Hello again! Today I want to present you my visual metaphor. In order to create it my E-learning project which I presented to you in the last post has been enriched now. But before beggining it is necessary to have clear two concepts, according to Cambridge dictionary:
- Collaboration: the situation of two or more people working together to create or achieve the same thing.
- Cooperation: the activity of working together with someone or doing what they ask you to do.
Seeing more definitions of these concepts, in The Huffington Post the words can be defined as:
- Collaboration: is a coordinated, synchronous activity that is the result of a continued attempt to construct and maintain a shared conception of a problem.
- Cooperation: is accomplished by the division of labor among participants as an activity where each person is responsible for solving a portion of the problem.
So keeping in mind those definitions is time to transfer them to the education and specifically to the classroom.
Collaboration movements by Paula Esteban
It is necessary to highlight that all the activities that students have to carry out during the project are cooperative because they have to work in small groups or pairs, learning new vocabulary and key structures and also working with their classmates which involve learn how to behave and learn from and with others (collaboration within the classroom). The activities are based on the topic: Landscapes. As final outcome they have to create a postcard. To turn this project into a collaborative one the final outcome has to be changed a little bit. As a final outcome to the E-project the students had to create a postcard and present it to the class but why not spread on the net these creation and use online tools to create the postcards? So now, the final outcome consists on:
-Once they know how to describe a landscape and therefore how to write a postcard the teacher will assign each group an address.
-The students are going to draw their landscapes keeping in mind that they have to describe it later. The students are going to use an online tool for their drawings: Sketchpad 4.1, then they have to complete the postcard with the help of an online tool: Postcard creator.
-The new final outcome will be published on a blog for kids which is called: Kidblog(collaboration out of the classroom). All the blogs the students create in this website are controlled by the teacher and the parents of the students have to give their consent too.
So, keeping in mind that the final task involved collaboration, I have to look for a good collaborative movement where this collaborative task could have place. From my point of view, the most suitable collaborative movement for my E-project is The ESL Times. It is a blog which main goals are: working with the four learning skills, encouraging reading in english, promoting group work and team work, using ICT while teaching/learning English and valuing the sociocultural side of the English language.
Above it can be seen the visual metaphor. It has been made with the tool: Smore, it is a web in which flyers can be created, it doesn't matter the topic or the layout, you have several and really interesting ones and you can create your own ones too. It is very easy to use so it could be used
I believe that working with flyers, poster, storyboards... is a good idea to make a clear idea about any topic and it is very useful if we as teachers use these tools properly. From now on I will start using this type of tools because they give a wide variety of ideas to carry out on the classrooms.
To sum up, I must say that I feel I am growing talking about ICT because each challenge we made is something new we learn. Doing that I have met new tools to make visual presentation and I'm looking forward to use it for a clear purpose. The idea of spread our work is something very attractive too because after several years studying and making a lot of types of projects and resources we can share it with the rest of the "world".