Open Educational Project

Hello everybody!!!

Last week we were working in a challenge about evaluating an open educational project. We have to follow the next requirements to analyze it in depth:

         Source: "Essential Project Design Elements Checklist" from Buck Institute for Education.

We could choose among three open education projects which were:

- EDIA CLIL projects: http://cedec.ite.educacion.es/es/rea-ingles

- CLIL Teaching Projects:  https://clilingmesoftly.wordpress.com/clil-projects/

- REA For CLIL - INTEF: http://reaaicleintef.blogspot.com.es/

I chose the last since I saw it was a blogspot similar to mine but with a different purpose. It caught my attention because every project was organized with respect to subjects or topics, which I found easy.

Once chosen the web page, I definitely looked for one project related to taking care of the Earth. Consequently, I found one about means of transport and pollution. I though it was the perfect topic to my blog!

This project called "Transport and pollution" was created by Teresa Guzmán and it is a complete didactic unit about means of transport with all the resources available in GoogleDrive.

       Source: http://reaaicleintef.blogspot.com.es/

Here you go the project: http://reaaicleintef.blogspot.com.es/2014/06/teresa-guzman-proyecto-final.html

Analyzing the project, I noticed some good ideas and bad ones.

- To star with, about the key knowledge, understanding, and success skills, I could see that the topic is included in the Spanish curriculum and the didactic unit includes thinking skills (in activities such as elaborating a conceptual map). Furthermore, pupils will be able to work in groups as well as individually.

- Secondly, with respect to challenging problems or questions, in my humble opinion, most activities are too easy for 3º graders and one activity is too complicate for them.

    Source: http://reaaicleintef.blogspot.com.es/

 Piece of the text about airplanes:

             Source: http://reaaicleintef.blogspot.com.es/

- Next, we can observe sustained inquiry in some questions that students will have to ask. Besides, all activities all gradually planned, from less challenging activities to more demanding ones. However, students do not have to find and use resources, ask further questions, or develop their own answers.

- Then, about authenticity, I saw some good things such as the topic that is connected to our world, one of the activities is connected to the means of transport that children use to go to school everyday, and also because the teacher will use some resources from the Internet (memory games and videos for children).

     Source: http://reaaicleintef.blogspot.com.es/

- The following requirement is about the student voice and choice. In this way, pupils will make their own choices to carry some activities such as a display about means of transport. On the other hand, we do not know anything about the time each activity will take and about the PBL (Project Based Learning) experience.

- With respect to the reflection point, there is no way in which students will have to reflect about their own learning process.

- Next, about the critique and revision, the author tells what she will evaluate (the oral presentations, self evaluation sheets, and daily observation), although we do not know how she will do it. It would be great if we could see the evaluation sheets!

- Finally, the public product is not done properly. There is a final project about what they have learnt, which is a display, but it is not publish beyond the students.

        Source: http://reaaicleintef.blogspot.com.es/

To conclude, I could observe some good and bad point, so I made a proposal about the bad ones. If you are interest in my changes, see the online presentation below.

Once analyzed the open educational project, we had to create an online presentation using Genial.ly about it. Genial.ly is a good tool to create appealing presentations and also helps us to organize our ideas. As a consequence, we have learn a different way to create presentations, different from PowerPoint. 

However, one of the disadvantage of this tool is that we have to pay money to use the full version, in which we can download presentations and use more templates. We hope to be ambassadors of Genial.ly soon!

I like Genial.ly because it is also interactive, we can add tags, links, new windows, etc. to each element in the slides. Nevertheless, you have to guess in which element I put the tag! Things to improve... but still genius Genial.ly!

Here you have the result!

To conclude, we can say that the open educational project REA For CLIL - INTEF is a good resource to keep learning. It is a pity that its owner is not publishing projects any more, but there are a great bunch of them that we can use. Whereas, I consider that the project that I analyzed might not be a good example of an open educational project,  but I realized that the main goal of teacher is not to teach content, it is to help children to grow up as good citizens.

Moreover, I have to say that analyzing is a necessary requirement to know how good a project is in order to be used. At first sight, it might be acceptable; however, it is really useful to evaluate it so as to know if we can take advantage of it as teachers. 

Be clever, be greener!