the steps in the blog's link I put above or watch this tutorial (also created by my peers):

So, first I had to decide what kind of content I wanted to upload: a videoclip or an audio track. I chose the videoclip because I wanted to do it more varied by adding different images. I recorded my voice with my mobile phone and created the video with Camtasia, a tool used in the previous challenge.

Then, I had to choose an image for my aura. At the begining it was going to be the cover of my favourite book, "The little prince" by Antoine de Saint Exupery. However, after giving it a thought, I decided to choose an image that cought the audience's attention.

If you feel curious about my reading experience, you can follow me on Aurasma app: GMEstrellaa and then, scan this image to find what is behind:

I also pin my aura on the Pinterest board A Wall of Books. There you will find also more auras created by my fantastic peers.

I hope you find it interesting!!

My e-project rubric

Hello everyone!
Today I'm going to talk about the assessment of my e-project that is explained in the previous post.

This project is designed to be assessed following this pattern:

• The Teacher will evaluate the challenge (Comic) and the search of information. It will be 40% of the final score.

• The partners will carry out peer assessment on the blog and grade about how their teamwork has worked. It will be 20% of the final score . The students can generate the different criteria or items to be assessed.

• Students will self-assess the final task using the rubric. It will be 20% of the final score.

The final score will also include a 20% for the teacher to evaluate how the students have been involved in the project or tackled the different activities.

Both teachers and students are suggested to use the available rubric to assess both the process and the outcomes.

When assessing, we need to consider four basic principles: Why, What, When and How to evaluate?

Why? We evaluate both the students and our teaching to detect the successes and the deficiencies to address the problems before they become serious.

What? We assess the teaching-learning process as well. The teacher can modify the planning as needed in order to maximise the results and the learners can use critical thinking to reflect on what they have achieved.

How? Through daily observation in class such as group projects, pair work and individual work and exams, surveys and interviews the teacher and the students will get feedback.

               Assessment is an integral part of the learning process and a very useful tool when it provides positive reinforcement. Not only does it provide information about the student’s progress, but also with significant data about the effectiveness of our didactic planning. This reflection will allow us to make changes in its design for the next year.

            Assessment will be a continuous process that will be undertaken throughout the whole learning process, and will include factors such as general progress, effort, attitude towards learning. Besides, we will deal with summative assessment and formative assessment and the “Can do” statements will be used to describe the assessment criteria for both summative and formative assessment. It is essential that we assess the 21st century' skills.

To see the rubric I've created you can click on this link Project: Save our planet!. 

To create that rubric I've used QuickRubric that is an online tool that allows you to create rubrics easily.  Once you are logged in, you have to click on "Create a rubric" (orange square in th image below). Then you can start filling the information: a tittle, a description, different criterias or topics you want to assess and the scale of rating you want to use.

Here you have a screenshot of a blank Quick Rubric:

You can simply add a new criteria/topic clicking on "add row" (green) and also a new scale of rating clicking on "add column" (red). Then, if you click on Score, you can change the maximum and the minimun score when rating. You can also click on "No score" in case you do not want to add a cuantitative rating.

Once you are happy with your result you can click on the green box at the bottom of the page to "Save Rubric". Then, when you have saved your rubric, you will have new options at the bottom of the page.

- Click on View/Print Rubric (yellow) if you want to print your rubric or if you want to share it online, because by clicking here you will obtain a public URL to your rubric.
- Click on Copy Rubric if you want to duplicate your rubric.
- Click on Delete Rubric if you are not happy with the result and you want to delete your rubric.

From my point of view, this tool allows you to easily create a rubric by only filling a present template, which you can adapt to your own needs. However, there are some things that I did not liked it about the app. The first one is that you cannot obtain an embedded code to share it in a more visual way. Also, it would be great if the web could provide you with a share button to directly share it on twitter, facebook or wherever you want. 

In any case, I think it is a very useful tool that can save a lot of time too.

I hope you find this post interesting!

Piktochart slideshow

Hello again!

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

I have worked with the same group as in the two challenges before. In case you don´t remember, they are:  @celiagon92,  @gonzaalo10, @lainez_ortega  and @cristinarisueno.

For this new task, we have decided to make a tutorial about how to use Piktochart in order to help our students to take advantage of it. We are not going to extend more talking about Piktochart because you can see all its details in the tutorial. However, we have to say that we have chosen Piktochart since we claim that our children might be able to create their own infographic and we have used it before successfully. 

First of all, we screencasted our computer screen while we were recording orally step by step the process to use Piktochart. We think that, in this way 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. 

However, a disadvantage that we have found is that aTubeCatcher doesn´t allow us to edit videos. For this reason, we used the program Movie Maker and we also added a final image with our Twitter handles in order to give the viewers the possibility to contact us with their doubts and questions.

You can see the tutorial here:

Our video challenge with Tic!

Good morning!

This time, for this group task, we had to become both writers and film directors! We were requested to create a clip about our common e-project but, first of all, we had to plan what it would be about. Therefore we started to create a storyboard with our main ideas. As our topics were about the Earth we decided to create a character based on the universe. 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 is called TIC?

To create our storyboard we chose the web tool Storyboard That. Since the moment we started to use this tool, we were surprised how amazing the pictures were: backgrounds, characters and different shapes, which allow you to create exactly what you want. What we liked the most was the possibility of modifying the position of the main character, which makes the story more real.

However, while using the tool, we discovered that a normal account doesn’t allow you to create a board with more than six scenes. This is why we had to shorten the story. It was not a problem because the final clip will include the whole story.This storyboard is a guideline for the video challenge and it is meant to be a tale the teacher could tell their students at class.

Here you have our storyboard! Are you ready to meet TIC?

Made with Storyboard That

From the storyboard, we brought TIC to live! First, if you want to film a movie you need to write a script so we became writers! Our clip was divided into eleven scenes in which our alien would travel through the Solar System to discover the magic planet. TIC was dying to find it out!

Second, we started to film the scenes, but… We needed an actor! Gonzalo @gonzaalo10 became TIC thanks to our make-up team! Look at the awesome result!

Then, we were ready to record the video challenge. For this purpose we use decided to use the chroma key technique. By using Camtasia and this technique, we could substitute the green background for a picture of our choice. Regarding Camtasia, it seems quite difficult to use at rhe very beginning. However, after practicing with it for a while we discovered all its possibilities. We downloaded the free version with a free trial for 30 days. Thanks to Camtasia, we have learned how to use chroma key and how to organize the video clips, the pictures and the audios in order to get the final video. The only problem we didn´t like about this tool was 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. Hope you enjoy it!

A live CLIL chocotalk

Hello again!

  On the 7th of April, at 19:00h Spanish time, some of my peers went live on Youtube to carry out one of our group task for the present e-project. This task consisted of participating in a collaborative project called #chococharlas. This project fosters the participation, opinion and inclusion of the entire educative community by organizing online meetings on Youtube or similar video platforms. In these meeting, people discuss topics related to inclusive education, special needs, new methodologies and so forth while eating sweets.

  The first thing we had to do was assigning roles. One of us would be the speaker (the one who will talk in the live debate), other two members would be the ones in charge of disseminating and commenting the event in the social networks before and during the live, and the other two people would be the content curators, what is to say the ones who collect all that happened during this activity.

 The roles in my group were the following: 

- @celiagon92 was the speaker. 

- @lainez_ortega and @cristinarisueno were the ones who disseminate the information.

- Finally, @gonzaalo10 and I (@GMEstrellaa)  were the content curators.

  Secondly, in order to prepare this task, each work group had to think of how CLIL can contribute to having happier bilingual learners.

  The speakers of each group were: 
@rpeinadog,  @patimasie, @nepeuspu, @lolaberralraya, @Alvaro_Gope,@teacher_inma, @GLHmaster and @celiagon92.
  They met on Google Hangouts, along with @mjgsm two hours earlier before the event to prepare the live. They went live at 19:00 pm and the chocotalk started. They talked about four main topics regarding CLIL methodology: 

1. Advantages and disadvantages of CLIL: the main conclusions were the need of working cross-curricularly, despite the difficulty of it (specially in Secondary Education) and the possibility of solving this problem by working with projects in collaboration with the entire educative community.
2. Social and emotional benefits of CLIL: Patricia remarked the importance of Krashen Theory based on language acquisition, that establishes the need of motivating students to learn. Besides, emotional intelligence plays and important role in education since we, as teachers, are working with humans, as Rubén highlighted.
3. ICT in the CLIL classroom: they talked about some tools that can be used in the classroom, including video games. However, the main conclusion was that the most important aspects of ICT are the purpose they are used for and the students' learning process rather than the tools. Moreover, Inma added that using ICT is not time consuming but just the opposite.
4. The last topic was relating to our e-projects: we described briefly each project in order to give ideas and examples of how ICT could be incorporate in the CLIL classroom. 

  While the speakers were debating, our peers were disseminating the event on Twitter, sharing our comments and conclusions and giving their opinions. You can see a summary of our tweets and the entire process made with Storify here: https://storify.com/GMEstrellaa/the-chocotalk-event