FACILITATORS

Hello everyone and welcome back to our blog! We are Molly and Martha and we are the facilitators for the week. 

This week our task was to create an infographic about the article "Holistic Teaching Competence for a Digital World", which was about competences teachers need to include technology into their teaching successfully. The infographic should address the knowledge the teacher needs to have in order to use technology with an educational purpose. 

We were excited about this project because many members of our group are quite talented in digital art and creations. First, we needed to decide who would take what role for the week. Because this was one of the last activities, we had to make sure that each person had completed each role at least once; That was a big motivation for the reasons behind who took what role. Here is how it turned out: 

FACILITATORS:

Molly

Martha

HISTORIAN:

Alicia

CURATORS:

Marta

Natalia

TRANSLATORS:

Ben

Alex

ANALYST:

 Charlie

STAR:

Celia

As the facilitators, we planned two zoom meetings so that we could outline a plan for the week and solidify it after we all read the document. We decided to create an infographic that incorporates the format of a magazine quiz! Here is an example for such a quiz we had in mind while working on our task. 

 We wanted our infographic to have a unique twist and stand out.
After the feedback from Linda, this is the final product:

We hope you enjoyed reading and hope you check out the rest of our group's post for this task!

TRANSLATOR

Hi there pickles, Ben and Alex here with the Translator role for this week, bringing you our five key concepts for this past week:

Infographic:
Our main objective for this task was to create an infographic, which are great ways to represent information and knowledge exhibiting information as clearly and concisely as possible. As we all know, humans are incredibly visual creatures, so the collection of charts, images and minimal text make topics much easier to understand. The following is a moving example on how to recreate Michael Jackson´s moonwalk:

Magazine:
For our task we decided to stylize the information as a magazine article, magazines are publications printed on glossy pages with themes for people of all walks of life, all genders and interests. They include interesting articles, games and puzzles for young people to learn about all kinds of topics. Some great examples for young students are "Muy Interesante Junior", "National Geographic Kids" or "Okapi".

Quiz:
We are all familiar with the concept of the "What...are you?" quiz we can find online on pages like Buzzfeed, or the quizzes in magazines that when answering questions you are ranked on your knowledge of The Jonas Brothers and the sort. Quizzes can be used not only to gain information about the taker but also to impart knowledge to them through the content of the questions being asked.

Holistic:
The term holistic refers to the belief that the elements that make up a whole are intimately interconnected and need to be viewed and understood as a dependant system. In this case the elements are the competences needed for teaching in the digital world. 

Digital World:
This term is best defined as the need for digital literacy especially when used for pedagogical reasons. The digital world includes digital tools to communicate through the Internet, smart devices and many other types of technologies.

And thats all for now, have yourselves a great week from us here at The Pickles!!

CURATOR TASK 9

Hello everyone and welcome to our blog!

We are Marta and Natalia and for the Task 9 we are going to be the curators.

For this task these two weeks we had to do and infographic and here we are going to post all the information that we have used to do the infographic.

This task was given to us through the Online Classroom by our teacher, Linda, and we obtained most of our information using the following file:

Castañeda, L. (s. f.). task9-DTC. Recuperado de https://aulavirtual.um.es/access/content/group/5438_G_2019_N_N/Bilingual%20Group/task9-DTC.pdf 

GraphicMama. (2020, marzo 5). How to Make an Engaging Infographic: The Full Guide | GraphicMama. Recuperado de https://graphicmama.com/blog/how-to-make-an-engaging-infographic/ 

Visme . (2017, octubre 17). How to Create an Infographic - Part4: How to Design Your Infographic [Archivo de vídeo]. Recuperado de https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EwDNokZvCE&feature=youtu.be 

The webs that we used to create the design of the infographic: 

Piktochart. (s. f.). Create Infographics, Presentations & Flyers. Recuperado 20 de abril de 2020, de https://piktochart.com/ 

Autodesk SketchBook. (s. f.). Recuperado 20 de abril de 2020, de https://sketchbook.com/ 

Now that you have seen all the bibliography we would like to show you the conceptual map.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoy the rest of our blog!!

MARTHA'S PLE

ALEX'S PLE

Hey there, reader!

We hope you're feeling well during these tough times...
We also hope you find our PLE's interesting! We had a lot of fun tapping into our creative side while making them.
So, without any further ado, here is my Personal Learning Environment!

Thanks for reading, and see you soon! 💚
Love,
Alex.

Ben's PLE

Good Evening, like most people I have been using this current global crisis to catch up on movies and TV, (mostly Disney), so I give you my Vaiana themed PLE, hope you like it!

                                                                                                                                                -Benjamin

ALICIA'S PLE

Good afternoon! I'm Alicia and today I'm here to introduce part of my Personal Learning Environment, as I'm sure I'll be missing some essential points.

Everyone's PLE is formed out of all the resources we frequently use to learn so it can easily be stated that we're learning all the time and throughout all of our lives with everything we do, so even though I won't be including all the specifics of let's say, all the conversations I participate in every day and which I definitely learn from, apps that facilitate these exchanges of information are definitely important to our learning process, even though some people barely take this into account, as sometimes they are not surrounding a typical "traditionally-academic-subjet-matter", yet I consider them to be valid and useful, as long as they are reliable. After all, weren't families the first sources of information? Therefore, it's only natural for us to keep learning a lot through our interactions with everyone else, while we're going beyond books and researches. Still, it is impossible not to be oblivious to some of these.

However, as this task shall be focused on my own Personal Learning Environment, I consider the following to be the sources I use the most in order to expand my whole learning experience. These are mostly ICT-related, so I've marked with an asterisk the ones that actually aren't:

Now, I'll be explaining briefly why I've chosen them:

1. Acceding to the information/Collecting/Gathering:
- YouTube: out of all the sources of information I frequently check, YouTube would certainly be among the top three. It's an amazing platform where many content creators upload their creations and it's possible to come across lots of topics of great relevance, and I strongly believed I've learned a lot thanks to this platform.
- News: when it comes to daily knowledge, I mostly obtained it from the news.
- Twitter: out of all the social networking sites, Twitter is the one I use the most when it comes to learning about what's going on around the world.
- LMS: this includes all the resources we're given to work on certain tasks or to reach a further understanding of the subjects. Sometimes, our teachers recommend interesting sources of information to us through this platform.
- Spread the sign: as a student of LSE, I frequently use this app if I want to learn how to sign a word I'm unfamiliar with.
-Wikipedia: although everyone can edit the information that is posted on Wikipedia, I normally check the information there along with other different webpages so I can compare the data.
- Google: is the searching engine I use every day.
- Lessons/Books: they're the only non-ICT-related sources of information I use the most, although now that I think about it, our lessons usually include the use of technology. However, I still enjoy looking for information in a more "traditional" way when I have the chance of doing so, grabbing an encyclopedia or any book that can be useful.

2. Doing/Reflecting:
- Google Drive (Word + PowerPoint): so far, Google Drive is the platform I use the most when writing an essay or a project, and it's extremely useful for group works too, as several people can write on the same document at the same time.
- Blogger: although we mostly use it to share our tasks, I write them directly here, so as the process is made on this platform, I've chosen to add it here as well.
- Notebook: once again, I'm still fond of some traditional working techniques, such as taking notes on my notebooks, writing some drabbles...

3. Sharing my Personal learning Network:
- Padlet: throughout this year I've used this platform a lot to put together schemas of a specific topic together and then share it. For instance, this is the last one I made.
- Amino: sadly, this app is not that well-known, but I use it from time to time and it could certainly be great to be involved in groups of people who share the same interests. Basically, you can either create a community regarding a specific topic for people to join or join other communities. It's great, honestly.
- Twitter/Instagram: these are the social networks I normally use when I want to share something.
- WhatsApp/Interacting with people:: as I've previously stated, I believe that we learn a lot by interacting with others, and this can either be done by messaging sites or apps, or face-to-face.
- Discord: I use this platform a lot to communicate with my friends and share information.
- Blogger: mainly to share the conclusions we get from our ICT tasks.
- Zoom: now that we're facing this situation, online lessons have become a reality and these are mostly done on Zoom, so I definitely use it a lot. Regarding the sharing aspect that there's to it, it's due to the presentations we still do.

Thank you so much for reading, see you in our next entry!

Carlos' NEW PLE

Hello guys! 🥒 This is Carlos from PickleRICT bringing new stuff to our blog.

So as you have already noticed, this is an edit from the last post I've uploaded. But, why did I do this? Well, honestly I felt as I didn't make a great job with my PLE representation. I'm a guy who likes learning new stuff, and I self-taught a lot of different things (such as playing instruments, learning new languages, drawing...). But I couldn't come with an idea to represent how I do those things, until today! I have redrawn all my last project that was pretty basic (and ugly, not gonna lie) in order to show that everything can be fixed to improve ourselves, we make mistakes and we have to learn from them!! So, without further ado, let's get into it, shall we?

First things first, when it comes to collecting information and gathering data, I usually stick to some websites and places that can have loads of information about any topic. For example, I use Reddit when I want to investigate in some topic in particular. This website is structured by cathegories called subreddits, covering almost any topic and being pretty much reliable. Then we cannot forget about the resouces that our university has in its repertoire, from a virtual library with a vast number of digitalized books and documents, to even been capable to contact with experts of any field. Lastly, I haven't tried Skillshare as much, but I heard a lot of good reviews about this website, having experience with online classroom that can be complete at your own pace and having a extense library of classes of pretty much everything you can imagine.

Secondly, as for the doing part I represented mostly the method for academic work, even thought I use other methods for other fields, such as the artistic one. Every field of work has its own tools to ease how we do it and also keep us motivated on the subject. For example, I have only drawn something related to writing, but if I included drawing or playing an instrument, we can add more tools, such as Paint SAI Tool, Musescore... But if we want to reflect academic information into a visual project, we also need some specialised tools like PowerPoint, Canva, Padlet, ect.

Finally, nowadays sharing implies that social networks are going to be part of this process, So, I had included three of the most popular social networks we have. But I also have to say that social networks can be included in the collecting part, as they include tutorials, instructions, recipes of all sort of topics. That is why we should take into account how social networks can benefit us as well as we can benefit others.

🥒 Thanks for your time, we'll see you next time. Pickles out! 🥒

MOLLY'S PLE

Hello everyone! Molly here. This is my PLE:

Celia's PLE

Hi! How are you?
I'm sharing with you my personal learning environment with the elements I use most.
I hope I haven’t forgotten any of them!!

MARTA'S PLE

Hello everyone! How is your quarantine going? I hope all of you are okay. 

Today I'm going to present to you my Personal Learning Environment. I have chosen the apps and stuff that I use the most to work and create. 

I hope you like It.

NATALIA'S PLE

FACILITATOR

Hi, my name is Natalia! And this week I was the facilitator of my group.

So, I'm going to introduce a little bit what have we done during the whole week.
This week our task was to make a diagram in which the protagonist was the PLE. The work consisted of putting ourselves in a situation and imagining that we were teachers and how we would face the COVID-19 pandemic for the rest of the course. We decided to use three resources to continue developing it: YouTube, Podcasts and PADLET or another platform to upload content. Each of the companions in our group, was contributing several ideas to shape the diagram.

Here we leave some photos:

This was the first idea; we though about inspire our project on our planet (which is the center of everything) and surrounding it three hands.

However, this is the final idea that we decided to carry out. We were trying to inspire the project in Alice in Wonderland (hence clocks, gears, cups of tea ...) We thought it was quite original and fun.

And this was the final result! We were very happy of it, and of course we have to say thank you to our personal editor, who made it possible for the design to be carried out and captured our ideas perfectly.

HISTORIAN

🥒Hiya, PickleFans! 🥒

Welcome back to our stunning blog. We are Alex and Molly, and this week we've had the pleasure to work within the role of Historian. (Or should we say hisssstorian 🐍 )

This week, from Monday 30th to Friday 3rd, we started working as soon as we received the task from Linda Castañeda, our professor at the University of Murcia of the Resources and ICT subject, as I'm sure all of our readers must know by now.
We had a virtual class with her, through the Bb Collaborate platform, which we really like and think it works great, and in this class she explained to us exactly what our task entailed, as well as the theory behind it. What we needed to know before we started with our work was what a PLE is. The letters stand for Personal Learning Environment, and it refers to all the tools and skills that one has at their disposal and that help enforce the desired outcome, which is learning.

As soon as the class was finished, in our group chat on WhatsApp we divided all the roles for the week, which ended up being these:

Once the roles were set, we decided on a design for the diagram (which you'll have to keep reading to see hehehe) and we had to divide the workload! In regards to this, we decided to divide ourselves in smaller groups of three, one for each specific tool that needed to be contemplated in the task. THOSE groups ended up being as follows:

This was the moment when we realized that even if the stars were Martha and Alicia, that it would be nice to have a third presenter so as to have each tool explained by one "specialist" from the group that worked with it.

We didn't know how the Youtube, and OAB groups managed to work together, but we asked them for the blog's sake, and now we have the necessary information to report to you, our faithful readers:
The Youtube group did a shared drive and had a private group chat on Whatsapp. The OAB group had a private chat as well, and coincidentally had a padlet where they put up some of the info they deemed useful, so they used their tool to work on their tool, very meta. You can check it out here: https://padlet.com/alicia01ct/sabv2p4a0acc

In the Podcast group, which we're a part of, we did some individual research and then met up through Zoom to do a videocall and put our ideas togther, and we also had a shared document, although Molly was sharing her screen in the call so she basically wrote all our information down there and then.

Regarding the presenters, we didn't really have to study anything by heart, nor read it while we presented it, because we had done enough work and research to know what we were talking about, so we think it ended up being really natural.

This is how our final diagram looks:

We wanted to be creative in the design, which is why we chose to take Alice in Wonderland as inspiration, to make a subtle hint at the presence of the children's imagination, that we feel helps them to make meaningful connections between the subject matter and other things they find interesting, which in the end helps them retain more information, so really their imagination ends up being a part of their PLE.
In the design itself the gears, that represent each of the tools, pour into the big clock, that represents the PLE.
In the end we were very proud of our final result, but it did take us a while to get there, here are some pictures that document our design process: (Oh and by the way, Alicia did the final design, she is a true artist).

Before we say goodbye there is one last thing we need to do. This week, we decided to comment on 8PlusHalf's star blog post. There, they outline the presentation they gave on Thursday. We felt that they did a wonderful presentation and we wanted to point out why. They made very unique points about how the podcast can relate to all of us, as we are all bilingual students. None of the other groups pointed that out, and we liked the fresh perspective they brought to the table.

Here is the link to the post that we commented on:
https://eightplushalf.blogspot.com/2020/04/week-8-stars.html?showComment=1585938310970#c2416984783797139571

That is all from us for this week, thank you for reading us, and we'll see you soon!

Love, 
The Pickles
💜🥒

Analyst

Hi! I'm Celia and welcome one more time to our blog!
This week I'm the analyst of the task number eight which talks about the personal learning environment (PLE) 
 
Now, the questions:

a. What was the best part of the activity?
The best part of the activity was that, one more time, we were able to create another metaphor! 
The idea uf using elements of the movie "Alice in Wonderland" in the diagram was very original and we all loved it.
Also, this week each of us have been a bit more responsible with the task, so we can do a very good job.

b. What was the worst?
From my point of view, it's good to divide the task in mini-groups, so everyone can participate at the same level, though I think this way of doing the job makes everyone focus on their part and be less interested in the others.

c. What was the best moment of the week (in the work of the group)?
When we see the reacion of our peers during the presentation.
Some of them said they really liked the diagram, so we knew that the time that we have been spent, especially Alicia, in making the diagram had been worthwhile.

d. What was the worst?
I think this week we have workes very weel, maybe it' necessary a bit more communication or responsability, but this week has been very good for teamwork.

e. What have you learned?
We realized that we learn in everything we do, even if we are reading Twitter, watchinga serie, writting a whatsapp... all this is part of our personal learning environment (PLE).

f. What do you need to conserve -as a group- for the next week?
The good environment and the communication.
We avoid arguing over who does one thing or another, but try make the work the same for everyone.

g. What do you need to improve -as a group- for the next week?
Maybe some of us, I include the first, need to work a bit more because, at the end, some of my peers do more work than others, so a bit more of responsability and communication can end this.

h. How this content is related to other contents in the course and your degree?
It can help us to know other ways of learning than with a book, thus, in the future be able to tech our students other ways of learning and knowing how to search information with ICT.

i. Is there any evident social connection of thi content (news, politics, etc.)?
We realize that technlogies are so accesible to everyone that we can learn anything from them and getused to the fact that, in the future, when we work as teachers, we must teach how to know what content to learn when the students use technologies.
It's also related to know how to make classes more dynamic and, at the same time, interesting.

REFLECTION:
This week we have had more communication between us because last week we talked about those things that worried us, so we have done a very nice work.
The task has been a little more difficult than the previous one because there were some things that were abstract, but we have understood that everyone has their own way of learnig and that technologies ocuppy a large part in this aspect due to its rapid evolution and easy acces at present.

TRANSLATOR

Hello everyone! Marta and Carlos here as the translators of this week, bringing up the five key concepts we had choose:

YouTube:

Since over a decade YouTube has been a essential part of our lives, bringing to our lives funny videos, music and a lot of entertainment. But it also has a bunch of channels worth watching that can make us learn from home!

Spotify:

 

Its creation had a simple objective: storing the biggest library of music of the Internet, esay to use and access. But far from only having music, it has audio versions of books, that can help children to continue with their lectures, and podcast. With podcasts students will feel more involved on that activity, rather than only hearing the lecture from the teacher.

Padlet:

Introduced to us not so long, Padlet demonstrates how an announcement board can be done online. User-friendly, easy to edit and follow, and most importantly, makes learning more accessible, boasting motivation to take part of the board.

 

Motivation: 

 

We can not forget in which situation we are living in, but it is not an excuse to stop our lives. It is just a stage we have to clear, as the players we have to keep on doing and not perish to any adversities. By that philosophy we, as educators, have to boost the motivation of our students in order to achieve successfully the objectives we had in class.

Communication:

Also this crisis has powered something everyone of us use on a daily basis: mass media. For our own sake we have improved (or at least tried) and perfect how to use this tools in order to keep up with breaking news, ask our relatives how are they and, most importantly, continue working from home and live as regular as we did before.

So, this is the end of our post today, hope you liked it and see you next time!

｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆　PickleRICT　 ｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

CURATOR

Good Morning and Welcome to our Blog 🥒
                                                                                                               
I'm Ben and this week I am undertaking the role of curator, this is the last role that I had left to be and I hope I can do it justice.

This week's task entailed the elaboration of a PLE based on three channels: Youtube, Podcasts and an Online announcement board. Of course the sources we have used for each of these are varied.

This task was given to us through the Online Classroom by our marvellous teacher, Linda, and we obtained most of our information using the following file:
Castañeda, L., & Adell, J. (2013). THE ANATOMY OF PLE. Recuperado 2 abril, 2020, de https://aulavirtual.um.es/access/content/group/5438_G_2019_N_N/Bilingual%20Group/Chapter1Castaneda_Adell2013EN.pdf

Youtube

Firstly, for youtube we used a few different channels whos main focus is childrens education and learning through songs and games.

Links:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCZpm6436NiU__lcBAlEZmQ

https://www.youtube.com/user/TelmoandTula

Podcast

Secondly, when talking about podcasts we first spoke about polatforms that can be used to listen to them, whatever the theme and then we researched podcasts tailoured to children and learning.

Links:

https://maximumfun.org/

https://open.spotify.com/

https://choice.npr.org/index.html?origin=https://www.npr.org/podcasts/474377890/but-why-a-podcast-for-curious-kids

https://www.littlestoriestinypeople.com/

http://www.sciencepodcastforkids.com/

Online Announcement

Lastly, to talk about online announcement boards we gathered various websites that can be used by teachers and students alike to share information and, in turn, aid learning.  

Links:

https://padlet.com/

https://netboard.me/

https://www.mindomo.com/

https://miro.com/

Finally, here is an updated version of our concept map: 

That would be all for today! We sincerely hope you have a lovely week, and stay tuned for more! 🥒

YOUTUBE

Youtube:

Above all with the current reality due to COVID-19, attendance at schools is paralyzed but the monitoring of classes is not. Youtube is an alternative used by many teachers and students to continue advancing and reinforcing concepts.

Due to this particular situation, it is a good opportunity to start introducing ICT in the classroom, it is essential if we do not want to isolate them from the immediate future. In addition, both teachers and parents have the obligation to teach them to use them in a practical and didactic way, with their pros and cons. In this sense, teacher training in this subject is essential, but parents should not avoid this knowledge either.

Among ICTs, social networks play a very important role in education, YouTube being one of the most used tools due to its versatility. But what does YouTube allow us to do besides watching videos? What are youtube advantages?

Motivation: students can create their own projects. This, in addition to involving them in it, makes them feel motivated by something that they themselves have created. Communication: they learn to express themselves in front of and behind the camera. Teamwork: because to make an educational video different people are needed. Coordinating the team, agreeing on what they are going to say, ordering ideas and agreeing on how to record will help them foster communication, as well as empathy. Inform and investigate: it is yet another channel to inform yourself about the topics in which you are interested or in which you should train. In this sense, the role of the teacher is essential to teach them to distinguish false channels from those that are a good source of information.

How to make educational videos efficient for students: 

- different playlists for each topic.

- videos should not be longer than 10 minutes (introduction to the topics: further information in the podcasts)

- using images in each video to make them interesting.

- background music.

- making use of the comment section: students can write tasks in the comments, ask questions.

- additional videos answering students' questions.

- if students present projects they can even create a video and upload it to the class' channel.

Some of the examples of educational channels are:

1. Smile and learn:
This channel is aimed at children from 3 to 12 years old, which makes it perfect for children who
are in Primary School. It offers several videos with different content, so they can learn from the
months of the year or colors, to how to relax, protect themselves online...

2. Telmo y Tula:
This channel is very fun and original because it offers different activities and crafts to develop children’s creativity.

3. Piopio family: This channel also has a content of several subjects, so they teach to read, to subtract with two figures… In addition, in the community section, they offer questions for students to solve.

There are many channels, but we believe that these are very good for children to learn some things from home or to review them, for example, if in the quarantine period we had a group of first graders we could send them the link of piopio family where they explain how to add, so they can review at home in a different way.