Final reflection

Hello teachers!

As I explained in my last post the end of the subject is very close and that is why I would like to give you a short reflection about the whole learning process we have been involved during this months.

Firstly, I must say that I was not very interested in social networks like twitter o blogger and I didn´t see the point of connecting them with educational objectives. After this course I have to recognise that I was not wrong, the problem is that nowadays people are using social networks with no responsibility, that is why I could not connect the idea of social networks and education. Now, I have noticed how many teachers are sharing their work not to boast but to help other teachers all over the world. In fact I found some online blogs (infoedugrafias is an example) and webs that have been designed by teachers to share resources and ideas, it is amazing how many teachers are involved in this kind of activities, but how many teachers know about it? without this course I wouldn´t have been able to know this kind of websites, now is when I see the importance of spreading the word.

Secondly and without noticing, we were engaged in a project in which I was connecting ict activities with online tools and using English at the same time, moreover these activities were linked to another curricular subject. It is true that each challenge have been time consuming but I have to say that we have been learning how to create all these activites and curricular links without noticing, we were just  focused on how to make these missions attractive and enjoyable for children. This is one of the points that I think we can apply to our future lessons, I our children are engaged in lessons where they have to create something, they need to collaborate and share things they are not going to be focused on the content or language they are learning they are going to be focused on create the product, and that's is how they will learn without noticing.

The last challenge of this course was a big big challenge, on 4th of May we were asked to participate in an online conference in order to talk about our experience with ict and our online project,. The online presentation was presented at wiziq by Moodle Mooc its name was Open Educational Digital Projects for CLIL Primary Education . People from literally everywhere was looking at the screen and we were going to have the opportunity to participate. It was amazing but I should recognise I was a little bit panic. As I usually do, I just summarise in a paper what I wanted to talk about but I just rehearse one day and it was one week before the live online presentation. the summarise was written in google drive, here you can see the steps I wanted to follow:

1-Name------Madrid------Master

2-Social networks------twitter----blog---educational purposes

3-Open education project

-name

-missions-----students should know the objectives

-creativity, entrepreneurship and collaborative group work

-assessment-----rubric

4-Infoedugrafias-------- Explain them what and who

5-Mission with Daniel collaborative mission

6-Say thank you and go to the science corner 93


The Live conference was recorded and you can have a look in youtube:


As I have said before I usually do not rehearse and at this time I truly think that I should have done it. I agree with the idea that if you try to rehearse each word you want to say is not going to be useful for your future presentation, nevertheless at this time and taking into account you actually do not see the audience and you do not have feedback you can get panic, and that is how I felt I know some people are more confident to talk in front of their computers at home but in my case I found it a little bit estrange. Anyway It was a very good experience and I also learnt a lot from my peers, I feel very proud of them.

To finish this post I would like to add a little bit of humour and I have created the following meme:

Author´s own (picture from pixabay)

I hope you like my final reflection and the meme. See you soon teachers!!

Assessment Rubric

Hi again!

Today I am going to write about one of the most important but also the most difficult aspects that teachers should consider. It is assessment.

If we think about how our teachers should evaluate us 10 or 15 years ago, we agree that the only resource they used are exams. However, education has changed throughout history and nowadays, we as teachers, feel the responsibility to evaluate our students´ learning process. This last point is very important, when we were young we were usually exposed to a knowledge that we should learn and vomit in an exam, but today, teachers know that learning is a process where there are many things to evaluate in order to guide our students through this process.

In CLIL as a quite new approach, sometimes we have got doubts about how to assess. Firstly we need to know the importance of the content we are teaching and secondly the second language we are using in order to learn this content, so that, teachers need to focus their assessment on language and content at the same time. About the skills we are going to make our students improve there are three very important skills that any CLIL lessons should assess: communicative, cognitive and attitudes to learning.

The most important thing we, as teachers, should take into account is that students should be the centre of the assessment process, it means that teachers should adapt their assessment resources to students needs and not the other way round.

The resources that fit with this type of evaluation are called rubrics and portfolios. With this resources, teachers are able to record how effectively their objectives have been achieve. We should remember that our assessment criteria is literally checking if our students have reached the goals we proposed.
Therefore, rubrics contain:
1-the objectives or goals teachers want their students to reach
2-a description of each aspect that is going to be evaluated
3-a scale of progressive ratings that teacher will use to evaluate the goals
4-a clear description of each level of the rating

In particular my open educational project is focused on creativity and entrepreneurship, collaborative group work, English language, Ict and Social science. So that I have already created a rubric for the first learning mission . It is also aligned with Infoedugrafias´ way of assessing, which of course is using rubrics and portfolios.

OEP: Setting up your company de raul oviedo silva

Quick rubric is the online tool I decided to use. I first was thinking about making a table in google docs but this online tool provide you with all resources and possibilities to create a rubric: titles, rows, columns, the score. It looks very easy to create a table in word and that's it but as ICT is very time consuming all these tools like Quick rubric make us save time and the rubric, at the end, have a very good appearance.

As I said before, rubrics are one of the most useful tools for assessment, they allow us to check if our students have achieved the objectives we want but at the same time rubrics are giving information about how effective our performance as teachers has been. To conclude, I would like to reflect about how difficult is going back and review your whole project and check again what objectives we want our students to achieve and if the activities really help them to achieve it. I also should say that at this stage of the project I feel proud about the whole process, it hasn´t been easy but it has made feel very fulfilled. When you are reaching the assessment of your project you know that you are nearly at the end of your big challenge but, it is not the end, this is actually the starting point, now I am ready to propose this project and apply it to a real class and I can´t wait!

I hope you like my rubric and thoughts about assessment, thank you very much.