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 :)

PREPARING A LESSON PLAN

MY HISTORY LESSON PLAN

Hello everybody!

In this task we had to make a lesson plan

On this post I would like to share with you my e-project draft which is called “Becoming Romans Journalists”. The objective of our task, was to develop a lesson plan using ICT tools.

To organize my draft, I have followed the template that our teacher gave us. In my opinion, using this sort of charts are really useful as they allow you to follow the steps and to structured it in a very visual way.

Here you have the link to my e-project document:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tg30JvI0iXS6-h5n8jw_EF-JoIq5Oi2DXe0RtSw8LRU/edit?usp=sharing

As you can see, the topic of my project is “The Roman Empire in the Iberian Peninsula” which, according to the curriculum, had to be carried out in 4^th grade thorugh Social Sciences subject.

As a general rule, when I am asked to prepare these kind of tasks, I’m used to create Natural Science programs because I think I’m better explaining this subject. But in this case I want to prove myself and demonstrate that History can also be developed in an amusing way.

Other reason for me to prepare this project is that I have realized during my traineeship that teachers do not give enough importance to History topics. In my opinion, through these project students will understand lot of interesting concepts and contents of this period and I will encourage their enjoyment of history.

To make this task more engaging, I have prepared a short video in which I intend to catch students attention. I used the same tool as in my 3,2,1 Introduction because I really like the final product and I get used to it. The tool is called Powtoon and I hardly recommend you since it is really easy to use and allows you to work with a wide range of possibilities. You can use this tool in informal presentations as well as in formal ones, being original in the tool selected.

As I said before, my idea was to create an original and dynamic video so that you can see the main aspects of my project, trying not to write so much information as the whole lesson plan is in the other document. The purpose of it was to prepare a presentation of the project that engage people.

Here is the link to my e-project video:

https://www.powtoon.com/online-presentation/dgtK4VfmdvN/ana-fuerte-e-project/?mode=movie#/

Hope you like it!

Ana.

THUMBS UP OR DOWN?

Hello teachers!

Here I am writing one more post that you might find interesting.

As you know, in our Masters’ we are supposed to work in different “missions” related to ICT, but in this case, we were asked to assess an e-project carried out by one of our last year classmates.

In this task I have evaluated the following e-project:

http://cristinafp.weebly.com

The e-project is about “Landscapes” and it’s really interesting how the author uses many tools to develop the topic. The main reason I chose it is because, at first sight, the topic looks too simple for developing an ICT project but I find quite interesting the way of carried it out.

At first, evaluating a project seems quite easy, but you have to pay attention to many details and to be analytic enough, that’s the reason why we use different rubrics to know which aspects should we bear in mind (if you want to know which rubrics I used please click here and here).

Once I had evaluated the project I had to make an online presentation to show my conclusions. I utilized a free online tool called https://www.genial.ly/Dashboard I had never used this website before and I really like it since it allows you to add plenty of resources such as links, pictures, slideshows and lot of contemporary templates.

The tool I have used is called Genial.ly

Moreover, this tool provides you their own pictures and images that you can add in your presentations. Using this resource, it’s not necessary to look for pictures on the internet and as a consequence, the license.

Initially, it is quite complicated to get used of managing the tool, above all adjusting the time you want every element to appear.

As I see it, evaluating an e-project helps you in the development of your own work. You can be aware of the improvements you can add, the organization, take some ideas… and pay attention to strengths and weaknesses of projects. Besides you can improve your critical thinking.

In conclusion, although this web is less intuitive than others (like Power Point) is more complete, different and catchy so I won’t doubt in apply it as a part of my classes and also in my academic life.

Here you have my assessment in case you want to have a look:

http://www.genial.ly/View/Index/56ddaa0f1561e80814c34e24 

Thanks for visiting me and do not hesitate to add your comments and suggestions!

Ana.