ALONE, WE CAN DO SO LITTLE. TOGETHER, WE CAN DO SO MUCH

The initial contact between the History Team

Hello everybody! 

I hope you have rested during your holidays, but now, it is time for us to go back to work and show you our new challenges!

Picture from metro.co.uk

In this new challenge, we were arranged in groups according to our e-project topic. As you can remember, in the previous post I told you that my project was about the Roman Empire. Not surprisingly, my group’s topic was HISTORY and it was composed by Laura, Gabriela, Salvador, Xhua Mei and an expert on the area, Rubén, who has studied History.

The aim of this challenge was to create an infographic, in other words, a sort of online poster. So my peers and I had to think about how to reflect a history aspect so that it could be useful for all group members' e-projects.

Picture from ilovehistory.utah.gov 

But although the infographic seemed to be the challenge of this task, we had to face another one: work together, cooperate and make the most in order to create a great result with people that had previously not worked together.  Because of that, we decided to spend an hour explaining our own e-project and commenting possible ideas for the infographic so that all of us set out this views. Finally, we reach an agreement: a timeline it is an essential aspect for studying history because it helps students to learn in a visual way as well as promotes the students' critical thinking since they have to select the information. Finally, we decided that would be a good idea to use the infographic in order to teach students how to make their own timeline.

Once we knew what we want to do, we started to make a draft explaining the points we intended to highlight in the poster and we concluded that they had to be explanatory enough for students but clear and precise. After knowing what we wanted to reflect in our infographic, the next step was to decide the tool we wanted to use.

At the beginning, we chose Canvas as the online tool to develop our work, but we realized that it wasn’t adequate to our necessities since many of the resources it offers need a premium account. Before that, our peer Laura told us that she had used the tool Piktochart for other challenges and we decided to use it.

Piktochart, our tool choice

I haven't used this tool before this challenge and I have to say that it was really easy to use and the majority of the resources were for free which gave us plenty of opportunities and possibilities: the background, images, the size of the infographic. It was perfect for our idea. Besides of that, our peer knew how to use it which facilitated our work.

Then we had to think how we wanted to express these ideas, the design.

We all agree that we wanted to create something amused enough for students, in order to engage them in the subject and promote their motivation, that is why decided to design it with the inspiration of Mario Bros videogame due to the fact that it will make the information visual and funny for children. The most difficult point of the design was to find public domain pictures related to Super Mario, but finally we were lucky to find a webpage in which all the pictures could be used in our challenge.

Having this in mind, we finished our work and sent it to Infographics nationwide collaborative blog to take part in this project. 
They gave us an award for this cooperative work and talk of us in their blog:

If you want to see our result… click here!
Hope you like it!
Ana :)