Our Kandinsky Story

My name is Mireia Cuxart and I’m presenting you an activity that I applied in my class related to the ICT class.

The activity is planned for a 4 years old class with 100% English immersion program during Infant Education. Kandinsky is one of the painters for the Arts and Crafts sessions where the students don’t have any previous knowledge. For this reason, the objectives are to have the chance to observe an abstract author and visualize his art. Moreover, students will describe the piece of art that they want in one word and take a picture to place it in the iMovie app in order to create the story.  For these three activities, students will be discovering art on their own and taking pictures individually. Afterwards, as a group activity, they will create the story with the words chosen for each picture and place it in iMovie individually. As you can see, students will be aware of cultural arts as well as using their oral and ICT skills to participate during the activity. It is appropriate to use ICT resources because it is a way to introduce little students to new technology that are useful in class. It is something you can use in your daily life to create new projects and use different materials for the topic that are planned for the year. ICT resources contribute in letting them use new skills that they won’t use without new devices like iPads.

Like in every lesson plan, you need to know that there are some problems that may happen during the session. The ones that I think are more typical are classroom management problems; in this case iPads can be very useful but also really distracting for the students and for the same reason, a guide access is done with the students so they can only use their cameras to do the activity. Regarding the assessment for this unit, the final result will be the most important part for the activity. As the kids will be taking pictures with their own devices and creating the story with the iMovie, the final project presented to the parents will be useful to see if the kids did participate on the sessions and were able to make a reasonable sentence as their collaboration for the story. Parents will need to give their own opinion for the Open Door’s Day so the students can have a feedback on their work.

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 Apps (Mariona, Gemma and Mireia)

Trying with iPads

As the first experience with iPads, we had the chance to work with two apps called Book Creator and Bits Board.

Book Creator gives you the possibility to create your own book with all the new technologies possibilities such as camera, pictures, videos and voice recording. We thought that a good way to use all these possibilities was to create a book about emotions. Each group could work with one emotion and try to represent it with a picture from Internet, a picture taken by themselves, a video or a voice recording. This activity is about understanding the meaning of the emotions and creating a way to explain them.

Another possibility, as you can see in the example that we created, is to design a book related to more than one emotion. Children can work in peers or threes and they can talk about which things make them feel happy, sad, confused, angry, annoyed, scared, bored or whatever. In this second option students can learn more vocabulary because they work on more than one emotion and they can also learn more things about their classmates. After finishing the creation of the book, each group will be present theirs to the rest of the class.

We designed this activity for second year of primary because of the topic but this app can be used in other school years; we just need to adapt the content we want to work on.

We think that this app is very useful, first of all because it is a HOTS activity and it promotes the use of High order thinking skills. It allows learners to work on the four skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) and they learn new vocabulary. When they are creating their book they can write or record audios (speak). To check if what they have written is correct they have to read it and to check the audios they have to listen to it. They also have to read or listen the other groups’ presentations. Related to the vocabulary, they learn the name of the emotions, and also other vocabulary related to these emotions. Maybe they want to say “I feel scared when I hear a Thunder” but they don’t know the word “thunder” in English, so they have to ask to the teacher and then they learn it.

Another advantage that this app has is its visual attraction. As we have said before, it offers a lot off possibilities (pictures, audio, images…) and kids love it. Children also have an active role doing this activity and they can experiment with the IPAD and this make them be motivated. Finally, the IPAD itself makes the activity more attractive to students. They usually love new technologies.

Related to the example we created about emotions, we think that it is a beneficial activity for the teacher because with children’s creation, the teacher can know better their students; their interests and fears.

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0XjKFxt21t2dHY0Ym5WcV9adWExaXVjRFJ1MUpXTWdTX3RV/view?usp=sharing

Bits Board activity is the second app we discovered in the last session. This app allows you to create flashcards related to any topic. You can take pictures or choose images that the app already offers you and write the name under the picture. Then, if you want, you can add the audio of the word. You can record the word with your voice or if you prefer, the app can also produce the words by recognizing them ones you have written them. In our example you can see flashcards related to the parts of the body.
It is a good app to work on LOTS (low order thinking skills) activities.

We think that this app is also really interesting because instead of showing to the students some flashcards that don’t mean anything for them, you can make them create these flashcards that you are going to use afterwards. In this way, their learning is more meaningful because they work on the vocabulary while they are creating the flashcards and when the teacher uses these flashcards in the class, they feel proud and also they have fun because they can see themselves on the pictures.

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0XjKFxt21t2a2NwMmVqU2swYXM/view?usp=sharing

IWB_Mireia

Here I go again with a new experience! 

This time is about Interactive White Boards (IWB) and I need to say that it was an incredible discovery. I have been seeing IWB in class during this past years but I had never used one. I have one in my class but I have never used it because I didn't know how. Another reason is because we don't have the appropriate program to use it. 

During the class I discovered several ways to use this new toy for me and I really liked it, I couldn't stop thinking about activities that I want to practice with my 3 years old students. Because of that, my activities are related to some of the activities that I have done in class but in a manual way. 

On one hand, you can see the activity called "Peter and the Wolf". If you don't know the story, each character has one instrument during the argument, and I wanted them to relate everything between them. Because I did not know how to create the perfect template, the one you can see can be related with the arrow that you can draw on the IWB.

On the other hand, you can see the activity called "What can you see?". As you can see, there is a picture under the grey curtain and the idea is to ask the students what they can see on the mysterious part. However, instead of removing the curtain, the main objective for this activity is to draw on top of the curtain.

I actually applied both activities and it was an interesting experience. In the first activity I thought that relating was going to be difficult for them. However it had the opposite reaction because they related the pictures and each sound.

The second activity was an excellent idea. Apart from them loving it, they had the perfect excuse to create in a different place rather than a paper. I introduced this activity in hour philosophy hour and they did it in groups of five to talk about the mysterious picture in order to draw it.  

Here is the link to the file: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0XjKFxt21t2YS1ONUdyT0tYTEU&authuser=0

A little bit of me...

A little bit of me... 

But you already know my face, so I decided to put my friend's pictures. They are the ones that made me believe that Education was my passion; the ones that made me realize that teaching is my life!

My name is Mireia Cuxart and I live in Barcelona. I studied Infant Education with the minor of English in Blanquerna about two years ago. I worked in the US as an assistant in a Spanish Immersion School in the state of Oregon. It was a onetime life experience that I recommend to live. I am currently working in Princess Margaret School as a tutor in P3.

Regarding my ICT skills, I need to confess that I am really bad at them and that’s the reason why I took that class. I thought that I needed to learn some more since new technologies are being used in class. I am only using Facebook as a social network and Drive/Dropbox to organise everything I used to keep in the computer.

I am a beginner but I started using Symballootwo weeks ago and I have it as a home page in my browser. Flipboard is my second discovery and I am using it as much as Pinterest (and that means a lot!).

I have been learning a lot so far, and I would love to keep learning and be able to use new technologies in my class. We have whiteboards and iPads and I really want to take advantage of this in order to let them learn with new technologies.