HOW DOES IT WORK? I'M GOING TO SHOW YOU :)

Hello everyone!

How many times have I said “I recommend you this tool because it is really easy to use, it is original, it is perfect for student...” and so on? But I’m sure that, even for the easiest tool in the world, you have spent time discovering how it works and to be honest, when you find it out you are like...

So imagine how difficult can be for students. 

We can’t forget that some of the activities we carried out during this project, are going to be developed by children as well. For that reason, it is essential for them to have a knowledge of the tool’s functioning. And why don’t use a tool to explain how other tool works? Remember that this is the ICT blog so… LET’S GO!  

In this new task, the History Group (Rubén, Nieves, Gabi, Laura, Salva and me) had to face the challenge of explaining students how to use an online tool. We decided that it was a good idea to create a slideshow in order to teach how to create their own comic with an advanced tool: Pixton. Our peer Rubén used it in other challenge and he thought that the tool provides a wide range of possibilities and that it would be interesting to show pupils how it works so as to take the most of it.

Thinking of explaining our students in a brief, clear and easy way how to use Pixton, we picked Google Slides to do it. As a result, we have created a slide show with all the main different steps to create properly a comic.

We chose Google Slide to create our slideshow because it is an easy tool really similar to Power Point that we all manage perfectly; and also because it let us work together being each one on its own home. So that, we saved time and we could work coordinated as a perfect team.

The structure of the slideshow follows the correct order of the different steps to use Pixton. It starts showing how to sign up and create a new account and finishes showing how to complete a comic. To make it more visual, we did screenshots of the different steps and emphasized it with red arrows and squares. The unique problem we had struggled with has been precisely emphasizing those buttons or elements essential to use Pixton. Google Slides does not allow you to create a red line square; you can just create a filled square. So that, you must create each read line independently and it is difficult to make them perfectly straight.

In spite of this fact, Google Slides is a great tool in order to teamwork online and create any sort of presentation. In the same way, Pixton is and incredible tool for students to create any story and also represent a specific historical period.

When we finished the slideshow, our teacher suggested us to make the challenge more complete by adding our own voice to explain it, it would be more attractive for students as well as more clear. Finally, we decided to use Movenote to add Laura’s voice.

This tool was really easy to use and perfect to satisfy our necessities, since it allows us to add the voice in each slide so that the sound and the picture are perfectly coordinated. When we saw the final outcome we realized that adding the voice was a great idea since it changed the work for the better.

Here you can check our slideshow (and you can check it also here)

3,2,1 ACTION!

Hi there :)

Here I am once again to explain you our new ICT challenge: create a storyboard and a video related to our e-project. We had to take into account that the idea reflected in the storyboard had to be recorded in a video. Consequently, we had to thoroughly plan our idea.

After considering different possibilities, such as describing a character’s life or a major event, we all agree that it would be interesting use the storyboard as an explanation for students who will create a similar one.

The tool we used

Following that premise, the storyboard and the video were intended to be a challenge for students, since they have to create their own comic according to a period of time. We thought that it would be a good idea to introduce the challenge through the resource they are going to use and, in order to help them, we have included some scenes about different periods. So, by reading a comic, they will learn how to do it.

To make our video planning we used Storyboard, 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. On it, we found sketches of places, characters and different types of accessories you can use to decorate your scenes.

Our costumes!

As you can see, our story is about some different periods of History, so we needed to use very diverse landscapes and characters in order to represent them. During the process we found loads of options to create our comic, even finding inspiring ideas within the tool to carry it out. Although we thought it would be difficult to find all the tools we required, it was easier than we expected.

Besides, creating and decorating the sketches and the characters was also 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.

The main drawback we found was that the use of more than six vignettes implied paying, so that our work was restricted. We had to cut back the story in order to make it shorter and use only those six vignettes, so we couldn’t include many details we’d liked to. It would have been really nice to be able to do it just as we had prepared it.

Apart from that, a little detail that was an obstacle too, was the fact that the characters have only two positions (standing and sitting), and sometimes we couldn’t represent the scene exactly as we’d thought.

Here you have the result:

StoryboardThat

Once we had our storyboard ready, it was time to record the video. It wasn’t easy because we used different backgrounds and characters from other periods so we needed many costumes and a wide range of resources. Our classmate Salva, provided us with many costumes that we utilized to pretend to be the characters: Egyptians’ clothes, a fool’s cap, a sword and a top hat… it was just perfect!

The most difficult point was to create a background which represented certain period. For it, we tried to use a green fabric in order to use it as a chrome key and then we will add the appropriate background.

A picture from the video

We record all our scenes during the class but, when we tried to edit the video, a problem arose: the light wasn’t good enough to insert an image as background.

At the very beginning, we tried the programm Sony Vegas but it doesn't work in Laura’s computer, so we decided to download a free trial version of Adobe Premier cc, which is a professional video editor difficult to use and understand. We had to saw many tutorials till we found out how to use it and how to apply a croma effect. Then, we realized that the light in the videos recorded was not uniform so neither the green colour on the chroma key. This can give you a lot of problems when you are editing because you need the green color to be uniform and with now shadows.  In that point we thought that we would have to record the video again with a better light and being more careful. Of course, this had occurred because we are not experts and it was the first time we used a chroma key as well as the video editor. 

We have a lot of fun recording the video!

Then, we tried to find a solution in order to not record again and our peer Laura found a colour effect which eliminates all the green colour in the video, maintaining red and blue colours. This technique worked because it eliminated all the green background, however it also removed the green in our faces so that our faces may appear more red than really are.  Nevertheless, we decided to maintain the work because it was not a big problem. As a practical matter: if you are going to use a chroma key in your videos, take into account these aspects. 

Then, with the video finished, we used iMovie to add music and some effects easily.

Although we had to face some technical problems, the experience was worthy. We had a great time together while dressing up, recording again and again a sequence and pretending to be actors and actresses. 

The final outcome is in this YouTube link, but you can also see it below. Hope you like our team work! And remember, if you see us a little orange or red it is because of our chroma key!

CHOCOLATE AND A GOOD TALK... WHAT ELSE?

Hello everybody! ;) 

I want to show you the work that my classmate and friend Gabriela Márquez and I did after the "Choco-talk" challenge! This challenge was promoted by
http://tertuliasconsaborachocolate.blogspot.com.es and the aim was to carry out a live conference between classmates in which we talked about CLIL and other different aspects.
In this case, Gabriela and I played the role of content-curators, in other words, the responsible to write and gather all the information that was given during the conference.  

Before starting the live chocotalk, we decided to utilize "Storify" as the online tool to develop our comments and description. This tool works as an usual blog but the difference lies in that you can upload tweets, YouTube videos, links, images from the own page.
As as result, we were given a new badge:

The final outcome was great and allows us to remember the main topics, comments, tweets and pictures of the talk. So... without further ado... our blog about the Chocotalk!

Hope you enjoy it and know more about our experience!

Ana.

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 :)