Turning a flat activity into a super learning mission

Hello everybody!

Last week, two of my classmates and I were working on a new project. We were turning flat activities into super learning missions!

How could we turn flat activities into learning missions? I created a poster to explain it using Canva:

how to turn a flat activity into a by Carmen Olmedo

First of all, I would like to explain my flat activity which consists of reading an infographic that I made for my students. This infographic is about types of plants and its reproduction. Besides, it includes some videos to clarify some difficult concepts. Here you go the infographic if you are interested in it. Before watching the infographic, it is supposed that learners have to take notes about the infographic to accomplish a following activity.  

As you can see, this activity is kind of flat because the content is provided to the students, they just have to watch and take some notes. That is why two of my friends and I collaborated to change our flat activities into super learning missions! They are Lucía Carrasco and Ana Márquez, enthusiastic general teachers of Primary Education. We are hard-working teachers and we were working many hours on this project as well as on the next one. I must explain that we turned six flat activities into two super learning missions which are linked. It will be necessary to accomplish the first super learning mission to do the second one. It must be clarified that the new activities are still intended for fourth graders. 

To start with, let's explain the first super learning mission and everything will make sense in my next post. My classmates and I wanted to mixed all our projects so we planned the first super learning mission in which learners will have to investigate on the Internet for information about:

• The country of India.
• The climate of India.
• The flora of India.
• The forecast of yesterday, today and tomorrow in India.

Once students get the information, they will have to create an infographic using the tool StoryboardThat. In this infographic (which is a storyboard, similar to a comic), learners will have to plan their video; that is, students will be told that they have to create a video explaining the information that they get about India. To do that, they need to plan their video. So they will use a comic to do it. They will have to add the number of scenes, the background, and a summarized script.

I created an infographic to summarized this activity and explain some curricular facts. I used the tool Canva since I had used before and it is the perfect tool to create posters. Here you go the result: 

Creating a comic by Carmen Olmedo

So, learners will have to:

1. Look for the information.
2. Select and summarize the information.
3. Create a comic with the information and planning the future video.
4. Create the video and edit it (next learning mission). 

They must include an opening and ending part in both tasks (the video and the comic). 

Students will accomplish this challenge in groups of four. They will need a computer per group to look for the information. In each group of students, each student will have a different role:

• Role 1: the builder, who will create a storyboard using the tool StoryboardThat.
• Role 2: the writer, who will write on the computer or in a piece of paper. 
• Role 3: the presenter, who will explain how they did their work and show the result. 
• Role 4: the supply specialist, that will be in charge of looking for the information. 

Nonetheless, every student will participate in the whole activity sharing ideas.

When they complete the activity, they will get a badge according to their fantastic job and role. Here you go the budges. 

Created by Lucía

We, as teachers, will use two sessions to do this super learning mission because learners have to look for the information, select it, summarize it, and create the storyboard (in 45 minutes will be almost impossible). 

We did an online presentation to show students and explain the learning mission. Here you go the presentation:

Learningmission1 by Ana Márquez

Consequently, we tried to carry out this activity as if we were children. In this way, we will see if it works. We used the tool StoryboardThat to plan our future video. The result was this one:

If you want to zoom in our story board, click here.

To create the storyboard, pupils have to summarized their future work, that is why they will need to use Google Drive to write some notes, the whole script, and so forth. 

REFLECTION

Thanks to this challenge, I realized that using a infographic is crucial in order to plan a sequenced activity: a video, a story, etc. I had used StoryboardThat once, but that time it was not useful for me. Now, I know that this tool is pretty good for children since they love comics and they can create easily one. Moreover, it helps you to organize your work and ideas. StoryboardThat is easy to use, learners just have to add a background, the characters, and the bubbles. 

I really like this tool, although it is a pity that it is not possible to add your personalized background since that option is for the premium tool. 

Apart from that, with this activity that we created collaboratively, learners will go further: they will investigate, analyze, summarize, evaluate, etc. doing an task that is cross curricular. It involves content such as forecast, climate, vegetation, countries, culture, as well as the development of the 4 language skills (writing, speaking, listening and reading). My classmates and I could create a richer activity since we collaborated together so it was so rewarding.

Using Google Drive was the perfect idea since it much faster than Word and children do not need to save their works (these are saved automatically). 

I have to say that this project is perfectly aligned with InfoEDUgrafías, one of the projects I am collaborating with, because students will have to create an infographic by doing a comic. An infographic is a graphic visual representation so it can be a picture, a comic or a poster. Besides, it is also aligned with my project since we are still working with plants. 

However, this super learning mission is not completed! See my next post here to see the final outcome.

See you soon and

BE CLEVER, BE GREENER!