Ester Álvarez

Project based learning

(20th July, 2019)

Today, we have been talking about the essentials elements when developing PBL methodology:

1. Start with the essential questions: the problem or the change that the students must solve.

2. Plan your project design: think about what linguistic and content skills you want students to learn while working on the project.

3. Provide students your choices : students can make their own choices to develop the project.

4. Create a schedule: how long the project will las and set a deadline.

5. Asses the outcome: think about how will you asses students work. What are the skills you want to evaluate?

6. Find a wider audience: how students can share their products outside the class.

Once we have understood how to guide a project, we have been divided into groups to design a project for our students. We have chosen 3rd grade of primary and our topic was "Healthy habits".

At the end of the lesson, we had to make a brief presentation to the rest of the groups.

ending....

Topography of Terror Documentation Center

To spend my last afternoon in Berlin I visited The institutions of Nazi terror where I could learn lots of things about this period.

Between 1933 and 1945, the central institutions of Nazi persecution and terror – the Secret State Police Office with its own “house prison,” the leadership of the SS and, during the Second World War, the Reich Security Main Office – were located on the present-day grounds of the “Topography of Terror” that are next to the Martin Gropius Building and close to Potsdamer Platz.

CHECKPOINT CHARLIE

It was Berlin’s best known crossing point between what was before 1990 communist East Berlin and the American-controlled sector of democratic West Berlin. In 1961, the East German government unexpectedly constructed a wall along its borders to restrict the flow of East Germans trying to permanently flee East Berlin.

Several checkpoints were erected, each laced heavily with barbed wire and carefully guarded by East German troops. They had instructions to shoot anyone trying to illegally cross over from East Berlin into West Berlin. More than 1,300 East Berliners died trying to escape via other means and locations along the wall.

APPS TO MAKE OUR STUDENTS LEARN IN A DIFFERENT WAY

(19th of July)

Here we can find some apps to make our students enjoy learning:

Mentimenter : app useful to create presentations or to give the students the opportunity to vote something during the lessons. It gives you a good report with the results and opinions of the students. It's also used to create word clouds.

Google expedition: to visit different places all over the world: museums, importante monuments, etc.

Students can watch videos about different things or places too.

Socrative: it's used to create tests. It's allows teacher to create multiple choice, true or false or short answer questions. It's gives you a very good feedback about students answers.

SIX THINKING HATS

(18th of July)

Using this methodology, people with different thinking styles discuss a problem, because every perspective is valid.

Each "Thinking Hat" is a different style of thinking. These are explained below:

• White Hat: you look at the information that you have, analyze past trends, and see what you can learn from it.

• Red Hat: you look at problems using your intuition, gut reaction, and emotion. Also, think how others could react emotionally.

• Black Hat: using Black Hat thinking, look at a decision's potentially negative outcomes. Look at it cautiously and defensively.

• Yellow Hat: this hat helps you to think positively. It is the optimistic viewpoint that helps you to see all the benefits of the decision and the value in it.

• Green Hat: the Green Hat represents creativity. This is where you develop creative solutions to a problem.

• Blue Hat: this hat represents process control.

BERLIN WALL

HOW TO MOTIVATE OUR STUDENTS...

(17th of July)

Today we have learnt some new apps that could be useful when teaching.

Padlet: similar to a website where you can add other relevant websites, videos, images, etc. Students can write their own comments in this virtual space.

Thinklink: after choosing funny picture you can add to it a huge variety of resources. It's quite motivating for children.

Coggle: used to create mindmaps. Similar to Cmaptools.

Kapwing: it's an app to edit videos online.

Screencast o matic: to record your own videos.

VISUAL THINKING STRATEGIES (VTS)

At 7:00 am my alarm clock rang, I was too tired after a long day traveling but I wanted to start the lessons, so I woke up quickly and I took the public transport to go to the city centre.

Once I arrived to the academy, I met my seven classmates who are from different European countries such as: Poland, Ireland, England or Croatia. We had to show a power point presentation about our countries, cities and schools. It was really interesting to know about different schools and places!

During the morning we have developed quite useful activities to develop in our class and we have discovered some new games to learn playing.

1. Clock game: It's used to arrange meetings with your classmates to talk about a topic given.

2. Word cloud: using the website menti.com we have vote those words that are related to innovation.

¡¡¡Loving Berlin!!!