Looking for a collaborative running project!

Hi bloggers! 

My last post was about turning an open digital educational project into a collaborative one, now is time to look for partners to share my project and find collaborative running projects to fit in.

As you can check in my last post, I proposed five collaborative activities for my open digital educational project. They were:

1. Creating schemes, summarizing the lesson but they must use drawing on them.

2. Creating flash cards of the unit, using the vocabulary of the lesson.

3. Creating displays of the digestive and excretory systems (and the rest of the systems if they have learnt them) with clay.

4. Creating a newspaper of one part of the lesson. For instance, about diet, they can search articles on the Internet about diet (Healthy and unhealthy habits) and present it in class.

5. Creating a collaborative blog where they will post all their collaborative works. They can add information about their works and also share it with the world. It would be fantastic to create an exchange with other school, showing the way they learn and the different ways of teaching in another country. They can post videos, pictures of their jobs, and add a section for the newspaper. At the end of the academic year, they will have all their progress collected in the blog.

For that challenge I have to browse some collaborative projects and decide on one to collaborate with. I will provide you the list and the link if you want to participate in some of them:

- The Other Kids EDU.

- The ESL Times.

- The 30 Goals Challenge.

- The Twima Project.

- Tertulias con sabor a chocolate.

- Maderas que son violines.

- InfoEDUgrafías.

- Piratas y Libélulas.

- No me cuentes historias, dibújamelas.

The one that I have chosen is "No me cuentes historias, dibújamelas". The reason of my choice is because I have done 5 different activities, and all of them are important for me, but from my point of view, the most significant for me is "creating schemes to summarize the lesson through drawing".

I consider drawing an important skill that has to be developed in the students. The children learn first drawing and after writing, it is an important way to express feeling, ideas and to summarize.

We can help some students through drawing, yes, we can! How?

We all have different ways of learning, one child can understand a mathematic problem perfectly or a scheme made just by text in sciences, but some others can get difficulties to understand these situations.

The problem appears when these children who are struggling at school decide to give up with the subject or in some cases with the studies. We can now solve this problem. Actually, there are lots of resources, for instance ICT. 

Nowadays, the Education System has changed more than years ago; we are in a society, which is in continuous change, therefore, the school must adapt the contents to the society.

It is in this point when we talk about multiple intelligences. I am sure you know this concept, but I will explain you briefly what is this for in any case. The multiple intelligences say that we have different way of thinking, different types of intelligences (in music in mathematics, language…) there is not just a main “computer” we are composed by several computers: one for language, another for sciences, other for mathematics and so on.

As teachers, we must adapt our way of teaching to our students. For example, we can write an scheme summarizing the nutrients in food. We can either include some drawing or not. In my humble opinion, I would add some drawing, it does not take you lot of time and you can guarantee that all the students or nearly all of them, would understand the lesson.

Some children do not understand just words in the blackboard, if they can see the drawing added to the scheme, they can associate words with pictures or drawing. As I said before, not all of us learn in the same way or at the same time, some brains work different than others. 

This is why I have chosen this project. I incorporated the drawing in my schemes during my internship period. In the first part of the lesson I used drawing, but in the second part I did not do it and some students asked me if I could include them. That checked my concern and gave me the answer, which I was looking for.

You do not have to be "Picasso" to incorporate drawing in your schemes, If the children laugh of it, they will acquire the concept easily because they are enjoying the lesson. Although I have been writing about: "the teacher should incorporate some drawing in the schemes", my intention with this activity in my project is geared towards students because it is easier if we show to our students different ways of learning (scaffolding), and after that, they can choose which one is better for them. In this way, they will get use to do it for themselves.

When I was a child nobody taught me that way of learning, or how to summarize through schemes. When you are at the high school is too late, it is better to learn it naturally when you are a kid.

Consecutively, I will provide you an example of drawing in schemes summarizing nutrients in food:

After finding a collaborative running project to fit in, I had to record an elevator pitch to talk that running collaborative project into accepting me as a new partner.

An elevator pitch is an enterprise technique to find financial support for a project in 20 seconds. If you click in here, you will find more information about it.

Here it is the video, I hope it convinces you to support me.

   


I have tried to use WeVideo to edit the video but I did not like the logo of the application in my video, because it was too big.

At the end I used iMovie because it is an application that I know and it is very easy to use and it has also all the tools that I needed to edit this video.