Hello again!
Today I am going to show you how I have been turning my project activities into real missions in which our students will be totally engaged. In this post you will have the opportunity to check not only the features of the activities but also how I have aligned these activities with
infoedugrafias´ way of working.
First of all I would like to remind you that in our project, students and teacher have two ways to be in contact from anywhere:
-Google drive: the whole class share a google drive where students and the teacher can ask questions or make suggestions. It is a good way to keep lots of useful information not only for students but also for the teacher.
-Blogger: during the process of building their companies students are going to create some prototypes and artifacts that the teacher will share in their class blogger. This type of applications make students feel proud of themselves and it is also a good way to share their work with known and unknown people.
As I said before and according to
infoedugrafias´ way of teaching this project have selected three steps to follow when carrying out a mission:
-First thing that teachers need to take into account is the objectives of the mission. It means that we should make our students being conscious about the main objective of the activity. Once they know it, we as teachers, have to give them freedom to work with the objective. Not all students will achieve the objective at the same time or following the same process, it doesn´t matter, the importance of the activity is the achievement of the goal. that is why it must be clearly explained.
-The second step that infoedugrafias propose is the
group formation: we are not talking about make groups of three or four, we are here talking about collaborative groups in which everyone have a responsibility withing the group. I was explained in a
post before when I talked about
Fernando Trujillo.
According to this methodology I would like to share with you they way in which
C.E.I.P Carmen Laforet in Vicalvaro(Madrid) is working. They have faced this collaborative way of working creating the following roles in each group:
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Image from C.E.I.P Carmen Laforet |
-The last step is starting the activity: In this step and as it has been explained before the teacher should be a guide for students in order to achieve the objective. Students should be guided by links and explanations provided by the teacher but at the same time they should feel free to create their product. This concept is very important when talking about missions instead of flat activities; students will have to create something that proves what they have learnt.
Once all these general aspects have been clarified, it is time to explain the first mission, its features, objectives, and so forth.
Mission 1: What are you offering?
The objective of this missions is making students think about what people nowadays need and what they can offer to the people. As we are learning ict, english and social science at the same time one of the ideas of this mission is making students differentiate the three sectors of the economy.
The first thing that students will enjoy is the warming up activity. After dividing students into groups according to the criteria we have shown before, we are going to start the lesson watching a video about the three sector of the economy and their activities. Here you have three examples:
Now is time to foster their creativity and entrepreneurship. The best way to make them think about their future companies is guiding them thought these questions:
who is going to buy your product? (age)
what do they need or want?
think about companies that already offer this service or product ¿how would you make costumer even happier?
where are you going to locate your business and why?
There are also many websites that give students and teachers advices about how to create a company and what have to be taken into consideration. From my point of view I would recommend
THIS ONE. It is easy to understand for students and it can really help them to start prototyping their projects.
Once students have thought about all these questions they will start working together in order to create an on line poster. This is the product we have been talking before. Divided into their groups and roles students will start using the on line tool called
canva. This tool have been chosen in this missions because of its lots of applications, templates and alternatives to work with it. It is also easy to use and I am sure it will be a enjoyable way to foster their creativity.
The reason why I have also chosen the on line tool canva is because it gives us the opportunity to be aligned with the objective of infoedugrafias project, which is creating a poster online.
All these things have to be very well explained. According to infoedugrafias way of thinking the time our students spend on organising the information is very important, we should not forced them with deadlines because they will also need their time to familiarise themselves with the online tool.
Moreover our students need to know at every time where they are, what is the objective and what they should do to achieve it. It needs to be clear that while using canva they are free to add visuals, explanations, pictures, and whatever they want. They should be creative while designing something with the information necessary to understand what the company is about, but with no lot of writing. The images should be captivating and explanatory.
The last step of the missions is a self reflexion where students have to explain the steps they have been following, the tasks each of them have carried out and what they think they have learnt.
As an example of the product they are asked to do in this mission I have created this canva poster:
The company I have created is an example of how imaginative student´s companies can be. The images included in the canva poster have been freely download from
pixabay.
As a kind of mind map I would like to make clear all these things:
Goals of the mission:
-To
promote child´s understanding of economic sector
To
enable the child to familiarise with canva and use it with an objective
To
make them being capable to analyse their company: objectives and features
To
foster their creativity and entepeneurship
To
promote the child to develop the concept of being original
To
enable the child to work with english in a different context
To improve HOTS since they have to analyse, create, evaluate and so forth
Competencies:
-communication in foreign languages
-science and technology
-digital competence
-interpersonal, cultural and social
-entrepenurship
-learning to learn
-processing information and use of ICT
-social skills and citizenship
-artistic
-autonomy and personal initiative
Digital artifact: a poster (infoedugrafia)
Online tool: canva
In this post I have been firstly talking about some general aspects that have to be taken into account while creating and teaching the missions. All these ideas have been created according to infoedugrafias teaching methodology. In addition, I have included the roles that students have in each collaborative group work.
To face this step of the project, I started first to think about how to aligned my flat activities with infoedugrafias and then turn this activities into real missions to accomplish by the students. After that I wrote a bunch of ideas in google drive about my activities and suddenly I realised that while I was trying to connect my activities with infoedugrafias´ way of teaching I actually was turning them into real missions.
Therefore and as a kind of self reflexion I must say how difficult turning our flat activities into real missions it can be. It made me think about how engage students in missions and what is more how should I create the missions to properly assess the results. But from my point of view students are the ones how best will evaluate our teaching methodology.
See you soon teachers!