3x1 Review

Hello everybody!!

This post is going to be the last one about my ICT module! Our Master's Degree is about to finish!

The purpose of this post is to reflect about all the chanllenges or post that I wrote as well as writing a 3x1 review: a review about the module telling 3 things that I liked and 1 thing that can be improved.

So, let's get the ball rolling!

1. I really like interviewing my classmate and friend Ana Herrera because we are friends but we learnt new things from each other. As well as that, I enjoy editing videos so I really like this challenge.

2. I found hilarious to do the super learning missions with my classmates Ana Márquez and Lucía Carrasco. We dressed up like Hindu and shooted a funny video. I was amazed when I learnt how to embed pictures into the background of our video.

3. Finally, doing the rubrics was a challenge so necessary for us. Rubrics are quite objective to evaluate students so it should be compulsory to use them. Besides, if teachers show their rubrics to the students, the evaluation will be completely fair.

I do not think that any challenge could be improved although I am of the opinion that planning two super learning missions was to much work. I loved doing them but we are so busy. If we had had more free time, I would have done more than two super learning missions, because they are worth. I like planning lessons. On the other hand, about the challenge of analyzing an OEP, in my opinion, the freedom to choose an OEP was crucial. However, as I did not know what an OEP was, I chose a project related to my topic but which was not an OEP. Sadly, the OEP that I analyzed was a simple didactic unit.

Well, that's all about my 3x1 review.

See you soon


and remember


BE CLEVER, BE GREENER

Author's own

Funny meme, isn't it? I made it using the tool Generador de Memes Online. The easiest tool that I have ever used! I strongly recommend it.

Moodle Mooc 10

Hello everybody!

My classmates and I attended an online conference called Moodle Mooc 10 (MM10) about Open Educational Digital Projects yesterday. We were the presenters and we spoke about our experiences. You might wonder what MM10 is, don't worry I did it too. MM10 is a series of online conferences that are taking place from May 1 to June 4 this year. They are intended to share knowledge, experiences, culture... among teachers from any country and, above all, to share reflection about our practice. 

Source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zMHab0y3cBItvZe89ahtY54XS6xwWuBUOV18ileAMlM/edit

This digital conference took place at WizIQ and it was called Open Educational Projects for CLIL Primary Education. 

Let me explain how we have taken part in this conference because it was not unprepared.

- 1st Our professor told us in advance that we will speak 5 minutes about our own learning process and experiences with ICT and Open Educational Projects.

- 2nd We designed our slideshow in order to speak those 5 minutes. To do that, we use Google Docs so my classmates and I could create an online presentation. 

There you go the final outcome:

Open educational digital projects for clil primary education from carmen olmedo

- 3rd Last week we attended an online class in order to rehearse our speech. We used the platform Moodle4Teachers, which is free and it offers online classes or conferences. We had to check if everybody could hear and see us properly. Besides, we could rehearse our speech which I found necessary because in that way we were conscious of everybody's opinion about our discourse (although doing it on the spot is fairly enough).

- 4th We had a long week to rehearse, rehearse and rehearse our speech, so I did so. 

- 5th The 4th of May (yesterday) we attended the final conference and we spoke about our projects, experiences, about the ICT module, and so forth.

Personally speaking, before beginning the conference, I was quite nervous, but when it began I was completely uptight. Our professor introduced us and I was the third person to speak about my Open Educational Project and experiences. I did my homework and I wrote a transcription about what I would say, just in case my mind would go blank. Here you go the transcription:

I uploaded it to Issuu, a website that I have mentioned and spoke about in previous posts. 

I rehearsed many times during days before the conference and I took some notes not to forget all the topics I wanted to speak about. I wanted to sound natural but I did not want to forget anything.

So my turn arrived and I felt so nervous, but I could tell everything that I had planned. While my classmates were speaking about their projects, the rest of us played the roll of commercial managers so we used our twitter accounts to share their learning diaries, twitter accounts, projects, etc. using the hashtags #ictclil_urjc and #moodlemooc10. You can follow our conversation clicking in the hashtags if you are interested. Sadly, not much people joined the conference but, even so, we are so proud to participate in such an online conference. It was our first time. 

Around 30 people were writing in the conference chat, adding to our classmates' speeches and the tweets, it was a bit high demanding and chaotic. I hope I had done a neat job because I tried to listen to my classmates, write tweets and read the chat almost at the same time. I turned into a super girl yesterday!

Here you go the outcome, my intervention is from the minute 19:30 to 26:25 in the next video:

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtSBDWzqPWw

REFLECTION ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

As I was saying, writing tweets, copying links, using hashtags, listening to our peers,  and reading the chat was such a hard work. If you are not used to do it, it might be complicated. Indeed, it was complicated for me. 

It is true that just my classmates and I (with our professor's help) could present and run a conference just speaking 5 minutes each one, although it seemed a bit long for some people. I found it interesting because each of us spoke about our projects which are really worth. We were working on our ICT module through Project Based Learning, thanks to that, we could do our projects in different ways, openly and freely. The result was a brilliant series of new projects which can be used by any teacher.

Once the conference finished, I felt elated to collaborate in an online conference for the first time. People from Canada, Australia, or India joined us. We felt a high pressure because everybody (I said everybody) could hear and see us. 

I was really uptight about speaking and participating in that conference. Then, my professor said to me "All yours" and I felt the loneliness of speaking and looking at the camera of my laptop, which was specially weird (it was like self talk). It was strange because I did not hear and see anybody (normally when you give a speech there is always some noise and you look at somebody). In this case, it was just the webcam of my laptop and me. 

Now I realized that I liked the experienced and being part of such a wonderful conference of pre-service teachers. Perhaps some people were not interested in us since we are students and we are not working but we spent more time thinking about our activities. Indeed, we offer fresh  and new ideas. 

So, all in all, we not only collaborated in the conference but also learnt how to held an online conference.

I just hope that many teachers will watch our conference because we created really innovative projects in which we spent many hours. I feel the necessity of telling several teachers the many things that I learnt during my ICT module. 

Maybe my speech was not as I imagined it but I tried to do my best.

On the other hand, I must say that online conferences are the best thing since slide bread because everybody can attend them and they are absolutely free. The weak point of them is that they seem slower than face-to-face conferences: we had some problems with microphones, webcams, Internet connection, and so on (although we had prepared it in advance). 

Eventually, I need to say that it was a pity that some of my classmates could not deliver their speeches. However, I visited their blogs and checked their fantastic projects.


REFLECTION ABOUT THE ICT MODULE

Thinking deeper and deeper about the whole ICT module (its challenges, its posts, its tweets...), at last I learnt many many things, thanks to my work and effort partly - I did not learnt anything in my ICT module during my degree. I have learnt many tools that I can use and that my future students will be able to use. Above all, I have learnt that there are further teaching methods than reading the textbook or doing PowerPoints on the computer. I learnt that PBL is the key as well as ICT and English all together. 

It must be admitted that we all worked so hard in order to complete all the challenges that our professor planned for us. It may seem easy, but there are many hours behind these posts. After finishing each challenge we felt really happy because we felt that we had done a really good job in which we were spending much time ("The challenges are time-consuming" said our professor, and they completely are). 

I really like being assessed through rubrics because they are the most objective way of assessment that I know. Apart from that, if students know the evaluation criteria they know how to act and what to do (what is expected from them). 

Last year, I did not use any social networks apart from Facebook and now I am completely addicted to them. This was part of my fears about social networks because I have more issues to do. 

The challenges in which we collaborated with our classmates were hilarious and quite fun. The ones that I love are the flipped introduction and the super learning missions since I like shooting and editing videos. I am always ready to shoot a funny video. 

As I enjoy photos, taking pictures and visual artifacts, I loved learning new tools to create posters and slideshows different from PowerPoint and Word. 

I am amazed about the idea that there are many teachers on the Internet sharing their fresh ideas and trying to change the education system right now. I was not conscious about that. 

I did not know what an open educational project was and now not only I completely comprehend it but also I created one. I reckon that my project needs many improvements, changes and being continuously working on it, but I achieved it. There is no better feeling than feeling proud of oneself (self-pride!).

As I mentioned in the conference, we would like to change the current situation at schools since teachers and learners are using computers as ten years ago. To do that, computers, tablets and technological gadgets will be necessary in every classroom. Children were born in the digital age but there is no digital gadget at schools. I mean, it may be an overstatement but there is only a computer room in each school. Perhaps, as one of my ICT professors, we take for granted that children know how to manage the ICT tools better than us, but that statement is completely wrong. We must educate it and teach how to use the Internet properly. This idea is even more important than showing them many websites or tools (Ciberbullying is a serious issues these days). 

I must say that this module was quite hard and we really deserve the 6 ECTS of the module. I would say that 12 ECTS for the module would be great (I was just joking!). However, I really like doing open challenges in which each one could choose a different topic, an issue that we really like. The outcome was useful and we will be able to use the ideas of any of us because we are sharing them with everybody. PBL is great and is the best way to learn if we want to give freedom to children while they are learning. PBL is the best way to do it as my classmate Raul claimed in MM10.

Finally, during this ICT module, I wrote several posts in English, so I consider that I wrote in English more than ever! Yet, it was a good practice to improve my writing. 

Well, that's all about my reflections.

See you in my next post ;)

BE CLEVER, BE GREENER! 

Designing an assessment rubric

Hi everyone!

Have you ever created a rubric? I hope so, because nowadays rubrics are so trendy in education. It is true that they seem innovative but actually they were used some years ago. As far as I am concerned, rubrics are so useful to assess students. During my internship period, I just used simple assessment criteria, but I realized that it is not an accurate method. Rubrics are an accurate way to evaluate learners as well as a good option to save time when assessing students.

How can we do a rubric? Well, we must include these elements:

what to include in a rubric de Carmen Olmedo

I created this poster using Canva, because as I told you in previous post, it is a pretty good web site to do posters and online presentation. They look great in your blog entries.

Before creating the rubric, I did a mind map to have a clear idea about my Open Educational Project and its respective learning missions. I used the tool MindMeister because not only it is an easy web site to create mind maps, but also because I want my students to use it and create artifacts in their learning missions. I had to use it to see how it works before telling learners to go there. 

There you go the mind map which summarize my OEP (you can place the mouse pointer in the mind map to scroll down/up/right/left and read all its elements):

Class Blog about learning process, experiences, likes, and dislike. by Carmen Olmedo

Back to my concern, I planned a rubric to assess my students and based on my Open Educational Project. The rubric is quite general since I want to use it for any of the learning missions that I planned. Taking into account this, I will follow the next rubric to evaluate the different tasks and I will modify it if it is necessary for a specific task. If I need to modify the rubric, I will add a short sentence in each criteria but I do not modify the criteria I wrote at all. Hence, I used the tool Quick Rubric since I can change my rubric whenever I need it. 

Rubric to assess 21th students about PBL from carmen olmedo

I have embedded the rubric in my blog but you can click here and zoom it in. This time I used SlideShare to upload the document because I like the way in which it appears in my entry: the embedded artifact is bigger than using other tools.

As it can be seen, I have included five main elements to assess my students:

• Group work and individual work.
• Vocabulary and grammar.
• Thinking skills.
• Content knowledge.
• Final outcome.
• 
  

I am of the opinion that these five elements are crucial to assess learners and I will explain why:

I consider vital to take into account the group work as well as the individual work, although the final outcomes will be group task. Some students are good at working by themselves while others are good at collaborating in a group, but nowadays both facts are essential. In this way, each student will be assessed fairly.

Content is always vital and necessary to be assessed, since students have to learn some facts, competences and skills. Nonetheless, it is significant not only the content but also the mechanics or the accuracy with which they will transmit that content. In CLIL subjects, content and language are equally important. 

This content knowledge and vocabulary might be based on remembering and understanding, so Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) will be taken into account. I will assess some thinking skills related to creativity, analysis and evaluation. These days, these High Order Thinking Skills are not developed well at school but they are even more important than recalling and repeating. 

Finally, I will evaluate their final outcome because it will reflect their learning process and effort. The task, that is submitted, must always be assessed.

Apart from that, I would like my students to be self-assessed following the next rubric that I will provide them:

Students rubric from carmen olmedo

I do not want to just take into consideration my observation but also students' perception of their own learning. Besides, it is a way of developing evaluation and they will be conscious about their learning and aptitude. 

REFLECTION

I realized that creating rubrics is quite hard work, although it is true that teachers save time using them to assess students. In our ICT module, our professor uses rubrics to assess us and, what it more, we have access to that information, what I find crucial and handy. If I know what criteria the teacher uses, I know what is expected from me and I will base my actions on that. I believe our professor expend many hours planning those rubrics full of details. 

Doing this rubric was not as easy as I thought because it is necessary to bear in mind your Open Educational Project and your learning missions clearly. I had to have a clear idea about it to establish my specific criteria. 

In my humble opinion, one has to do several rubrics to create good ones as those that we could read in our ICT module. Furthermore, it can be necessary to carry out the learning mission to know clearly how to assess our students.

I decided to use a scale from 0 to 3 in order to be more accurate since I found quite simple to use a minor scale. The more criteria we plan, the more accurate we will be assessing students. 

I felt so happy to use the tool Quick Rubric because at last we could download an artifact with no watermark and freely. However, this web site does not offer possibility to embed the rubric or a link to share it with people. 

To sum up, this time I learnt how to use new tools such as Quick Rubric (which I highly recommend for teachers), SlideShare, and MindMesiter. I consider I kept working hard one more time. Besides, I changed my mind: this challenge changed my way of assess ing students, now I will use rubrics. 

Well, that's all for this post.

Hope you like my artifacts, see you soon and remember:

BE CLEVER, BE GREENER!