Useful information for the families

FIVE ADVICE FOR DEALING WITH TECHNOLOGY AT HOME

At the moment, we are living in the Information and Knowledge Society, where almost every child has a computer at his or her disposal.  The technological revolution reflects the idea that children are becoming computer experts at a very young age. However, with all this constant exposure to this "world", there are some important concerns about how teachers and families can implement technology for educational purposes, without being damaging for children. In short, ITC´s are a good tool for education when they are used correctly and managed by an adult. 

In the following lines, five pieces of advice will be listed with the objective of encouraging a correct use of technologies at home: 

1. Select the appropriate links according to the age of the students. Internet is a huge world where you can find plenty of information and resources to be used, however, not everything is true and useful, that is why adults must research until finding the ideal resources that suit our students. 
2. Control the time: Too much exposure to a digital screen can provide prejudicial effects to children such as social interaction issues, obesity, falling grades, etc. 
3. Do not avoid traditional methods. A perfect educational method does not exist. That is why we can combine traditional methods with technology in order to achieve the best results possible. 
4. Cybersecurity software: They can be also useful to ensure children´s security while they are using the internet.
5.  Perceive technology as an enjoyable tool for learning: Students are going to find the learning process fun and interesting, which is going to increase their motivation and interest for the content to be learnt.

I hope you find all this information useful

See you in the next chapter👋

 

Activities for fast finishers

 FAST FINISHERS, THIS ENTRY IS FOR YOU!

Congratulations 🎉on finishing all your homework as fast! Here, you have an opportunity to continue learning.

Click on the link you like the most and start playing the different games. I am sure you will have a good time with all of them. 

1- Present simple: https://www.gamestolearnenglish.com/present-simple/ 

https://www.eslgamesplus.com/present-simple-tense-action-verbs-interactive-monkey-game/ 

2- Questions: https://www.gamestolearnenglish.com/questions/ 

3- Spelling: https://www.gamestolearnenglish.com/spelling-bee/ 

4- Speaking: https://www.gamestolearnenglish.com/speaking-phrases/

5- Prepositions: https://www.gamestolearnenglish.com/prepositions-game/

6- Hangman: https://www.gamestolearnenglish.com/hangman/ 

7- Adjectives: https://www.liveworksheets.com/ak1222716iy 

8- Daily routine: https://www.liveworksheets.com/hy2382377xr

9- Countries: https://www.eslgamesplus.com/countries-esl-vocabulary-memory-game-with-flags-low/

10- Story maker: https://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/games/story-maker-1 

I hope you enjoy all the activities

See you in the next chapter! 👋

 Reflect on my own super learning

It is time to say goodbye to this amazing subject. It is been five months where we have learned many different alternatives to implement ICT´s in our lessons. Technologies have started to invade the real world and that is why teachers must adapt their way of teaching according to this new reality. We have discovered how to create avatars, boards to organic materials, comics, mindmaps, infographics, slideshows, podcast and video clips, all of them under the creative commons licenses. However, this is just the beginning of our learning. ICT´s change every day, so we have to keep updated all the time and surfing to use the best tools possible. 

To summarize our learning, here you can see an infographic created with Piktochart with all the projects that we have carried out during these months. I have listed the benefits that they have for education and a couple of digital tool for creating them.

Apart from it, in the end, you can see my own personal reflection and the tools that I absolutely recommend to use in the classroom.  I want also to highlight one of the key ideas from this learning and it is the importance of social media. The correct use of platforms such as Twitter, Instagram or Tik Tok can have plenty of benefits for our students because they see them as entertainment, which can motivate and engage them into the learning process more than traditional exams and homework do. 

I hope you have enjoyed the different posts that I have created.

It is not goodbye! See you soon...👋

 Record a video clip: "Back to 1256"

The first part to create a video is to think about what you want to say. To learn how to do it have a visit to my last post "Storyboard a video project". 

After doing the script it is time to record the video. In our case, we did it using the camera of our mobile phone and a drone. If you have one at your disposal I absolutely recommend you to use it, the views look amazing👀.

When the video is ready, it is time to edit it to make it look more flashy and attractive for the audience. There are many different programs to modify your video. It is necessary to have a view of a couple to choose the ideal one for you. You should check how professional it is because there are very complete resources that can be difficult to use, and for pedagogical videos, a simple program easy to use is enough. Some of them are, Powtoon, Screencast -O-Matic, Tellagami, Touchcast, Flipgrid or iMovie (just for apple), one we chose.

iMovie lets you edit your video close to the most professional platforms. You can cut and paste and edit the duration as you wish, include effects, music, audio, images. Furthermore, it also has a wide range of templates, filters, special effects, trailers and amazing beginnings and endings to make your project more engaged to the students from the very beginning. 

Related to the music we used lamusicagratis.com. It is a website where you can download music without copyright, accessible for everybody. 

Finally, the last step is to upload the video to an online service or repository. In our case, we decided to use youtube. 

Now, it is time to present the video. It has been a group project. You can also visit the entries from my partners. 

Title: "Back to 1256"

Objectives: To compare how we live now and how people live centuries ago.

To raise awareness of cultural aspects. 

Subject: Social science. 

Grade: 5th grade. 

Here you are! I hope you enjoy it. 

See you in the next chapter👋

 Storyboard a video project 

Create a video is a very interesting task for children. With these kinds of activities, students are going to increase their creativity, imagination, language and communicative skills. Most of the time, these tasks are performing in groups, which is why they are also going to work on cooperative and collaborative skills. they are a kind of role-playing where students are going to feel and think like other people, which is also a crucial fact to develop in young learners. 

The first step to creating a video is thinking about what this video is going to be about. Children must do brainstorming to share their ideas, and then choose one that everybody agrees with. 

After that, it is time to do the script to order the characters´ different ideas, settings, and dialogues. Also, we can include explanations and the words that the narrator would say. There are different ways for preparing the script, however, we decided to use "Storyboard that" for planing our video. If you want to know more about this tool check my post "The benefits of comics in education".  

To finish, let me present our work. In the picture below you can see a storyboard that we created to organize the ideas of our video. It consists of 3x2 comic strips which is a free option in the application. The theme of our video is "The middle ages". We want to do a comparison between how we live nowadays and how people lived many centuries ago. 

 

 Do you want to watch the video? You will do it in the next post...

To be continued... 👋

A podcast to introduce yourself 

A podcast is an audio recording, similar to a radio programme, but you subscribe to it on your mobile what let you listen to it whenever you like, and as many times as you wish. Nowadays, new technologies are having a heavy impact on education and podcasting is one of the alternatives that is becoming very popular among teachers. Podcasting is one of the latest mediums to emerge into the mainstream and a very interesting alternative to teach our lessons. You can record your podcasts to give explanations to the students about different topics or propose activities, but also you can provide them with different tools to help them to create one by themselves. I am sure they will have a good time feeling like they were a journalist in a radio program🎧🎥🎤. 

There are different programs and applications to create and after that to upload your podcast. In my case,  I recorded the audio with my mobile and I inserted different music and effects using Audacity. It is a free application where you can edit your audios. It is really complete, however, in the beginning, it can be a little bit difficult to use, but after some research, the final result is quite good.  You can upload different audios, join them, insert music, effect, increase or decrease the volume and many different tools that can be considered "more professional". For the labour that we need at the school, you can watch the following video where you can see some tips to create your first podcast. 

The podcasting service that I decided to upload my project is Soundcloud. It is a  platform to share and categorize your audios according to different topics or lessons, something really useful if you decided to use this resource at shcool with your students. They have a free version with a lot of possibilities for listening to different audios, so I invite you to discover all of them.
 
After register on the web site, it was time to start working on the podcast. To create one I followed the following steps🏃🏃: 

1. Decide your topic: In my case, I wanted to do a podcast to welcome my students to the new academic year. I introduced myself and I explained a little bit my intentions and objectives for the year. 

2. After decided the topic it is time to think about what you want to say. The perfect thing will be to write a draft with all the information that you want to say, and after that, write exactly what you want to record. Here, you can see my script. 

3. If you have already created an account into an application to upload your podcast, the next step will be to create a playlist to have your different audios organised. In the link above you can see my playlist for the sixth graders. 

4. The four-step is to record your audio. If you consider that is necessary you can use a program to edit it as I said before. 

5. Finally, after these changes, your podcast will be ready to be uploaded to the platform that you choose.  This is my final result, I hope you like it!

Teacher Sandra · Sixth grade. Lesson 1

See you in the next chapter👋

 Educational slideshows 

As we have commented in previous posts of this blog, visual elements👀 are attractive and motivating for children. It is tested that this kind of factors is going to benefit the student´s learning process, supporting the theory with images, pictures, graphics, videos, and so on. 

Slideshows are one of the possibilities that teachers have to go with their lessons. They are presentations of a series of still images projecting on a screen or in an electronic device. Apart from the one that everybody knows, the power point, there are many different online resources to make your presentation more entertaining, dynamic and attractive to your students. Some of them are the following: Powtoon, Prezi, Biterslide, and the one that I decided to use, Genially. 

👍I absolutely support and recommend this resource to build your own slideshows. The thing that I like the most about this resource is the big amount of templates that they provide to you to carry out your presentation. There are a lot, and about many different fields or thematics. Furthermore, you can add your own images, videos, and associate these elements with different audios. To make your presentation more attractive, you can insert text, with many different types of letter, interactive elements, emojis, transitions and effects. They also have a part with smart blocks with graphics, flowcharts or barchart to make your work more professional. It is easy to use

If you follow the instructions at the beginning you will not have any problem achieving exactly what you have in your mind. Besides, with good scaffolding, you can also ask your children to create one. 

👎If I have to say something negative I would say that the best templates only are for the premium version, so you have to pay for it. 

See you in the next chapter 👋