Let's talk about mindmaps!

Hello Everyone!

In this new post I'm going to talk about mindmaps. I love creating mindmaps because it's a tool that allows you to organize ideas and in where you can have a large amount of information really well organized so you can see find what to look for in a few seconds and it's also really good to conect information.

Today I bring you this mindmap that I've created about  the  "China" project I made for the 2nd grade of Early Childhood Education. In this mindap we can see the content, the aims, the phases and the activites of the project in a really clear way. I have used colors to make it easier to distinguish the information and I'm very happy with the result because I can see all the aspects I care about the project in a clear way.
I've made  this mindmap with Creately, which is a great online tool for diaframming and collaboration. Creately allows you to create diagrams like flowcharts, venn diagrams, family trees, infographics, site maps... and share it with its community.
For each of these diagrams it has a variety of templates very original which is very useful.
It's a really easy to use tool in which we have a great variety of shapes and arrows that can be modified according to our needs by changing the color, the text font.... You also have the option to import images if necessary.
I think that the most difficult thing about creating my mindap was organizing my ideas because the use of the tool at a basic level is pretty easy, but I want to continue using it to improve my skills.
Here you can see my mindmap.

I hope you liked this post!!

Online tools to create comics!

Hello everyone!

In this post I will talk about the tools to create comics that we can find online. Comics are a very good resource to use in our classroom. There are several ways of using comics in the classroom: the teacher can create a comic for the students in order to present something, the students can create it to express themselves or to work on a content previously explained....

In this case, I've created a comic in which we can see a problem that a lot of  students face in every subject, such as the fear of public speaking. In this comic we can also find some advices to overcome this fear. This comic could be print and placed in the classroom so that the students could see it and it could help them.

Before starting to work with this topic in class I did not know anything about the tools that we can find online to create a comic such as  Creaza or StoryboardThat

I've decided to use Pixton to create my comic. Pixton is a  tool is easy to use because is very intuitive. You have icons that indicate you what to do in a really simple way, like for adding a new character you  have the icon of a face, or for adding a new background you have the icon of a landscape. In Pixton you can create your own comic from a scratch but you can also
use their templates. They have a lot of templates and, if you are using Pixton as a teacher, is really useful because you can find this templates well organised in lesson plans like English, Computer, History.... You can also decide to use a pre set background which you can modify by  adding or deleting item, making the item bigger or smaller.... It lets you give text and speech bubbles to characters which you can also modify according to you preferences changing the font, the size the color... It also has the option of adding images, audios or links if you want, which I think is really useful.
But, the two things that really caught my eye is that you have a lot of pre set expressions, poses and characters and that you can add your students to the comic.

So as I said is really easy to use Pixton and you can make a lot of different stories.
There's something although I didn't like and is that you have a trial period to use it and, after that, I think you have to pay for some of the features but since I have used it with my trial period  I don't know how much and for which ones.

I would definitely use this tool with my students because as I just said is really easy to use so I think they will be able to create really good stories expressing their feelings.

So, here you have my comic and I hope this entry will help you.

See you in my next post!

Genially: A great tool to create slideshows!

Hello everyone!
In this post I'm going to talk about online support slideshow tools for presenting content in class.

Before I started working on this topic in class I knew some slideshow tools like Prezi  and Powtoon which are really useful when creating a presentation in a creative way.

However, I must admit that because of this topic I've discovered a fantastic tool:Genially. Genially is a really good tool to create our own CLIL materials and present the subject content to our students in a funny way. It’s a tool to create presentations with animations, different templates and stickers. It has a wide variety of functions so you can create slide shows, video presentations, presentations of teaching materials, interactive images, games, quizzes, posters, maps, invitations, infographics and even CV! and the good thing about this is that there are pre-designed templates that you can easily work on.
Another thing I really liked and which I think is very useful is that, while you create the presentation on the website, you have a window where you can search and add images directly from Pixabay (The bank of images I talked you about a couple of post ago). It's great! Also in the presentations you can add videos and music. I’m sure my students are going to love these presentations.
I have to admit that I haven’t been able to discover completely the tool yet because it has a lot of features and functions but I hope to do it little by the little because it is a very interesting tool.
Here you can see the first presentation I’ve made with Genially. It’s a presentation of the plants for second graders with slides for presenting the content, I also add a slide for activate the previous knowledge and another one with a small activity as a review.
To make it I used a genially template which I modified. I know I still have a lot to improve since it's my first presentation but, of course, it will not be my last.
I hope you liked it! See you in the next post!