World book day!

Hi bloggers!

As you know, this Saturday 23 April is the World Book Day. Because of that, our new mission is related with this special day.

For this challenge we were asked to present one of our favourite books creating a collage and then, add a clip to the picture using Aurasma.

To begin with, I used the web tool called Canva to create the poster. You may ask why, and I will tell you that, as you know if you read my previous posts, we made a tutorial explaining how to use this tool, so I put into practice what I knew about it!

Here you have the tutorial if you do not remember it, and also in the following link: http://www.genial.ly/View/Index/5712001b1561e807349c6fa0

Canva is a great tool as it allows you to create nice posters using your own pictures. The main problem of this tool, from my point of view, is that many of the resources provided are not free.  Anyway, it offers many facilities to use and create very visual posters. Here is the process of mine, do you like it?

The next step was to create a clip explaining what sort of books I like, the features that define me as a reader and finally, why the book chosen is my favourite one. In order to do it, I used Movie Maker adding different pictures, respecting, of course the copyright. All the images used are free of it.

Related with Movie Maker, I have to say that I love this tool! It is very intuitive, easy and varied. It allows you to personalised and create your own videos in a few minutes, using many different tools to modify it. It also offers the possibility to add more videos, podcasts, pictures, songs… Thanks to that, you can design your creation however you want! You do not need to follow a template already done as it happens with other tools.

I uploaded the video to the blog for those who may have problems using Aurasma:

Finally, I downloaded Aurasma app to my mobile phone in order to create an account. Do you  know what is it? I have to say that I have never heard about Aurasma before my classmates Álvaro, Neus and Marta created a tutorial about this app. Thanks to them I could learn how it works so as to use it in this new challenge.

You can watch their great tutorial if you click here or in the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1CWdit80hU&feature=youtu.be

After using Aurasma I realised that it is a great tool in the sense that it makes possible to bring back to life a simple picture or image. It is incredible! Using this app you can convert a creation in 3D in a very easy way, and that amazed me.

Here you have my final task, discover more using Aurasma! 

Moreover, the rest of my classmates did also this task and we shared all of them in a collaborative board called “A Wall of Books” in Pinterest. If you want to have a look at them, just click here or visit the following link: https://es.pinterest.com/mjgsm/a-wall-of-books/ Or, if you prefer, click here and see only my pin! 

Sigue el tablero A Wall of Books de Mª Jesús en Pinterest.

And… that’s all for today! Thanks for reading!  

Raquel

Double mission: planning and recording a video challenge!

Hi friends!

Do you want to see our next challenge? Here it is!

Now we were asked to plan and create a video challenge for our collaborative CLIL e-project.

Again, as in the previous challenge, this was a teamwork, and we worked in the same group as we did before keeping also the same roles: Natalia, Celia, Patricia and I.

The first part of the challenge consisted of creating a storyboard for the video challenge (which was the second part of the mission) to include in our CLIL e-project.

As we were not sure about storyboards, we looked for some examples to clarify the concept. Thanks to that we realised that a storyboard consisted of drawings and notes in frames that represent a scene in our future video challenge. So it was a kind of “draft” for our video.

The next step was to choose the suitable tool for creating the storyboard. Among many possibilities such as Storyboard Generator, Storyboard Template for Google Drive, Storyboard Maker free Android app, we finally chose Storyboard That. You may ask why, right? Well, here I will explain our decision. The first think we liked was the huge range of possibilities that it provides: you can choose many different images, scenes, backgrounds, texts… It offers the option to develop your story in a school (as we did in our storyboard), outdoors, in castle… About the characters used, it is also possible to pesonalise them according to your needs. The only thing that it does not allow you to include sounds, and that would be nice to make the comic more interactive from our point of view. What I want to say is that you can choose, for example, their physical appearance and their face expression, but not the voice. Anyway, thanks to that you have the opportunity to use this app in order to reach many goals, since you can customise the story for your own aims. Furthermore, I find it very interesting to use with our students since it is very visual and original. Moreover, it can also be used for them to create their own stories related with a subject, task… since this web tool is not difficult at all to use. With it, they are dealing with communicative and writing skills in a different way as they are used to do it, practicing ICT at the same time, and that will be motivating!

If you click here you can find our storyboard, and also in the following link: https://www.storyboardthat.com/storyboards/93_nat/the-senses


Made with Storyboard That

Once we finished the storyboard, we moved on to the second part of the mission: recording a video challenge based on the storyboard we made.

It was not difficult to start with it as our comic was a kind of “draft” of our video, so we knew more or less the outline of our video. As we did in our storyboard, we recorded the video in a classroom. In order to make it more engaging, we pretended being students carrying our e-project out. Our proposal, as you can see in our video challenge if you click here, is that children create a poster about the body and the senses using the web tool Canva. In the video we also explain the steps they have to follow to reach the final outcome and the way we will assess the task.

In order to record the clip, we used an smartphone, and then we edited it with Movie Maker (you can get it just clicking here). From our point of view, Movie Maker is a great free resource (in Windows) to edit and create your own videos: it offers the possibility to add videos, pictures, music, sounds... Moreover, in our opinion this app is very easy to use because you can see all the features the tool offers at a first sight and it is very intuitive. Another advantage is that you can also use it without Internet connection. However, we consider that the main problem about this tool is that users from other computer systems (as Linux or Mac) may face more problems to use it; since they might not find the chance to download it or they may pay for it as the tool cannot have all the features included in the Windows version.

I would like to say that I often used this tool for some of the lesson I have carried out during my internship in order to present new contents, clarify some ideas… Children love it since the explanations were very neat and visual. I also included videos and images of real examples, and also pictures of the children, making the learning more personalised. Thanks to that children were engaged to the explanation. Movie Maker makes possible to use it in many different ways in your classroom.

There you have our final video, just click here or visit the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vXWjrxl8E0

Moreover, both, our storyboard and the video challenge are going to be part of a nationwide educational collaborative project called The ESL Times (click here to know more about the project), which is very exciting! Our ideas are published in their blog! I believe that it is a great idea to include the use of ICT in our classrooms, making it motivating and meaningful, since all the tasks have a real purpose. Furthermore, ESL gave us an award for having participated in this collaborative project with them!

Thanks for reading!

Raquel