How to turn an open educational project into a collaborative one

Hello everybody!! Welcome to a new post!!

Today I am going to explain more about my prototype of open educational project I have mentioned in my last post.  We are trying to enrich our project in ICT classes adding some collaborative movements.

Firstly, I am going to make a friendly reminder of what my project was about. As I said in my last post, my prototype of an educational project is about Prehistory and its time periods. The children need to acomplish some challenges  related to this topic, in order to complete the final outcome: recording a videoclip in which they recreate one of the Prehistory time periods.

As many authors have previously stated, “cooperation” is the key of success in Education and  this concept is also deeply in accordance with the principles of CLIL education that we try to promote throughout this master.  Furthermore, I think that one of the goals of Education is the full development of students, so it is necessary for the teacher to adapt individual and traditional methodologies into others that promote active participation.

Through the cooperative learning, we not only respond to an intellectual learning, but also focus on the work of diverse group attitudes, teaching values such as coexistence, respect or responsibility. Moreover, as the students take the decisions within the group, they develop an autonomous thinking and a personal initiative that are also very important in the educational process.

In fact, the vast majority of the new school projects include collaborative tasks and cooperative learning in order to promote social skills in the students. Nevertheless, it is not only a matter of merely doing some group activities but also placing the work online to reach out to all the society. We, as teachers, need to think about how our students can take advantage of collaborative movements, since they are part of the society and it is important that they know how to do well in it. For that reason, we are learning to turn our open educational project into collaborative and cooperative ones.

If you want to know more about cooperative movement you can read this paper published by Fernando Trujillo.

Secondly, I would like to explain that I have made some little changes in my final outcome, so that it could fits with this new challenge. Thus, I will include two specific challenges in the final outcome in order to make it collaborative and cooperative. These are as follows:

Cooperative activity:

Students will be randomly placed in groups of four people. Then, they have to record a videoclip, make a comic, an infograph or another task in which they should show that they have acquired the subject content. Besides, they should have worked on all the skills during the whole project. Students are free to choose the settings and the place where they are going to record the videoclip. They will be free to choose the way they will present their work. They can use some tools like YouTube, We video, Pixton, Canva… that we will show them in class.

Collaborative activity:

In order to make this work collaborative out of the classroom, we will show student´s results to other people. Students should have a personal blog called “learning diary” in which they will show their work to the rest of their schoolmates and also to the teacher. To turn this activity collaborative, we will make a short videoclip on the work done in this project. This videoclip should be uploaded to the schoolblog, so everybody can see it and benefits from the idea. Students should leave comments and give teachers their creations to paste them into the blog.

Furthermore, students can show their videoclips, comics or whatever they have create, to their schoolmates from other classes.

With all this changes, I try to turn my open educational project into an entrepreneurship one, in order to collaborate with other projects. Through an active searching, I decided to join The ESL Time.   This project focuses on the work of diverse skills that are in accordance with my prototype of open educational project. Besides, it want to ensure the use of ICT skills that are promoted in my project and actively developed in The ESL Time.

Finally, I have made a visual metaphor to show how I will turn my open project into a collaborative one using Canva. This tool is a good alternative to show your work in a very visual way. Moreover it is easy to use so students will be able to manage with it.

Prehistory de Laura Hernandez

To conclude, with this post I would like to admit that I have never done this kind of job and I think I am learning a lot. In fact, I am learning how to use many tools that I have never used and which are useful for both, teachers and students. Furthermore, I am grateful for take part of collaborative movements and for enrich my teaching work.

I hope that you have learned more about collaborative and cooperation movements and I am waiting for your suggestions and comments!!