5th class TABLETS

Hello everyone,

This session was focused on working with tablets. The scanning of a QR code was the starting point where we discuss about the pros and cons about using new technology in the classroom.

Then we conclude that is difficult to get our students attention and cope with the explanations or some problems our students can find with the devices.

Then Maribel introduce us a project called “El lideratge digital dels alumnes a l’aula”. The aim of this project is to train some students of the class in order to help their classmates with the different tools they can be using during the class. An expert in TIC is going to help the teacher with the classroom management.

Finally we start working with the different apps downloaded in our tablet and by groups we choose one and show to our classmates the different uses and possibilities the app give you.

IWB activity! Food chain...

HELLO! We are Anna Molina, Gemma Ceballos and Paula Buenaventura, AKA “the dream team”!!!!!

We have a proposal for the 3rd grade of primary to teach FOOD CHAINS, using the Interactive WhiteBoard...Hope you like it and find it useful!!!!

TOPIC

Food Chain!!!

CONTEXT

·       This session is intended for students of 3rd of primary

·    The students have learned previously that a food chain shows how each living thing gets food, and how nutrients and energy are passed from creature to creature. Food chains begin with plant-life, and end with animal-life.

2nd session ICT

Hi there!

During this 2nd session, we met our other teacher Aoife, during the first 10 minutes we made a little presentation, after that, we move to the subject content.

Aoife taught us some useful resources and apps to include in our lessons, you can find some examples bellow:

- For classroom management (Class Dojo)

- Songs with actions (GoNoodle & Brain Breaks)

- Storytelling time (The Literacy shed & Book box)

After that, she show us how to apply these resources into a real project, she presented us a real project carried out in her school: We are explorers! where they work on mapa mundis,aventurers and explorers while wotking in an inrerdiciplinar way, in which all subjects where included
During the presentation other interesting apps appeared for instance piccollage, kahoot, geocatching and some very practical apps to create displays like instant displays or twinkl.

Finally we have to create in teams a session which include some of these resources, and later shared with our classmates. We has so much fun!

Thanks for reading!

3rd SESSION ICT 2017

Hi everyone, I'm Gemma!

Last session was quite different so we went through the smart board. Maribel, our ICT teacher, presented us this useful tool and gave us some clues about how to get it and so on. Then, as the most practice, the better knowledge, we had the chance to interact with the smart board. She provided us a list with all the possibilities that you can perform with the tool and invited us to touch and try everything. We divided the class into two groups and we're filling the grid regarding our practice from the smart board and then from our laptops.
After the break, the teacher told us what would be the final assessment about and we also had some time to develop part of it.

Thanks for reading it!

Powerful interactive whiteboards

Hi everybody! We are Amaranta and Marta and today we start this adventure in the Cister Pearls Blog! Have you ever heard about the power of Interactive Whiteboards? In this post we will share with you the things that we have learnt about this amazing tool and its effective features during the last ICT session. 

It's widely known that old blackboards are exponentially getting obsolete so new motivating ways of teaching are showing up. Over the last few years, schools are realizing about the added value contributed by Interactive Whiteboards to learn, teach and collaborate at classroom. However, it's true that some teachers still find difficulties when it comes to use it for some reasons such as the lack of confidence and training, the belief that it's time consuming or because it implies getting away from their comfort zone. 

That's why keeping up-to-date and continuous training it's essential for educators to be competent at the current technological needs. This resource offers several advantages over traditional blackboards such as the ability to attend all different learning styles (visual, auditive, kinesthetic...) or the chance to design activities taking into account Bloom's Taxonomy (HOTS and LOTS).

Before presenting our activity, we think it's interesting to explain briefly some actions that Interactive Whiteboards can offer you. Some examples would be: adding, copying, pasting, editing text, images, gifs, graphics, shapes, videos; using templates about different kind of activities classified in different topics, creating new ones, searching on the Internet. In short, different kind of dynamic activities that involve children, promote participation and cooperative work. 

Activity: Let's know our body! 

Having said all that, we are going to present our activity about the parts of the body, aimed to review the content vocabulary: eyes, ears, mouth, nose, head, hair, arms, legs, shoulders, knees, toes, lips, fingers... This task is divided into two parts: the first one consists on identifying the parts of the body, matching the written words with the image (whole body of someone). The second part is more difficult because students are only provided with the image of the body and they will have to write it down the words. 

Description and organization of the activity

The class will be divided into three groups of four students small group). 

First part 

Students will see on the screen the body of a girl and some words written next to her. Each group will be in charge of matching six words. They will take turns to associate text-image. Teacher will ask them to participate in a sensible order to avoid classroom management issues. If any student doesn't know the answer, his/her group will help him/her. This will take about 15 minutes.

Second part

The groups will be the same. The picture of the body will be a boy. Students will have to write it down using the interactive markers the word that matches with the image. Each group will write four words. Because of this activity requires a higher level, students will have to cooperate and reach an agreement before the final answer (they need to be aware of the spelling). If the answer is right, they will get one point for their team. The team who get more points, will be the winner! This will take about 20 minutes. 

There are no specific roles because all the members are responsible for the same task. Everybody will participate (rotating each turn).


Picture of the activity:

Added value contributed by ICT

• Visual support
• Cooperative task
• Provides feedback: Well done, try again!
• Motivating

Saint Patricks Day

Hello girls!

In this entry I’m going to show some resources that I used with my pupils to work Saint Patrick's day.

I created a power point slide collected some of the resources that can be used to work Saint Patrick's in Primary 5.

First of all, this celebration can be introduced by a video about a Leprechaun, helping the teacher to create good atmosphere to start talking about Saint Patrick. Then I thought it could be good to show another video explaining briefly the legend.

It’s always important to work vocabulary and there’re some webpages that have flashcards and images that would be good to use to work Saint Patrick's day.

Also if we want to create our flashcards I highly recommend to use Bitsboard and play games in groups with the iPads.

Furthermore, to learn vocabulary in a more attractive way they can be playing games, such as memory, and every time they turn over a card they have to say the name of the image. (This would be a LOTS Bloom’s taxonomy activity). 

Also, learn more about the legend they can search on the Internet some webpages explaining it.

Moreover, a good and HOTS activity (linking with Blooms Taxonomy) we can tell the students to choose 6 clue words about the legend, so they will have to analyse the previous text that they have searched, and decide which words they want to use to create a crossword puzzle, introducing the word and making the definitions.

Although, it can be very creative to look for some Saint Patricks crafts, and a very useful and recommended application is Pinterest. 

Additionally, I founded lots of very interest presentations about the legend of Saint Patrick's that can be used in class without any problem, and we can edit and adapt to our needs.

Last but not least, I want to comment that before doing this subject I was interested in new technologies but after doing I have opened a lot my mind and now I have more skills and more resources to use in class, and also I’m more oriented on how to use it in a correct way and try to squeeze it to take advantage of all the digital resources.

Thank you so much!

Apps in Primary school

Even I couldn't assist to the last session of this subject, I have been very interested in the sessions focused on the Ipads because it is a topic that our school does not work very hard at the moment.

Having Ipads in the classroom is a wide chance of resources where learning is integrated and the process of teaching and learning becomes more effective. 

As I said before, I do not work with ipads at the moment in the classroom but there were some special situations during the year where students have had the opportunity to use the ipad for final projects. 

One of these situations was the second trip of our project Erasmus +. Every year, students have the opportunity to visit a partnerschool in a different country and spend a week with native English speakers sharing culture and language besides adventures and experiences. 

When we were back from the trip, students wanted to show to the rest of the students what they visited, what they learnt, their new friends, the place where they stayed... 

Imovie was an amazing tool because students could create their own project and share it with everybody via several platforms. 

The main idea was to choose what they wanted to share, organize it, illustrate it, design, write... and Imovie was an appropriate resource for our aims. 

  

Certainly, fhe fact of using Imovie was the right choice because it was easy for the students to understand how it works, to use it and to achieve the aims teachers decided.

Regarding to Bloom's Taxonomy, this activity is related to Higher order thinking skills (HOTS) where students have to analyse, evaluate and create a final outcome taking into consideration their own experience and their feelings. The fact to show the final product to the rest of class and to their families and friends, made the project interesting and motivating. 

On the other hand, I would like to consider iDoceo as a very useful tool for teachers. 

Instead of carrying a notebook, iDoceo makes it easy to assess pupils and have access to a register of all the notes, labels and marks. Apart, iDoceo has different options with different purposes useful for teachers as summary (look for students, personal details, diary annotations, notes, comments, resources...), gradebook (assessment), a diary, notes, a setting plan and a pinboard. 

                   

I have been using iDoceo this year and I have seen a big change. The fact that I like the most is that children can help me during the assessment because they love iPads and they love using them.

WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLONAIRE

Hello ICT girls!

This is my last blog entry! This time I am going to present an activity I designed during my practices in the School. It consists on a Quiz from the TV program called “Who wants to be a millionaire?”

One day, my tutor from the school asked me to prepare an activity for her fifth graders students. She wanted something for practicing comparatives and superlatives and make sure they knew the rules about how to make these words from adjectives.

After thinking a lot, I decided to create a quiz because I wanted a motivating activity, different from the ones they were used to do in class. I have also chosen this tool because during the first semester of the Master, Imma Piquer introduced it to us and we really enjoyed it! It is like a gameshow; a competition that engages children a lot. 

When we played it in class they loved it! I divided children in small groups (four students in each group approximately) and each group had to decide one child to be the spokesperson and another one to write down, in a piece of paper the answer of the questions. After that, I explained them the rules of the game and we started playing.

Questions were projected on the whiteboard with its four possible answers, a, b, c or d. I read the questions and the four answers aloud and each group had to discuss and choose one of the answers. Once they had chosen the answer, the writer had to write it down in a piece of paper. After 30 seconds, I rang a bell and they had to put the pencils down and, in order, they had to say the option they had chosen. Then, I showed them the correct answer and, if it was right, I gave them a “lacasito”.

If you do a quiz with your students I recommend you to specify some rules to control the class because when doing this activity, students become more and more excited and they start speaking too loud and it can be a little chaotic. So you need a good strategy to calm them down when this situation come. Mine was the following one: If when I speak or when I ask you to be quiet, you don’t listen to me, I will take your “lacasitos” away. It worked really well.

Another recommendation to make the activity even more motivating for children is to get dressed or wear some funny complement related to quizzes, such as some glasses.

For creating this quiz I downloaded a Power Point template in this page where you can find other ones.  Of course there are other sites where you can find it and download it for free.

Related to Bloom’s Taxonomy, this activity fosters remembering, understanding and applying. It is an activity we can use for practicing or reviewing content, where children have to apply what they learnt during the previous sessions. In this case, it is a LOTS activity. However, we can turn it into a HOTS activity. After the quiz, in the same groups, students can create their own quiz, so they have to think all the questions, the possible answers and they also have to know the correct answer.

Finally, we can also use this activity as an evaluating activity. We can make it a little bit more serious and ask children to discuss and select one of the four answers and justify the decision. 

PREZI PRESENTATION

Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Artola and I will show you and explain an activity done by Prezi.

In one of the ICT classes of Yolanda, she showed us a lot of resources and one was Prezi.

What is prezi?
Prezi is a presentation resource which is classified as a creating tool into the Bloom's Taxonomy.
It can be used by teachers and students to collaborate on presentations with multiple users having acces and the ability to edit the same presentation. It allow students to construct beatiful and useful presentations.
Prezi provides you different kind of templates which you can use it to create your presentation. You have a wide range of templates with different designs and for this reason I recommend you to choose one of this and start creating the presentation, whereas, constructing your own presentation without a template it means that it will bring you a lot time and the result is not much better.

Taking into account the knowledge and the abilities that you need to create a prezi presentation, I think that it could be appropiate for children up to 10 years old.

To know more about it I created a prezi presentation which was suitable for me, as a director of a school summercamp (Jesuïtes de Gràcia - col·legi Kostka), to present and explain the parents all the information about the organisation and the activities for this summer.

Here you have the presentation, you can get a glimpse to it!

GLOGSTER ACTIVITY

Hi, I'm Gemma Artola presenting an activity that I created with Glogster tool.

What is Glogster?
Glogster is an application for presentations and interactive learning. It allows you to combine different kinds of media to create a multimedia poster which you can add to a blog, print it, send it, etc... Noways there are many people from all over the world that use glogster application and it is sensational to have a look on glogster page where you can find lots of ideas, templates and posters which you can get.

In my case, this kind of poster has two ways to implementing the activity:
On one hand, I think that it could be useful and interesting for students up to 9 or 10 years old using glogster to create a poster engaging education content. Referring to the Bloom's Taxonomy, this activity would be HOTS because the children are creating which mean that they are designing, planning and constructing the poster.
On the other hand, I believe that is very curious and also interesting for those children who don't have the age to create it in their own, using glogster as a way to indroduce content. Referring to the Bloom's Taxonomy, this activity would be LOTS because the children are remembering which mean that they are identifying, recognising and naming the content that they are learning.

Two weeks ago I was researching on Yolanda's resources and I found Glogster. Then I explored and I came up with the idea to create one poster to put on practice with my students of 8 years old.
With this tool I explained a whole unit of science content, concretely the ages of the history.
I sticked in the poster one video for each period and some images too to complement the theory from the book.

That poster was useful to the children to compare and connect the videos and the images to the text book content.

I encourage you to try it, you will love it!

Gemma

KEY NOTE ACTIVITY Mireia, Georgina i Mariona

KEY NOTE ACTIVITY

The last 29^th of May, we had our last session of the ICT optative. As in the previous one, we were working on IPads, a sophisticated technology that nowadays many schools use or start introducing it as an educational tool.

During the first half of the class, we talked and experimented with QR codes and we shared ideas about how we can use them in class to enrich the teaching-learning process.

After that, we went through a list of suitable iPad apps to use in class with our kids. As the list is very long, we focused on the more interesting ones and we also had time to explore and try some of them. Some of the apps we discovered are Class Dojo, Tiny Tap, Toontastic and Skitch.

Class dojo is a very useful app for teachers as it helps them with classroom management. They can use it to reinforce positive behaviors in their students and parents can check their children's progress. It also offers a different but a great opportunity to communicate with parents.

Tiny tap allows us to create and play fun interactive quizzes, lessons and games. Here you can read more about this app and the things you can do with it.

Toontastic is a storytelling and creative learning tool that enables kids to draw, animate, and share their own cartoons. Here you can find a description of the app and a video tutorial with the steps you have to follow to use it.

Finally, Skitch is an app for writing and drawing on pictures. In this page you can read about its advantages and you have some examples for using it in class.

In the second part of the class, we had to design, in peers or threes, a HOTS activity for iPads. Our activity is for Primary 5 and it involves comparatives and animals vocabulary. We decided to use Keynote, an app for designing, create and share beautiful presentations. Our activity consists of two phases. In the first one, children are divided in small groups of four, approximately, and they have to create a quiz to work on comparatives and animals vocabulary. The teacher will show them an example to have an idea about what they will have to do.

The quiz should have five questions. They will have to write the question, for example “Which animal is faster?” and under the question they will have to put the picture of two animals such as a lion and a cheetah, with its name. 

Then, in the following slide, they will have to give the answer of the question by putting the image, the written word or the speaking word (using a recording) of the animal. 

This first phase is a HOTS activity because children have to create the quiz using a lot of skills during all the process. On one hand, students need to investigate on what topic they want to work and all the information about it as well as examine the uses of the activity. On the other hand, they have to design the quiz and decide a plan to make the activity happen. It is really important that while they are creating they are deciding the uses of the game and constructing the questions and the answers.  

The second phase consists on answering the other groups’ quizzes. Once the members of the group have read the question, they have to decide which is the correct answer. So first of all, they will need to discuss among them and come to an agreement and, after that, they will have to record the answer and add it in the quiz. Following the example before, they will have to say: “We think the cheetah is faster than the lion because….” And give the reasons why they have decided the cheetah instead of the lion. After giving the answer, they will be able to check whether their answer is correct or not. This second phase is also a HOTS activity because students have the challenge to decide, choose and justify their answer. It is not a simple yes/no answer, students are applying their knowledge and putting in practice comparative structures to give a reason to the game. 

iPad as an ICT tool

Hello girls!

We are Alba and Georgina sharing our experience of the last session, using the iPads as technological tool in the classroom. Both of us have our own iPads and we have used them for leisure. But after the last session our mind has been opened and we now see the iPad as a good and useful ICT tool.  

BOOK CREATOR

We really consider that Ipads bring education to life in the classrooms. It is a tool very easy to manipulate and children can use it easily. We all know that new technologies make the sessions more engaging than a printed format beside the incontable number of tools you can take benefit from. Sharing resources, working in groups, communication, access to different cultures… are some of the advantages of using ipads in the classroom.

Thanks to Maribel Benito we were introduced in how to use ipads in classrooms with students from Nursery and Primary School. The first App she shared with us was “BOOK CREATOR”.

This educational app is ideal for children to create a personalised story related to any topic. The app allows students to take a picture and add it, videos, images and icons, text, change the background and change the colour. Students can see the result when they finish.

Gina and me decided to focused our example with “Book Creator” on one topic: routines. Our aim of the activity was to check if students could work on a routine using this app. The idea was simple: students must create a book choosing one time of the day (morning, afternoon, evening) and illustrate it by adding recordings or images and text or audios.

We tried our best checking all the options we were allowed to try and it worked! We were really proud of our project and we will definitely use it in our classrooms.

https://youtu.be/FDpStQCDSe0

The second application that we downloaded was "BITSBOARD". 

It’s very easy to use you only have to make photos or choose images related to a topic that you are interested. Insert the image and write the name, if you want you can record how to pronounce the word, if not the application will look trough their documents the voice of another person saying the word and if you are agree with you can leave it. Once you have introduced all the images it gives you the option to play to several games using them.

The games can be played in groups, for example in this one the maximum are 4 pupils playing at the same time. They have to match the sound with the object that apperars in the image.

Bits board gives you the opportunity to choose lots of games depending on the age of the students. We share you some different games that can be used in different ages. 

And it’s also very useful if you don’t have time to create your own board, you can search through all the boards that other people published.

So, Bitsboard is a fantastic and complete tool to show contents in a new way, playing dozens of games. Also, it gives the opportunity to create your own contents, search for created boards before, and share your own boards to people and other teachers around the world.