Content Curation Tools

Hello Everyone!

Today I'm going to talk about content curation. I have to admit that, before we start working with this topic in class,  I didn’t know what content curation was. As I worked in this topic I discovered the content curation and how useful it is when selecting and organizing content, projects, activities to be done in the class or web pages. This is a way to access  the content you want in just one click without having to spend a lot of time looking for it again or thinking about how you did find it.

I've been looking at some content curation tools and I decided to use Pinterest because I have previously worked with it. As I just said, I already knew Pinterest but when I started working with it again I realized that I wasn't using it correctly since I only used it as a tool for looking for activities when I needed new ideas for the class. This is the reason why I decided to create a new account in order to organize all the resources regarding education that can be useful for my class.

In this new account that I created, I've organized different activities, crafts and resources on boards which I think could be good for working with my students. Also the advantage of these boards is that everything is well organized. The boards that I've created for now are: Music, Math, Social Science Models, Project Based  Learning and Literacy. I could say that this is my start on Pinterest but I plan to create more specific boards,  for more subjects and for different courses.

Here you have other content curation tools that I've discovered with this topic and which I found very interesting:

- Pearltrees 
- Symbaloo
- Listly
- Scoop.it

I hope you all liked it and you've learned as much as I did with this topic. See you in my next post!

CLIL Lesson: The Continents!

Hello Everyone!


Today I'm going to talk about a bank of images you can use in order to create you own CLIL lesson. Before I start this topic I thought that you could take and use all the images on the internet as if they were yours but now I know that you have plenty of bank images where you can find and use pictures and you can also create your own images, create a license and share it with the educational community.

I have used one of this bank of images (Pixbay) to get images that I could use in the CLIL lesson I have created for my students. This lesson is "The Continents" and the images are the following ones:

Picture by:  Clker-Free-Vector-Images CC0 Creative Commons

Picture by: OpenClipart-Vectors CC0 Creative Commons

Picture by: Dsndrn-Videolar CC0 Creative Commons

Picture by: OpenClipart-Vectors CC0 Creative Commons

Picture by: OpenClipart-Vectors CC0 Creative Commons

Picture by: OpenClipart-Vectors CC0 Creative Commons

Picture by: Felix_Broennimann CC0 Creative Commons

I would use this images to help my students learn in a more visual way how the continents were created, what are the continents and some physical characteristics of them. I would also use this images to create activities in where they have to guess what is the continent of every image. Finally, they will have to create a model of The Earth using the images provided to draw the shape of the continent.

I hope this post help you! See you in my next post!

Meet my avatar!

Goals:

- To know how to use TOONTASTIC app (avatar generator).

- To create an avatar with its own story.
- To know different types of avatar generator.
- To acquire digital competence.
- To share what I have learn with others.
- To protect your privacy on the internet.




Before I choose the app I used to create my avatar I tried other avatar generators such as Bitmoji (https://www.bitmoji.com/), Doppleme (http://doppelme.com/), Portrait Avatar Maker (http://avatarmaker.abi-station.com/index_en.shtml) and Avatarmaker.com (http://avatarmaker.com/).  I decided not to use this websites because it only allows me to create statics images and I wanted to create something with sound, movement and nicer background. Although I didn’t use it I think this websites can be really helpful if you want your students to create an avatar for a specific activity in a short period of time. After trying this webpages I downloaded Voki and Gabsee because there were apps that allows you to record sounds and in which the avatar has movement.

VOKI (http://www.voki.com/): If you have the premium version this app is really useful but I wouldn’t use it in a class without the premium account because the options are very limited and then every student would have the same avatar, which is kind of bored for them. Also you can’t export your avatar for free.

GABSEE : Is a good app in which you can use your face as the face of the avatar and use what you are seen at that moment as the background for it  with the smartphone or tablet’s camera. This is very interesting for the kids because they can see themselves reflected in the app. You can also choose your mood depending on how you are feeling. The main thing I don’t like about this app is that the mouth of the avatar does not move as you speak, so you can’t use it to pretend that your avatar is speaking.

Finally, I decided to use TOONTASTIC which is an app to create avatar and stories.
TOONTASTIC’S is a great app with great features such as:

- When you start using the app you have three options:

a. Short story (three parts): beginning, middle, end.
b. Classic story (five parts): setup, conflict, challenge, climax, resolution.
c. Science report (five parts): question, hypothesis, experiment, result, and conclusion.

You can also erase the parts of the story that you are not going to use.

- It gives a little explanation before every part (“ the beginning where you introduce the characters and the setting of your story”)

- You can use between 1 and 7 avatars in every part of the story.

- You have plenty of created avatar (mostly related to the backgrounds) that can spin, move their hands, move their mouth like if they were talking and move like if  they were walking. You use this avatar as they are, edit it or draw your own avatar and then make it 3 D.

- You can choose interactive backgrounds that move things depending on what you touch. You only have 9 already created background but you can draw your own if you want to.

- Once you have chosen your avatar and the background you can start recorded but you need to talk it doesn’t have a text reader.

- When you are recoding you can make the character bigger or smaller depending on what you want and you can also zoom in or out the background.

- When you have recorded the video with the avatar and the background you can add background music to the audio according to the mood of your avatar. There is a lot of background music you can use.

- Once you have created the story you can recorded on a video adding a name to the video and the name of the person who create it. It also includes the name of the characters that appear in the story.

- It is possible to export the video you create to different apps or download it.

I really liked this app because I think is very useful. It allows you to create a story with an avatar sound and a background, is really easy to use and it have plenty of created material for free as I said in the features of the app. You can make really good and complete stories in a few steps. I think I would use it in the class if I wanted the children to create a story for their avatar which I think is really important. I also think that is really interesting to use this app in science class as a way of recording results on an experiment. There were also thing I didn’t like about this app:

- The avatar doesn’t pretend to talk when you talk, you have to press the avatar when you want it to do it and if you stop pressing then the avatar will stop moving its mouth. You can’t also make the avatar move at the same time it is talking.

- You can’t touch many thing at the same time, there is not a function when you can keep something press while you do something else.

- There is not a text reader in the app you if you want to use a neutral voice, as I did, you have to make it with another device. I used google translate to read the text I created my mobile phone while I recorded the story with the IPad.

- There is not website for the app online you need and smartphone or a tablet if you want to use this app.

In conclusion, I really liked this app and I would definitely use it in my class if I had enough resources because in most of schools you don’t have a tablet for every student, they only have computers, this is what I think is the main inconvenient.

Objective of this blog.

The objective of this blog is to post all the resources we use in the ICT class with a little review. I want my blog to be a website you can use to find ICT resources with its features, positive and negative aspects and how you can use this in your classroom. So, Welcome to my blog! I hope you enjoy it.